First Plenary Meeting of NOVASOIL Project
Seville welcomed the first Plenary Meeting of NOVASOIL “Innovative Business models for soil health"
A few words about the project
NOVASOIL focuses on innovative business models to foster soil health across Europe. Its general objective is to highlight the benefits of investments in soil health for society and the environment. To reach this objective a toolbox will be developed to analyze the suitability of different business cases that promote soil health. This toolbox will be based on a set of good examples from Europe and other countries, tailored to the needs and demands of society.
The 1st Plenary Meeting
The first Plenary Meeting of NOVASOIL was held from 22nd to 23rd of May 2023 in Seville (Spain).
The goal of the Plenary Meeting was to provide an overview of the activities held the past seventh months as well as to plan the activities for the coming months and years of the project.
The participants discussed the activities related to analysis and development of business model to promote the soil health. They also analysed existing soil health improving practises.
Other subjects tackled were the screening of the relevant farmer and sectoral acceptance studies, as well the identification of the most promising business models through the soil health parameters, social innovation (education), marketable products, legal requirement, underlying incentives and acceptance.
Furthermore, the consortium was presented with the first mapping of the existing incentives for sustainable soil health business model related to incentive inventory and mapping incentives.
The next step of this activity will be the identification of the new incentives in the soil health business models. The output will be published on the website of the project. At the same time discussions focused on the activities related to the envisioning incentives the policy solutions. During this activity the partners will identify a stakeholder category that will be selected based on the expertise, interest and relevance in the base of the case study.
A concept will be identified on the criteria of the concept of the intersection of atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. As soil health is considered a "metaphorical concept" (Janzen et all, 2021).
The last activity that was discussed was the preparation of the practical abstract related to the case studies. They will be publishing on the EU CAP Network website.
A Community of Practice (CoP) will be created and will involve a large network of stakeholders from the participating countries. The CoP will be built around the actors involved in the case studies soil health indicators and monitoring approaches proposed hereby benefiting from their knowledge.
The CoP members will participate in the different workshops and webinars related to the activaties held during the lifetime of the project and they will give feedback and comments. For being members of the CoP, it is necessary to fill the application form, that will be sent to a large number of stakeholders in the next months.
Know more about Novasoil
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement n°101091268