PRUDENT · Promoting Green Nudging for Sustainable Agriculture and Forestry

PRUDENT aspires to change the way agriculture and forestry systems currently operate and to accelerate the transition to sustainable agriculture and forestry practices and smart farming technologies. The project will identify and evaluate the most effective green nudges, in the context of appropriate behavioural and experimental settings, that can enable farmer/forester behavioural change to more sustainable agriculture and forestry. Nudges will be also tested in natural contexts to evaluate the interactive effect of nudges with actual policy changes in the transition to sustainability. Innovative nudging tools, in the form of web/mobile apps, will be employed to boost farmer/forester self-regulatory capacity and enhance the durability of nudging effects. Four different systems, representing major farming and forestry systems in Europe (arable crops [wheat], perennial crops [grapevines, apples, olives], livestock [bovines] and forests [boreal forests]) in various EU regions (Northern, Southern, and Central Europe) will be studied to account for the heterogeneity of farming/forestry systems and contexts in the EU. The behavioural insights are used to develop transformative pathways, via social innovations, business models and policy recommendations, to encourage transition to fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly agriculture and forestry systems. PRUDENT will provide a set of social innovations and business models establishing roadmaps for a shift towards sustainable agriculture and forestry and will develop a series of policy recommendations and tools to foster behaviourally informed policy design and implementation. Throughout the project's lifespan, multiple value chain actors, at various levels of society, will actively participate in co-creation activities to establish a mutual understanding of the benefits and bottlenecks of the value chain, as well as effective transformation pathways to change.