About

MarginUp! is working closely with stakeholders to increase farming system resilience and enhance biodiversity by cultivating biodiversity-friendly non-food crops for bio-based products. Partners are identifying the available marginal land for low indirect land-use change, and specific biodiversity indicators to monitor ecosystem health while improving productivity.

MarginUp! is learning from seven case study sites around the globe, including Argentina and South Africa, and five full-scale use cases in Europe: Germany, Greece, Hungary, Spain, and Sweden. Through MarginUp!’s use case implementations, partners are looking to strike the right balance between productivity and ecosystem services to provide socioeconomic and environmental benefits simultaneously. The bio-based feedstocks cultivated on marginal lands will foster the development of new bio-based industries at the local and regional levels, providing low-carbon domestic supplies of bioenergy, organic fertilisers, construction, cosmetics, and more.

Objectives

Identify the most suitable feedstock options for different climates, farming systems, soil types, bio-based value chains

Demonstrate how marginal lands can be optimised for biomass production and biodiversity enhancement

Support the development of new sectors in the rural circular bioeconomy and increase farming system resilience

Share knowledge experiences to foster replication and uptake of practices to maximise project results

MarginUp! is creating a Replication Hub and Network to facilitate the dissemination and exploitation of project results. The Hub will be a one-stop shop for information containing handbooks, factsheets, videos, lessons learned, and further reports to support industries, farmers, and policy-makers in enabling sustainable circular feedstock production on marginal lands.

Benefits

MarginUp!’s proposed alternative land uses offer various social, environmental, and economic benefits.

Biodiversity enhancement

Circular use of biomass

Replication potential

Improved soil quality and productivity

Water optimised production

New regional business models

GHG emissions reduction

Soil health

Work plan and flow

The Consortium