SolACE and Beyond: The Final SolACE Stakeholder Event

The event in Brussels, titled: Facing water and nutrient scarcity in European agriculture, was held at La Tricoterie and aimed to elicit stakeholder feedback on policy implications of SolACE outcomes and discuss potential future research. After an introduction by SolACE project coordinator Philippe Hinsinger, there were three main sessions:

• Key messages from SolACE: Improving water and nutrient use efficiency in agroecosystems – using a talk-show-style, the session participants highlighted and discussed the key messages coming from the series of stakeholder workshops, which parallel the key outcomes of the SolACE project.
• Feedback and experiences from multi-actor projects – a round table of experts discussed the pros and cons of the Multi-actor approach employed in many Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research project, as well as in other contexts.
• SolACE and beyond: what needs to be achieved from now on – in small groups, participants addressed key themes related to the SolACE project, discussing SolACE outcomes, where to go next and outstanding questions.

The final component of the event was summarised by Philippe Hinsinger and Amelia Magistrali, who highlighted the following themes:

• Focus on farms—bringing technology, experiments and researchers directly to farmers
• Communication—how is information disseminated and shared and how do we communicate across different languages?
• Applicability and over-ambition—how is research made relevant for farmers and commercially but also how do we acknowledge the reality of multiple stressors in experiments when this is difficult to establish in research?
• Multi-disciplinary/trans-multi-disciplinary approaches—how to tap into this exciting opportunity for multi-actor approaches and consider other end-users besides farmers?

Further Information:

• conference.solace-eu.net: Conference website
• zenodo.org: Proceedings of the Final SolACE Stakeholder Event
• youtube.com: Final Stakeholder Event
• conference.solace-eu.net: Pre-event workshops