A transition towards sustainable agricultural and forestry practices: the goal of the PRUDENT project

PRUDENT aims to change the way agricultural and forestry systems currently operate to accelerate the transition towards sustainable agricultural and forestry practices and intelligent agricultural technologies.

A four-year research project that makes innovation its cornerstone, studying the effectiveness of “green nudges” – a term that can be translated as gently pushing towards action – in promoting sustainable practices and technologies in the agricultural and forestry sectors and the development of social innovation and business models, along with policies supporting the future Common Agricultural Policy.

Four different systems representing the main agricultural and forestry systems will be studied to account for the heterogeneity of systems and agricultural/forestry contexts in various regions of Europe: arable land, perennial crops, livestock, and forests.

The concept of “Green nudges” plays a central role and focuses on positive and gentle interventions aimed at encouraging individuals or organizations to adopt sustainable behaviors, innovative nudging tools, and transformative pathways to incentivize the transition towards fair, healthy, and environmentally friendly systems.

Leveraging extensive experience in sustainability-oriented innovation for the agri-food sector and behavioral economics, the team from the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano is led by Raffaella Cagliano and Massimo Tavoni.

During a time span of four years, their multi-disciplinary team of researchers will work in close collaboration with Jacopo Bonan, from the affiliated entity CMCC (Fondazione Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici), to design nudging experiments and test the impact of nudges to promote sustained behavioural change towards sustainable agriculture and forestry.

The project leader is the Agricultural University of Athens (Greece). The partners include, in addition to the Polytechnic University of Milan, the Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Belgium), the University of Trento (Italy), Green & Digital Idiotiki Kefalaiouchiki Etaireia (Greece), Balkan Eco-Innovations (Serbia), Athens University Of Economics And Business – Research Center (Greece), European Forest Institute (Finland), Q-plan International Advisors PC (Greece), Boerenbond (Belgium), AgriFood Lithuania DIH (Lithuania), Associazione Nazionale Condifesa Italia (Italy), Jrc -Joint Research Centre- European Commission (Belgium).