To bridge the gap between research, practice and policy, the EU Climate CAFE project has set up a network of 10 “adaptation pilots” in the 8 European countries involved in our project.

Stakeholders including farmers, advisors and local policy analysts in the adaptation pilots (APs) will be engaged in articulating demands and boundary conditions for adaptation to Climate Change (CC), providing long lists of options for adaptation and discussion on outcomes from advance (before CC progresses more) assessments, thus providing input for a new assessment round at cropping system, farming systems and supra-farming system level.

For each AP, information will be collected on soils and climate, farms and their current and possible production activities, and institutional drivers of land use. Local and scientific literature will be complemented with surveys into an ecological description of the area, and validated at stakeholder meetings.

A participatory learning and action (PLA) process will be built to identify and prioritize the major climate change adaptation goals of the stakeholders. Surveys, focus group discussions or PLA workshops will be organized to collect information, and priorities of CC adaptation goals will be identified.

Options for CC adaptation that are already tested by farmers, such as in the ZALF Adaptation Pilot, or in on-station experiments will be used to support model-based results by providing practical examples.

Agro-ecological and socio-economic data collection within the adaptation pilots, takes place in collaboration with several partner institutions:

HY (University of Helsinki, Finland) : http://www.helsinki.fi/agriculturalsciences/

LBI (Louis Bolk Institute – Netherlands): http://www.louisbolk.org/

NMI (Soil for Life – Netherlands): https://nmi-agro.nl/en/

CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain): http://www.csic.es/internacional

INRA (French National Institute for Agricultural Research): https://www6.toulouse.inra.fr/agir_eng/

RUC (Roskilde University, Denmark): http://www.ruc.dk/

SLU (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden): http://www.slu.se/en/about-slu/locations-and-units/locations/uppsala/

ZALF (Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research, Germany):http://www.zalf.de/en/Pages/zalfaktuell.aspx

SRUC (Scotland’s Rural College, Scotland): http://www.sruc.ac.uk/

WUR (Wageningen University, Netherlands): http://www.wageningenur.nl/en/wageningen-university.htm