Our work

Working with local people and organisations across six locations to understand and influence how land across Europe is managed.

Central to the MOSAIC projects are six Policy Labs located in Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, Portugal, Switzerland and Europe-wide. MOSAIC’s Policy Labs are bringing together local expertise and the MOSAIC team’s modelling and land-use expertise to develop new and effective policies for sustainable land use.

Local Policy Labs are undertaking stakeholder mapping, policy context analysis and coalition building activities and engaging with researchers, policymakers, farmers, landowners and other relevant land-use stakeholders. Working closely with these stakeholders, coupled with data, case studies and state-of-the-art socio-economic modelling, will provide a holistic view of drivers and motivations behind land-use change

Lessons from each Policy Lab will be shared to enable local, regional and national decision makers to develop their own land use strategies which support the EU’s climate and biodiversity goals.

Understanding what drives decision-making around land use in Europe.

Before developing policy recommendations for sustainable land use, we first need to understand why and how land use decisions are made and what influences those decisions.

As part of MOSAIC, we are examining land use drivers, incentives and instruments across Europe and at individual Policy Lab level. We’re conducting a thorough study analysing the motivations behind land use changes. We’re using a variety of methods such as interviews and focus groups, as well as historical data to look at land use changes in the past.

This research will underpin our work and feed into our work with the Policy Labs, ensuring we are recommending effective, efficient, and context-specific policies that align with local and EU sustainability objectives.

Understanding and predicting how land might be used in the future.

State-of-the-art land use modelling will help MOSAIC to understand how land use across Europe might change in the future and ensure our project policy recommendations have the desired outcomes.

The MOSAIC modelling team will first develop different scenarios for the future. This will involve reviewing existing policies and the impacts they might have, as well as exploring different scenarios based on socioeconomic and climate change projections.

Advanced land use models will be developed and tested in each of our six Policy Labs. To ensure that models and scenarios reflect real-world situations accurately, these models will combine existing and emerging research with inputs from our stakeholder engagement work.

Results from MOSAIC’s modelling work are expected to generate predictions on how different policies impact ecosystems, climate regulation, food production, biodiversity and renewable energy, as well as any socioeconomic consequences. This work will ensure that policy and decision makers can be confident that MOSAIC policy recommendations have been robustly tested for their efficacy, sustainability and impact on local communities the environment.

Developing a virtual platform to support learning.

MOSAIC is creating a digital learning environment to support decision-making for sustainable land use. To develop this platform, we will first look at existing digital land use decision making tools to understand their strengths and weaknesses, informing the creation of the most relevant and useful platform.

The digital learning environment and services will be co-designed with stakeholders and developers and operate at three levels: one for the whole of Europe, one for individual countries and one for local users. We will create resources or services for users at each of these levels in an agile way, creating room for testing, feedback and improvement as we go along, with the goal of creating a user-friendly digital learning environment that meets the needs of different users.

We will work with the policy labs to test the various digital tools and services featured in the Digital Learning Environment. This will help us understand how and to what extent different resources can support sustainable land use changes. The lessons, insights, tools and resources from this work will be summarised and shared to help decision makers outside of the MOSAIC project achieve sustainable land use transformations.