Maximising the CO-benefits of agricultural Digitalisation through conducive digital ECoSystems

CODECS will co-develop, together with farmers and AKIS actors, user-friendly approaches, methods, and tools able to document the co-benefits and the costs of technologies applied to real contexts. In this way, it will improve the collective capacity to understand, assess and foresee the full range of benefits and costs of farm digitalisation, and to build digital ecosystems that maximise the net benefits of digitalisation. CODECS will develop a vision of “sustainable digitalization” which will contribute to a multi-level transition that links social, economic, and ecological aspects together, by adopting an innovative system based / actor centred approach, and an action research methodology based on coordination of 21 Living Labs through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams. The research will study the role of 'digital ecosystems' in the rate of uptake of digital technologies and in the distribution of their costs and benefits; will develop and test three indicators (farmers' digital readiness, scaling readiness, digital ecosystem conduciveness) to monitor the level of digitalisation and foresee its potential costs and benefits. It will assess and compare the full range of social, economic, and environmental costs and benefits of farm digitalisation, identifying synergies and trade-offs between different sources of costs and benefits; it will test and demonstrate digital technologies in 21 Living Labs through in physical and virtual demonstration. The CODECS platform will host search, demonstration, and assessment tools. CODECS has a strong commitment to get an impact in the AKIS domain and in the policy field, which will be put into practice through a dedicated work package on policy analysis and policy tools (iii) a set of policy briefs and webinars and an engagement strategy at local, national, European level through Living Labs, a science-policy interface, an AKIS network and a demo-farm network.