Empowering Small Landowners with a Digital Platform for Adaptation Planning

Key Learnings

• Engagement with multiple stakeholders: Understanding the issues that landowners (farmers and foresters) face, their language, and what knowledge they need is essential for designing tailor-made, capacity-building programmes. Involving experts and space for open discussions is important for learning and improving on-farm resilience.
• Multi-level governance: The project bridges the gap between decision-making on the national level and implementing the measures at a local level to achieve Green Deal goals by involving landowners.
• Access to information: Information related to land use, environmental protection, forestry and other relevant data is available online, but often scattered across various platforms, making it difficult to access for small-scale landowners. Compiling it on one common platform was important for landowners to find the information they needed.
• Adaptation is a case-by-case story: As each farm and landowner are a separate story and business, suitable adaptation measures need to be tailored to individual needs. Knowledge is key to deciding what measures improve site-specific resilience.

Summary

Knowledge exchange is essential for effective on-farm climate adaptation. A European project, successfully united pilot farms with experts across climate change, forestry, agriculture, and tourism.  By centralising scattered online information into a user-friendly platform, they provided a valuable resource on relevant topics, which also serves as a digital diary for landowners and a citizen science tool for researchers. Capacity building, designing measures contributing to various ecosystem services and building on-site resilience is a combination of approaches that is easily transferable to other contexts.

Contact

Stritih Sustainable Development Consulting, katarina [dot] mulecstritih [dot] com (katarina[dot]mulec[at]stritih[dot]com)