Background and issues
In September 2015, the UN Member States committed to achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Directly or indirectly, agriculture plays a key role in achieving the targets on poverty reduction, food and nutrition security, health, and socio-economic development as well as on biodiversity, water, energy and climate issues.
In this context, the Towards Sustainable and Resilient Agriculture (TSARA) project investigates means to support the development of agricultural and food production transformation pathways at the national level, with a view to delivering on national targets in line with the SDGs.
In this way, TSARA also constitutes the European branch of the Agricultural Transformation Pathways initiative (ATPi )
Objectives
Towards Sustainable and Resilent Agriculture (TSARA) investigates means to support and develop agricultural transformation pathways to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets in a range of selected countries in the temperate zone: the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and New Zealand.
The project relies on national foresight exercises conducted according to participatory backcasting methodology. It is aimed in particular at developing strategic processes and tools which could be replicated in other countries to support the creation of strategic roadmaps towards the SDGs, such as: a typology of European agricultural systems, a list of sustainability indicators (and their associated targets in each country), backcasting dashboards and quantitative processes (models) as well as qualitative processes(participatory workshops) to investigate tradeoffs between the achievement of different goals anf the social and political impediments along the way (strategy matrix).
