The EU-funded LegumES project aims to balance environmental and economic ecosystem service benefits provided by legumes such as peas, beans, lentils, chickpeas, and soybeans. It involves 22 partners from various sectors, including academia, research organizations, SMEs, NGOs, and commercial companies, using an action-research approach. The project engages stakeholders throughout value chains to optimize ecosystem services in legume-based agriculture both locally and globally. LegumES features 25 innovative pilot studies across Europe, utilizing different legume species and cropping approaches. The project’s goals include promoting best practices in legume-based cropping systems, developing methodologies to quantify environmental and economic benefits, assessing these benefits at various scales, and meeting EU targets for reducing agrichemical use, combating climate change, reversing biodiversity loss, and ensuring nutritional provisioning. The consortium includes experts in agricultural monitoring, life cycle assessment, economic modeling, social science, policy, law, and decision support systems. Through collaboration and critical reflection, stakeholders aim to achieve an optimal balance of ecosystem services in legume-based agriculture.
Peter Roebeling (CESAM-UA; Principal WP4-leader) and Moritz Reckling (ZALF; Deputy WP4-leader) coordinate Work package 4 (WP4) on the economic assessment of legume-based farming systems. The specific objectives of WP4 are to: i) assess and map the private-economic and socio-economic costs and benefits of legume-based farming systems across time, space, and stakeholders; ii) assess the costs and effectiveness of different intervention strategies / institutional mechanisms to induce and accelerate the adoption and diffusion of legume-based farming systems; and iii) derive and assess future “legume pathways” for legume markets for the EU and EU-Associated Countries in relation to other world regions. WP4 works in close collaboration with the 25 Pilot sites and 5 Pilot case studies across Europe. WP4 is developed with UAvr, ZALF, FiBL and PIK as well as several other project partners, and builds on and feeds into various other Work packages.
