Within this project, the research group collaborates with researcher from 16 EU countries to develop modeling tools and to study conditions for achieving climate neutrality in the European land use sector by 2035.As part of the European Green Deal, the EU must achieve climate neutrality by 2050.

The land use sector has a key role to play, which is recognized in the “Fit for 55 package”, where a climate neutrality target for the Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use (AFOLU) is set for 2035. To enable fundamental transformations in the land use sector necessary to achieve the Green Deal, LAMASUS proposes a step change in modelling and evaluating land use governance from policy formulation to implementation and monitoring. LAMASUS builds on

• decades of experience in direct policy support,
• unique modeling tools, such as GLOBIOM, the only model that integrates agricultural and land use sectors, and CAPRI, MAGNET and CLUE, which underlie JRC’s land use policy assessments, and
• novel approaches mobilizing machine learning and citizen science.

The project is driven by four key elements:

1. EVIDENCE – dynamic monitoring of land use, management and related policies for evaluation and model calibration;
2. UNDERSTANDING – state-of-the-art econometric and biophysical models to assess the role of past policies on changes in land use and management, and their economic and environmental impacts;
3. TOOLS – a highly-integrated policy modeling framework with full sectorial coverage from agriculture and forestry to the whole economy, accounting for carbon, biodiversity and all relevant sustainability dimensions, at multiple scales (land use actors, country, EU level, global);
4. GUIDANCE – a multi-level stakeholder dialogue for co-design of agriculture, forestry and climate policies by the EC, national and local governments and citizens, made accessible to stakeholders across multiple spatial scales through the novel webbased LAMASUS Portal.

In this way, LAMUSUS will create a new level of societal engagement in which local actors contribute to the design of effective and efficient EU policies for climate neutrality and will serve as an exemplar for other policy processes within the European Green Deal.