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New EASAC Report on European Regenerative Agriculture

The European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC), the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) and the Academia Europaea Budapest Knowledge Hub will present the EASAC’s latest report “Regenerative Agriculture in Europe” at a jointly organised public symposium on 6 April, in the main building of the HAS.

The concept of regenerative agriculture aims to create sustainable, resilient, healthy, equitable and climate-friendly food systems. It can be defined as a system of farming principles and practices that, while maintaining agricultural productivity, seeks to increase biodiversity, enrich soils, restore watersheds and improve ecosystem services, including increasing the carbon sequestration potential.
The European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC) prepared its report on this wide range of issues, which will published on 5 April 2022, and then presented at a public event in Budapest, on Wednesday 6 April at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in Stockholm, on Thursday 7 April at the Royal Swedish Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

The report has been prepared by a dedicated expert working group within the EASAC Environment Steering Panel. The 26-member working group, whose members were nominated by EASAC member academies, worked on the issue for a year. Hungarian experts are regularly nominated to EASAC expert working groups by HAS as an EASAC member academy. In this way a Hungarian researcher, Orsolya Valkó (Centre for Ecological Research), was nominated to the working group on regenerative agriculture. Orsolya Valkó participated as co-chair of the working group, the other co-chair being Lars Walloe, Chair of the EASAC Environmental Steering Panel.

The public session, chaired by Széchenyi Prize winner HAS member Gábor Stépán, will be opened on behalf of the HAS by Ervin Balázs, Chairman of the Department of Agricultural Sciences, followed by a series of speeches by academics and researchers – Lars Walloe, Orsolya Valkó, Thomas Elmquist, Anders Wijkman, Diána Ürge-Vorsatz – who will not only present the report in a narrow sense, but also shed light on the policy implications and the wider links with climate policies. The academic event will be available live on the HAS’s YouTube channel.

Source: MTA