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.
This project confirms the strong support of the Government of Navarra through the Department of Rural Development, Environment and Local Administration and INTIA, and the sector’s strong commitment to sustainable agriculture, which continues to be a factor in the consolidation of employment in rural areas. The purpose is to highlight the key role of agriculture, based on an adequate management, in the fight against climate change and in the increase of the quality of life of the whole society. This project, called RegadiOX, has been proposed by agents from the agricultural sector in Navarre, within the framework 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 farms. 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.