The RegaDIOX project, involving Fundagro as coordinator and INTIA and UPNA through the Sustainable Soils Management Group as partners, will study how to contribute to the fixation of atmospheric CO2 and how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the sustainable management of irrigated agriculture, which will result in economic and environmental improvements by an improved agricultural management.
The event presented by the Managing Director of INTIA, Mr Jesús Mari Echeverría, and Mr David Lezáun, vice-president of UAGN-Fundagro, has gathered the interest of the agricultural sector in promoting this type of projects that can offer practical applications in the farms and improve the final outcomes. It is therefore a work that seeks to reach an ambitious goal from the environmental point of view where the farmer sees recognised his/her role as an agent that supports the territory, all of which is reflected in a direct economic as well as environmental benefit for the whole of society. This project therefore seeks to implement in land parcels a series of measures and techniques aimed at reducing the impact of greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions from the agricultural and livestock sector. In this way, it will be possible to have more environmentally sustainable farms that will compete in better conditions in the market and to spearhead the development of an efficient and durable agriculture over time. This project called RegaDIOX, proposed by agents from the agricultural sector in Navarre, is part of the LIFE + call to promote projects and studies that improve the conservation of the environment and natural habitats in order to stop the loss of biodiversity and to improve energy resources. RegaDIOX is therefore a very useful tool that will allow the agricultural sector in Navarre to evaluate and verify a series of measures and actions intended to be put into practice in the agricultural sector, so that CO2 capture by crops and the reduction of greenhouse gases is quantified and implemented on actual agricultural holdings. This project has a budget of € 937,666, co-funded by the European Union (50%), for the development of specific actions over the next three years, until the end of 2016. The main objective of the project is to design, demonstrate, test and disseminate the impact that an improved model for the sustainable management of irrigated agriculture can have on the effects of climate change, especially in the capture of CO2 and the reduction of greenhouse gases thanks to agriculture. This study advances in the direction of the environmental guidelines to be included in the new PAC 2014-2020, and hence the results and proposals made will be used to guide agrarian policies and strategies of rural development in Navarre. In this way and thanks to the high technical knowledge of partners such as INTIA and the Sustainable Soil Management Group of UPNA, large-scale pilot experiences will be launched to assess the impact of the actions designed so that the learning obtained during this phase will allow to assess the environmental impact and to transfer it to agricultural holdings for their application from an environmental and socio-economic point of view. It is in this area of work that the coordination of Fundagro, an associate entity of the Farmers’ Union of Navarre (UAGN), with a great experience in the development of dissemination and training actions becomes more relevant, as the effective implementation of these techniques is key to the success of the project. To this end, training measures and actions oriented to the transfer of results to the sector and to society as a whole will be performed, so that their practical implementation in actual land parcels becomes a reality.