Transforming living labs into lighthouses: a promising policy to achieve land-related sustainable development

Abstract

Abstract. The previous rather abstract debate about sustainable development has been focused by the introduction of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 and the related European Union (EU) Green Deal (GD) in 2019. Restricting attention to agriculture, proposed targets and indicators are, however, not specific enough to allow a focus for developing innovative and sustainable management practices. Clarity is needed because farmers are suspicious of governmental actions. To confront these problems, the European Commission (EC) has presented the Mission concept that requires joint learning between farmers, scientists and citizens. For the soil mission, “living labs” are proposed that should evolve into “lighthouses” when environmental thresholds for each of at least six land-related ecosystem services are met. This presents “wicked” problems that can be “tamed” by measuring indicators for ecosystem services that are associated with the land-related SDGs in a given living lab. Thresholds with a character that is occasionally regional are needed to separate the “good” from the “not yet good enough”. Contributions by the soil to ecosystem services can be expressed by assessing soil health. By introducing the mission concept, the policy arena challenges the research community to rise to the occasion by developing effective interaction models with farmers and citizens that can be the foundation for innovative and effective environmental rules and regulations. We argue and illustrate with a specific example, that establishing Living Labs can be an important, if not essential, contribution to realizing the lofty goals of the SDGs and the Green Deal as they relate to agriculture.