Projects

The recent dry summers brought water management in agriculture on the political agenda and to headlines in the media. The importance of agricultural water management will be further increasing in the context of rapidly advancig climate change.

The agriculture sector is a significant source of global greenhouse gases. International research collaboration on mitigating climate change in agriculture can help to timely identify best practices and support their large-scale implementation.

How much peat is being used in Germany, and how could peat be replaced with other components? What would be the macroeconomical consequences of a peat reduction? An interdisciplinary project aims to answer these and further questions.

Waterbodies, biodiversity, air and climate are polluted by nitrogen emissions from agriculture - whether as nitrate, ammonia or nitrous oxide. Improving nutrient utilisation contributes to reducing environmentally hazardous nitrogen surpluses.

How worthy of protection are peatlands used for agriculture? Together with different partnering organisations, the Thünen Institute intends to develop a tool for authorities to assess the protection status of peatlands. The tool will also suggest agri-environmental protection measures for each category and methods for monitoring these measures.

BonaRes (A): SOILAssist - Sustainable protection and improvement of soil functions with intelligent land management strategies – a practical on the fly assistance system for farmers

Most people in Europe have access to good drinking water quality. However, due to nitrate and pesticides pollution which can be caused by agricultural production, drinking water treatment cost may increase. FAIRWAY develops indicators, measures and solutions to reduce drinking water pollution by agriculture.

In 2015, the parties to the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris agreed on the common goal of limiting global warming to less than two degrees Celsius. This requires a comprehensive "decarbonisation" of all parts of society, and increasingly places agriculture in the focus of discussion.

The Nutri2Cycle project recognizes Europe’s need to tackle the current nutrient flow gaps in European agro-ecosystems in order to decrease environmental pollution, safeguard the quality of life and improve EU independence for energy and nutrients. Nutri2Cycle addresses these needs by benchmarking the current N, P and C flows as a starting point to re-design (using scenario-analysis) and test new business models in nutrient management (‘prototypes’) to mitigate emissions and close the nutrient flow gaps.

The objectives of the EU- Water Framework Directive have not yet been fully achieved in many regions of Germany. This is due in particular to diffuse nutrient inputs from agriculture. "AGRUM-DE", will therefore create a nationwide, consistent method to monitor nitrogen emissions to water bodies. Based on this, measures for better water quality are derived and their impacts will be assessed.