INTEGRATED TERRESTRIAL AND MARINE DECISION SUPPORT TOOL FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF RESOURCE USE TRADE-OFFS IN EUROPE (TERRAMARE)

Research Project, 2026 – 2029

TERRAMARE will develop and demonstrate a co-created novel deliberation tool to assess and manage trade-offs in land and sea use for food, fibre, energy, climate mitigation, climate adaptation, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services. The tool will be grounded in biophysically consistent, thermodynamically constrained modelling (mass- and energy-balance constrained). The expected result of the project is an integrated deliberation tool, provisionally entitled ""LOTUS"" - Land and Ocean Trade-offs in resource Use and Sustainability, which will be built from data generated by a set of state-of-the-art biophysical and socio-economic models developed within the consortium. LOTUS will be implemented in a web-based dashboard, including an Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent for automated explanation of results using non-technical language. LOTUS will be tested in one European Union-wide application and 8 regional case studies across European biogeographic and coastal regions, plus in Brazil. A multi-actor co-creation process engaging regional authorities, EU policymakers, civil society, NGOs, and industry will be applied for setting up priority policy narratives to assess, assist with model selection, and validate results. To maximise societal impact, the project will deliver policy‐relevant insights by leveraging the unique expertise of a transdisciplinary consortium with demonstrated work on biomass modelling, biodiversity assessment, modelling of coastal ecosystems, and participatory processes, and by building on EU research infrastructures and knowledge services such as JRC’s IBLUA tool and the EU Knowledge Centre for Bioeconomy. These outcomes will directly support the European Green Deal objectives by informing policy mixes for sustainable biomass use that balance competing demands by directly identifying and minimising land–sea use conflicts, in line with Horizon Europe’s expectations for a just and sustainable transition.