LandShift is a groundbreaking initiative aimed at addressing the urgent challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and unsustainable land management practices. With a focus on the EU's land-use sector, LandShift seeks to develop innovative solutions that not only mitigate biogenic emissions but also enhance ecosystem resilience and promote sustainable resource management. LandShift aims to support the EU's ambitious climate goals by maximizing net removals from LULUCF, while minimizing biogenic emissions from agriculture. By strategically utilizing Living Earths, integrating FAO LCCS with optimized EO data, and Data Cubes as centralized data hubs, the project aims to implement tailored strategies for local and regional contexts, fostering stakeholder engagement and collaboration. Central to LandShift's approach is the integration of NBS aligned with the principles of the New European Bauhaus. These solutions leverage natural processes and ecosystems to enhance carbon sequestration, improve biodiversity, and strengthen ecosystem services. By harnessing the power of NBS, LandShift aims to create synergies between climate mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable land management. Furthermore, LandShift recognizes the importance of data-driven decision-making and monitoring to track progress and inform policy development. The project will establish robust MRV systems to ensure the effectiveness of implemented strategies and measure their impact on biogenic emissions, biodiversity, and ecosystem health. In addition to technical solutions, LandShift places a strong emphasis on policy influence and capacity building. Through targeted outreach and engagement activities, the project aims to raise awareness, build capacity, and foster collaboration among stakeholders at all levels. By empowering policymakers, land managers, and local communities, LandShift seeks to create an enabling environment for sustainable land use sector and management practices.

European soils face pressing conditions for their health. An alarming 60-70% of EU soils are considered unhealthy, attributed to factors such as pollution, urbanization, and intensive agriculture, further exacerbated by climate change. This degradation results in economic, societal, and environmental repercussions, including decreased land productivity, migration, land abandonment, and biodiversity loss. Addressing this challenge necessitates holistic measures, especially since soil restoration can take centuries. The project initiative, aligning with various EU policies, emphasizes the importance of comprehensive soil restoration efforts. It plans to establish six Soil Health Living Labs (SHELLs) across diverse EU climatic zones, including Sweden, Spain, Spain-France, Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria. These labs are envisioned as innovation hubs, tailored to address the EU's specific soil health objectives, notably objectives 4, 6, and 8. Through collaborative efforts within these SHELLs, the goal is to develop, test, and validate potential solutions, ensuring scalability beyond their immediate regions. iCOSHELLs places a strong emphasis on inclusive stakeholder engagement, from researchers to landowners. Its systematic approach includes building stakeholder capacities, bridging gaps between science and practical applications, deepening understanding of soil indicators, replicating effective soil recovery methods, and championing supportive soil health policies. Additionally, iCOSHELLs seeks to redefine the concept of Living Labs (LLs). Challenging the traditional model, which often revolves around isolated research entities, iCOSHELLs envisions LLs rooted in co-creation, broad engagement, and real-world application. This transformative vision aims to evolve existing SHELLs into standardized, widely recognized labs, setting a foundational blueprint for future LLs. Moreover, as a comprehensive soil data repository, iCOSHELLs promotes collaboration, ensuring replicable.

In the EU, 60-70% of soils are degraded as a direct result of unsustainable management. However, tackling this multifaceted challenge is not an easy task, mainly because farmers' decisions are influenced by a wide range of factors, making it difficult to define regenerative soil management practices that are simultaneously effective, economical, have demonstrable yield benefits and are easy to implement. In this context, the goal is to foster a collective awareness, at the the level of five Mediterranean regions, that soils and humans must be understood as social-ecological systems and that no organisation/solution alone is capable of sustainably transforming the system. The desired change can only emerge when the innovation process is supported by an exploration phase enabling actors to identify their personal (from individuals to organisations) drivers, ultimately aligning purposes and behaviours toward impactful collective actions. To demonstrate this, the project will apply co-creation tools to multi-actor governance structures, emphasising the building up of a shared awareness of soil threats over the identification of specific technologies. The main objectives of the proposed plan are: 1) to explore regional needs and drivers, and to validate governance models for operating multi-actor co-creation processes; 2) to establish a network of five agro-innovation hubs sustained by underlying business models; 3) to define harmonised regional baselines for 7 out of the 8 indicators found in the Soil Mission Implementation plan; 4) to kick-start the multi-actor co-design and validation of solutions for soil health that are practical and scalable; 5) to facilitate the diffusion of innovation through a plethora of communication and dissemination actions. GOV4ALL concentrates on 3 Mediterranean pedo-climatic zones, where the hubs will serve as sustainable innovation centres, aiding the Soil Mission's objectives and inspiring soil regeneration regionally and beyond.