NEuropa

Food systems in European countries exhibit much diversity and variance, shaped, among other factors, by their individual history, geographical location and natural resources. What links them is the current omnipresent lack of sustainability throughout the process stages in the food systems, causing a continuous loss of biodiversity, an advanced deterioration of soil quality, water pollution as well as climate change.

According to transformation research, the sustainable change of a system can occur inter alia, when innovative niche practices find the right momentum to advance and disseminate into the mainstream. The more they grow in quantity and connect with other niches and regime elements, the better the chance of their introducing sustainable adaptations into the food system. Although numerous social, institutional and technical innovations are sprouting in Europe, they are often little known in Germany and to each other. Due to this isolation, they miss out on cooperation, mutual learning and synergy potentials.

NEuropa aims, through the identification, collection and publication of niche innovations in the food system from all over Europe, to facilitate and accelerate this process. The project will focus primarily on researching and compiling an index of innovative practices that thus far are relatively unknown or not yet widely implemented in Germany. This information will then be shared and exchanged with partner organisations in Germany (via the Ernährungswandel online platform) as well as in Europe (via partner organisations and further media channels) in order to boost the knowledge (exchange) about the many times isolated, yet highly potential, transformative innovations. This dissemination of best practices allows for manifold adaptations in national, regional and local contexts across Europe and Germany. This way new actors can network, create synergy effects and urge regulatory adaptations, paving the way for more sustainable food systems.

The online map FoodSy contains data from projects throughout Europe, which are examples of the niche innovations identified within the NEuropa and TransfEern projects. Projects can be filtered by niche, stage and sustainability goal.