Welcome to the Missions working group!

EU Missions aim to tackle some of the greatest societal challenges our society is currently facing. These inspirational initiatives address clear, realistic, measurable, targeted, and time-bound objectives. Also, they seek to provide systemic solutions to challenges, yielding societal transformations and real impact.

EU Missions aim to mobilise and activate public and private actors, such as EU regions and local authorities, research institutes, farmers and land managers, entrepreneurs and investors to create real and long-lasting impact. For their successful implementation, they will work in synergy and coordination with other missions, Horizon Europe, and EU funding instruments and policies. Furthermore, they will need to be implemented in close synergy with funding, programmes and strategies at regional level.

The Commission has identified five areas for missions were three are directly related to ERIAFF main areas of work:

• Soil Health and Food.
• Adaptation to Climate Change;
• Ocean, Seas and Waters;

Thus, there are many reasons for regions and actors of the ERIAFF network to dive into regional initiatives on Soil Health, Waters and Climate Adaptation to get ready for a full intake of results and get ready for new regulations contexts.

WG MISSIONS main objectives:

1. Positioning and support of our regions in the missions’ implementation processes cooperation within, the framework of the three missions on Soil Health, Water and Climate Adaptation.
2. Exchange of knowledge and best practices: updates on the ongoing projects and initiatives in the regions, presentations of leading regional actors, and networking sessions (physically or virtually). Such sessions would target mainly regional representatives based in Brussels.
3. Disseminate and communicate the resources for regions generated by different Project where ERIAFF members are partners such as PREPSOIL, NATI00NS, HuMUS and ECHO.
4. Collaboration with the Agroecology WG: identification of common themes and/or strategies on which the 2 WG could collaborate, share information and co-organise events

Specific objectives for 2024 in SOIL MISSION

The Working Group wishes to facilitate the deployment of the Mission of SOIL HEALTH across European regions through:

• Engagement from ERIAFF stakeholders in future LLs across different land use types and challenges, identifying through their members which regional or local approach exist to co-create with multi actor stakeholders to undertake activities such as:
  • The evaluation of soil needs
  • Stocktaking and dialogue to understand which regional or local governance models can lead to action and turn into Living Labs (LLs) and Light Houses (LHs) for soil health
• Mobilise EU regions and local authorities and activate public and private actors, such as, research institutes, farmers and land managers, entrepreneurs and investors to create real and lasting impact.
• Analyse, promote the creation of Soil Stewards that facilities the interaction for soil end users-science-policy interfaces.

Framework of the working group:

The regional coordinator of the WG is the region of Extremadura (Spain) and it is open to collaborators for the management.

It is envisaged to hold 3 to 4 meetings every year. This amount might change depending on the publication of European calls for projects and possible needs for further project development.