CARINA

Coordinatore di progetto: Università di Bologna - Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Ambientali

Ambiti di ricerca: Agronomia e Coltivazioni Erbacee - AGR/02

Responsabile Scientifico: Andrea Monti

Durata: 01/11/2022 - 30/10/2026

Gruppo di ricerca:  Andrea Monti, Federica Zanetti, Walter Zegada-Lizarazu, Matteo Vittuari, Barbara Alberghini, Sara Berzuini, Erika Facciolla, Elena Pagani, Andrea Parenti, Angela Vecchi, Rossella Mastroberardino, Maria Giovanna Sessa

CARINA is built on a multi-actor consortium and participative decision-making process through mu-tual learning, transparent communication, and inclusive multi-perspectives and transdisciplinary engagement. From the proposal clearly emerges the importance of social innovation as the nerve center for the evolution of the whole project. Nine Lighthouses, 5 Living Labs, and 9 Policy Innova-tion Labs will be established across Europe playing a leading role in the co-creation of CARINA in-novation actions. CARINA focuses on new sustainable and diversified farming systems including 2 new oilseed crops, carinata and camelina, able to provide multiple low iLUC feedstocks for the bio-based economy. We firmly believe that a participatory approach is necessary for successfully sca-ling-up innovative farming systems. Engaging farmers and other stakeholders in jointly developing solutions under specific environmental, technical, and social conditions has been highly considered in CARINA. We estimate about 3M farmers being potentially reached by CARINA thanks to the di-rect cooperation with its partners. To find a broad consensus by primary producers, a new crop should enable to promote and harness biodiversity, be easy-to-grow, and technically feasible wi-thin current cropping systems. Carinata and camelina fully meet these requirements, able to suc-cessfully grow almost everywhere in Europe and in northern Africa. Carinata and camelina provide high quality oils that will be transformed into innovative bio-based products (bioherbicides, biopla-stics). The co-product from oil extraction is a protein-rich cake, which will be valorized as animal feed, and in a multitude of high added-value products, exploiting the mucilage and glucosinolates contained within. CARINA capitalizes on a highly experienced team of 20 partners, +6 affiliated en-tities, from 13 EU and Associated Countries (Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Greece, Slovakia, Bul-garia, Poland, UK, Serbia, Tunisia, Morocco, Switzerland).