Inspiration was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) funded Innovative Training Network (ITN) (Grant Agreement Number: 675120). Agriculture is vital to Europe’s prosperity. However, while agricultural production in Europe has significantly increased food security it has also damaged soil and water resources and ecosystem biodiversity and contributed to climate change.

Further intensification of production to support population growth must be sustainable to minimise future environmental impacts and negative externalities.

Sustainability is critically underdeveloped in European farming practices. However, it can reduce the environmental impacts of commercial-scale farming in Europe and increase the productivity of poor quality land in urban and industrialised areas, which may be contaminated. This offers huge opportunities to restore degraded land to re-use, return this asset to communities, ensure local food supply and increase the agricultural capacity of urban land, otherwise unsuitable for commercial-scale farming. It contributes to food security, by reducing the need for new land elsewhere. This is possible in many European cities, outlying areas and peripheral rural environments.

Addressing this challenge and improving Europe’s soil and water resources for future agricultural use requires innovative sustainable management concepts, which must consider environmental, technical, social and economic factors. Decision-making frameworks and predictive tools must also be developed to implement sustainable agricultural practices and devise measures to mitigate impacts. These approaches must be developed from the farm- to catchment-scale within European agricultural landscapes. This requires an integrated analysis represented in the INSPIRATION (managing soil and groundwater impacts from agriculture for sustainable intensification) project.

TelLab’s contribution:

TelLab hosted and supervised an Early Stage Researcher (ESR) as part of Work Package 4, Mitigation of soil and groundwater impacts from agriculture using mixed waste media. The ESR has identified various suitable locally-sourced raw/waste materials (nutrient rich) which are safe to recycle back onto land and be used as fertiliser. The ESR continues her PhD after the project end.