Across Europe, agriculture is under growing pressure to become more resilient, support biodiversity and contribute to climate change mitigation, while remaining economically viable for farmers. Agroforestry, which integrates trees with agricultural practices on the same land, offers a practical way to address these challenges. It can support farm productivity, biodiversity, water management and soil health and is particularly relevant for small and medium-sized farms.

This potential is reflected in current EU policy priorities, including nature restoration, land use and climate policy, and the wider objectives of the European Green Deal. These frameworks call for healthier ecosystems, more biodiversity-rich agricultural landscapes, responsible tree planting and restoration measures that can also reduce the impacts of floods, droughts and heatwaves. Despite its advantages, wider uptake of agroforestry is still limited by barriers such as insufficient practical knowledge, a lack of scalable business models, inconsistent regulatory support, high upfront costs, limited financial incentives, and low trust or awareness among stakeholders.

The AF4VALUE project addresses these barriers by developing and testing approaches that can strengthen agroforestry value chains and improve the economic viability of agroforestry for farmers and rural communities. The project focuses on practical innovation, business models, financial incentives, certification-related technologies and policy conditions that can support the agroecological transition.

The project’s main activities include:

• developing innovative agroforestry practices that support productivity, biodiversity, water use and soil restoration;
• assessing measurement technologies and modelling tools to reduce certification costs and improve reliability;
• investigating economic incentives and value chains that reward farmers and support rural development;
• developing business models and carbon finance innovations to make agroforestry more feasible for farmers, investors and other stakeholders;
• evaluating the policy framework and its alignment with EU incentive schemes, certification and regulatory structures.

Ecologic Institute is part of the project consortium and leads WP2 on Living Lab implementation. In this role, Ecologic Institute develops the shared framework and implementation support tools for three regional Agroecosystem Living Labs in Spain, France and Germany. The Living Labs serve as platforms for co-creation and innovation in agroforestry, bringing together regional stakeholders while allowing each site to respond to its specific agroecological context.

As WP2 leader, Ecologic Institute supports a harmonised but flexible approach across the Living Labs. Its work includes guidance on governance roles, quality criteria and process standards, support for regional stakeholder mapping and implementation planning, and coordination of peer learning across sites. This helps ensure that the Living Labs are grounded in co-creation, transdisciplinary collaboration, transparency and place-based innovation.

The project is funded under the second co-funded Agroecology Partnership call, under Topic 2, which focuses on transforming value chains, businesses and policies to facilitate the transition to agroecology, including new business models, actor coordination, social innovation and supportive policy frameworks.