GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

This topic aims at restoring and maintaining species-rich pollinator communities and their services in agricultural landscapes characterised by intensive farming practices, and facilitating the uptake of pollinator-friendly practices in the agricultural sector at a wide scale, in different pedo-climatic conditions across Europe. The proposed projects should involve all relevant stakeholders along the agri-food chain and share knowledge on multiple levels to integrate pollination considerations into farming, land use and other management decisions, focusing collaborative research on emerging issues and prevailing needs.

The proposals should address all of the following points:

• Demonstrate measures to diversify large-scale farming systems and the resulting feeding resources and habitats of pollinators in agricultural lands, grasslands and semi-natural areas, through agro-ecological practices, including organic farming and agroforestry, as well as through home gardens, and forestry systems where relevant to the restored landscapes, with a view to ensure heterogeneous habitats formed by native species that offer diversified floral and nesting resources for pollinators;
• Create set-asides for nature, such as uncultivated patches of vegetation, to enhance floral diversity, and to ensure native, diverse, abundant and continuous floral resources for pollinator across time and space;

The two points mentioned above combined should cover at least 50% of the proposed budget.

• Develop prototypes of potential extension services, farmer-to-farmer sharing approaches and farmer field schools to strengthen synergies between scientific evidence, traditional knowledge, conservation and farmer-researcher community practices, to exchange knowledge and provide hands-on education and empowerment of local farming communities on pollinators.
• Elaborate, based on the large-scale approach, how the promotion of coherent policies across sectors and issues (e.g. biodiversity, agriculture and food security, chemicals and pollution, reduction of inequality, climate change and disaster risk reduction) could look like for pollinators. This scalability plan should be developed with the involvement of the communities concerned, and should include the dissemination of innovative solutions and practices, and a process for commitments in adopting large-scale restoration of pollinator communities within governance and financing systems, to allow replication and upscaling across the EU, associated countries and internationally. It should seek guarantees for the non-reversibility and/or continuity of restoration activities and/or further replication and/or expansion, implementation of sustainable management practices and monitoring after the end of the projects.
• Assess and propose options to develop and implement innovative incentives, consistent with international obligations, for farmers and other actors along the agri-food chain, to encourage the adoption of pollinator-friendly practices (e.g. carbon sequestration measures that increase pollinator habitats; conservation of uncultivated areas for pollinator forage; communication to consumers and other actors on the benefits of pollinator-friendly practices, etc). This should also cover assessing the impacts on farmers’ income, on overall business performance of farms, as well as on social aspects in farming communities.
• Build on existing knowledge, developed inter alia by EU-funded research projects, to assess options to remove or reduce incentives that are harmful to pollinators and their habitats (e.g. pesticides subsidies; incentives for pesticide use as credit requirements from banks), and to promote alternative approaches to pesticide use (e.g. Integrated Pest Management), taking into consideration the needs of farmers, gardeners, land managers, indigenous people, local communities and other stakeholders. etc. 

Applicants are reminded that costs for land purchase or lease are not eligible costs in the context of activities of research and innovation or innovation projects.