Europe faces a significant challenge in managing its land resources, with growing competition between food production, renewable energy, and nature restoration. The increasing pressure on land is driven by climate change, biodiversity loss, and the EU’s ambitious climate neutrality goals. At the same time, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has further complicated land-use demands, highlighting the need to ensure food security and energy resilience.
Digital tools, such as satellite monitoring, AI, and advanced spatial analysis models, offer promising solutions to optimise land use. These technologies can help balance the competing demands of food production, renewable energy generation, and nature restoration by identifying synergies and reducing conflicts. For example, agrovoltaics enable solar energy production alongside agriculture, and digital monitoring systems can help align land use with sustainability goals.
However, while digitalisation is already being used to help optimise the land use, there remains significant untapped potential. The EU needs to do more to fully integrate these data and digital solutions into its land-use policies, ensuring that they can drive the transformation towards more sustainable land management practices.
In the aftermath of the EU elections, this project will explore how we can use scarce land resources to maximise the benefits for renewable energy generation, food production, and nature restoration in line with Green Deal objectives. In particular, the project will focus on how digital solutions can align the clean energy transition with food security and nature restoration objectives with regard to land use, and how European policies can help unlock this potential. Over the course of 12 months, the project will include a workshop, and a Discussion Paper and a Policy Dialogue where the key findings will be presented. The project is implemented by the European Policy Centre and supported by Vodafone Institute for Society and Communications.