Enhancing sustainability and resilience of agriculture, forestry and rural development through digital twins

Rural communities, farmers, foresters and other actors take advantage of digital twins to meet sustainability and climate adaptation objectives while enhancing rural economy and resilience; rural communities strengthen capacities in data-driven decision-making, monitoring and foresight to explore pathways for making villages attractive places to live; a stronger digital rural innovation ecosystem emerges, bringing together public and private players and improving attractiveness of rural areas; collaboration across different rural actors is fostered through innovative smart governance solutions enabling data- and evidence-based policymaking.

Co-create innovations with rural actors to respond to their needs; focus on sustainability and climate resilience in agriculture, forestry and other relevant sectors; ensure freely accessible 3D village maps and web platform support planning, monitoring and management of natural and cultural assets; implement the smart villages concept for underdeveloped and remote communities; adopt a multi-actor consortium with balanced representation of end-users (farmers, foresters, businesses), universities, research and technology organisations; integrate the gender dimension in design, testing, data collection, analysis, training and communication; involve social sciences and humanities expertise to enhance societal impact and behavioural change; cover diverse biogeographical regions, pedo-climatic zones, village typologies (size, remoteness, digital maturity, economic reliance, climate vulnerability) and farming systems; build on and complement results from Horizon 2020/Europe and other EU-funded initiatives (e.g. EU Missions, Agriculture of Data partnership); demonstrate adequate planning and resource use for synergies; develop new business models and explore funding mechanisms.