Foto: Arne Wenzel
Building climate resilience in agricultural landscapes through social-ecological diversification, co-design and transdisciplinary learning
Climate change threatens agricultural productivity, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. Transformative change is essential to ensure the long-term stability of agricultural systems. Effective climate and biodiversity measures must be implemented at the landscape scale and require transdisciplinary collaboration. AgRe-Lab investigates the interactions between agroecosystems and various actors to address the central question: To what extent do joint adoption of climate and biodiversity measures, together with co-design processes, landscape governance, and transdisciplinary learning, shape the social-ecological resilience of agricultural landscapes to adapt and remain productive under climate change?
Research is conducted in four Living Labs across Lower Saxony, where researchers from eight disciplines collaborate with ten implementation partners from agriculture, conservation, education, and administration. Across twelve study landscapes in three empirical Living Labs, differing in land-scape composition and climate and biodiversity measures, the ecological subprojects assess the resilience of key ecosystem functions such as soil carbon storage, biodiversity, pollination, productivity, and hydrology. Social science subprojects analyse socio-economic resilience and the acceptability of measures. Through co-design processes, they examine transformative capacities, collective landscape management, and individual competencies of farmers to develop transferable educational models and inform co-design processes. The transdisciplinary synthesis integrates all results to develop evidence-based climate and biodiversity measures that create synergies between ecological and social functions and, through feedback loops in co-design and learning, foster long-term transformation. Upscaling will be tested with a Twinning Lab. AgRe-Lab provides scientifically grounded, practice-oriented solutions, strengthens regional transformation processes, and builds a strong foundation for excellent climate and sustainability research in Lower Saxony and beyond.