Soil Health Restoration Needs Living Labs
Can soil-oriented living labs hold the key to reversing the devastating impacts of centuries of poor management?
Soils in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula are highly degraded. The main causing factors? The semi-arid climate coupled with decades of unsustainable agricultural practices preceded by centuries of irresponsible forest management.
Murcia and Almería provinces belong to the area called ‘the orchard of Europe’ but there, climate change, manifesting through droughts and short but intense rain episodes, is further threatening the soil health and the resilience of the local economy.
Fostering the transition towards a sustainable primary sector is urgent.
Fostering the transition towards a sustainable primary sector is urgent and the solutions will range from the revision of fertilization protocols, changes in soil management practices, introduction of more adapted species, abandonment of highly resource-demanding crops, among many others.
The monetary cost of such major changes will be very high, implying that the availability of proven and economically sustainable solutions is a necessary condition for farmers’ associations and local administrations to strongly promote needed measures.
Questions arise: How to design more sustainable farming practices that fit the territorial needs? How to involve key stakeholders to ensure that the solutions do not harm anyone’s interests? Where to test these solutions? Test field conditions must be representative of real-life farming conditions, in terms of extension, tested crops and farming methods.
There’s a co-creation formula that is perfect to address these soil health challenges: the living lab. Living labs are open innovation ecosystems in real-life environments that encompass iterative feedback processes throughout a lifecycle approach of an innovation to create sustainable impact. Living lab promoters are well aware that no innovation is possible without actively sharing available novel information, co-creating knowledge, and testing solutions in real-life conditions.
There should be always a double objective, first to disseminate and test the solutions that are being developed in research and development (R&D) projects, and second to facilitate networking and co-creation between the different actors in the value chains under transition, from those looking for solutions to those offering them.
There’s a co-creation formula that is perfect to address these soil health challenges: the living lab.
In Cartagena, Spain, the Technology Institute of the Energy and the Environment (CETENMA, recently founded one of the over 100 living labs pushed forward by the European Commission’s Mission Soil: the GreennoMed Living Lab, investigating green innovation for rural and urban ecosystems in Mediterranean climates. The lab’s evolution is an exemplary case that worth the attention of those willing to replicate the living lab scheme in their specific context.
CETENMA launched the living lab in May 2024 with the mission of addressing the primary sector of Murcia Region on the market uptake of circular fertilizers (obtained from biowaste, food by-products and wastewater) under optimization and assessment in two European research projects: SOILUTIONS and FER-PLAY.
In that inaugural meeting, a selected number of farmers, agronomists, fertilizer producers, researchers and local administrations had the chance to see samples and interact with producers of insect frass and struvite recovered from industrial wastewater.
In September 2024, the GreennoMed living lab’s scope and geographical range widened thanks to its funding under iCOSHELL European project. Now counting on Almería province stakeholders, the multidisciplinary leading team included research centers specialized in agronomy and edaphology to address soil health restoration.
GreennoMed living lab is now working to establish ‘Lighthouses’, physical sites where innovative soil management solutions will be tested in real-life conditions to obtain reliable results to be replicated massively across the south-east of Spain. Farmers adhering to the initiative are encouraged to take the chance to test these innovative solutions directly on their lands, operating as kernels of a fast and wide replication process.
Soil-oriented living labs and their Lighthouses can definitely act as effective bidirectional knowledge transfer and replicability units for innovation. To ensure the success, it is essential to count on a technical team with skills and networking capacity that is able to bridge the gap between primary sector stakeholders and solution developers.
Soil-oriented living labs and their Lighthouses can act as effective bidirectional knowledge transfer and replicability units for innovation.
But even more important it is the long-term impact: change takes time and so should the living lab. To promote its life beyond the first years of operation, usually ensured through governmental grants like European R&D funds, a living lab could be structured and run according to the criteria of labelling and certification entities, like the international, non-profit, independent European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL).
Having a quality seal is the first step toward the creation of a robust business model, which will place the living lab in the landscape of the territory’s innovation infrastructure, offering a valuable service to local companies and solution testers, ensuring the necessary cashflow to sustain the co-creation and testing activities.