Project details

Organic farming makes an important contribution to many ecological and social societal goals. These services are not always assigned to a single farm, but are the result of synergies and cumulative effects on a regional level. These social and ecological services should be rewarded more than before by various
political and market-based instruments. However, there is a lack of suitable approaches for assessing benefits and their impacts at the regional level, as well as for rewarding them.

The aim of the regiosöl project is to make these benefits of organic farming more visible through transparent documentation in a regional reference area and to increase them through appropriate renumeration. The project pursues 3 specific objectives: (1) An improved assessment of the societal benefits of organic farming at regional level and their visualisation, (2) an appropriate remuneration of the social-ecological benefits through collective approaches on the basis of (1), and (3) to contribute to the optimisation of the provision of benefits with regional action strategies and thus to improve the sustainability of the region. This approach is based on the understanding that the valorisation of social and ecological services in agriculture can only take place via the cascade of awareness - appreciation / interest - valorisation.

regiosöl is therefore concerned with the following overarching research questions:

• Which approaches are suitable for the regular transparent assessment of the social-ecological performance of organic farming?
• How can existing remuneration approaches for social-ecological benefits be improved?
• How can regional strategy approaches contribute to the optimisation of the provision of socialecological benefits?
• What political and institional improvements are needed?

The project is based on a socio-ecological system framework and on the multi-level approach associated with transition theory as an analytical framework.

Project website