15 million euros earmarked for agriculture of the future

To address the challenges of the future, 21 countries have formed a partnership and a new initiative within the frame of the Joint Programming Initiative on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change (FACCE-JPI).

FACCE SURPLUS (Sustainable and Resilient agriculture for food and non-food systems) is the name of the joint European research initiative based on the vision of a European bioeconomy that can solve some of the biggest challenges of the 21^st century - increased demands for food, renewable energy and raw materials from biomass.

Niels Gøtke, chair of FACCE JPI, sees big potential in the new programme.

“FACCE SURPLUS is a very important way to bring input to the bioeconomy discussion. No bioeconomy without enough biomass but no biomass without overexploitation. FACCE SURPLUS has the potential to show a way to unlock the potentials of the bioeconomy,” he says.

In collaboration with the European Commission the partner countries have announced a call for joint European research projects with an indicative budget of 15 million euros. The initiative is committed to improve collaboration across the European Research Area in the range of diverse, but integrated, food and non-food biomass production and transformation systems, including biorefining.

Read about a ERA-NET Cofund

The new call

• The call for proposals aims at supporting innovation and value creation from biomass and biorefineries in synergy with the environmentally sustainable intensification of agricultural and other biomass production systems while taking into account the required economic, environmental and social conditions and resilience to climate change.

  According to Niels Gøtke, patents, peer reviewed articles, cooperation with the industry, workshops and new findings are among the success factors of FACCE SURPLUS.

  The scientific scope of the call for proposals addresses collaborative projects in three research areas, which are incorporated into the following three subthemes of the call:

• Spatial targeting of land use to increase biomass production and transformation, stimulating the growth of systems for the efficient utilisation of green (plant) biomass cascading through novel transformation.
• Developing markets for a wide range of products and services generated through integrated food and non-food systems.
• Sustainable intensification of integrated food and non-food agricultural systems, by developing integrated, systems-based approaches to land management.

Read more about the call process

Flow of the era-net

The call opened January 7^th and has been sent out through national funders. Closing date for pre-proposals is 4 March 2015. When all pre-proposals are checked for eligibility and evaluated, an agreement will be reached on who will be invited to submita full proposal. All full proposals are to be submitted by 9^th September 2015. By January 2016 an agreement within the Steering Committee will be reached on the projects to be funded. A first additional joint call without EU funding might be launched already in 2017. The project runs for a total period of five years.

Read more at facesurplus.org