INSPIRATION: Stakeholder Perspectives on Future Research Needs in Soil, Land Use, and Land Management—Towards a Strategic Research Agenda for Europe

Abstract

INSPIRATION is an EC-funded Coordination and Support Action (CSA) coordinated by the German Environment Agency. The main aim of INSPIRATION is to develop a Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) to inform environmentally friendly, socially acceptable, and economically affordable soil and land-use management that meets societal needs and challenges. INSPIRATION takes a bottom-up approach because an SRA built on end-user knowledge demands is more likely to be enthusiastically adopted by funders in order to promote the knowledge creation, transfer, and implementation agenda.

INSPIRATION has set the following specific objectives as steps to enable the achievement of the project aim:

• 1. establish the state-of-the-art in balancing supply and demand in resources and natural capital by land management and the way soil, sediments, and water contribute at the national and European levels;

• 2. identify and prioritize key knowledge, technology, policy and understand gaps in current activities in meeting soil and land-use-related societal needs and challenges across Europe and beyond.

• 3. develop a need-and-challenge-focused Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) that can be tackled on national and European levels;

• 4. identify relevant existing and new funding and delivery models for implementing the SRA;

• 5. bring together European public and private research funders willing to collaboratively and synergistically invest in delivering the SRA, or parts thereof, at local, regional, national, and transnational scales.