Start date: 01/11/2020

Duration: 60 months

Topic: SFS-35-2019-2020 – Sustainable Intensification in Africa

Total budget: EUR 7 655 597,50 

Website: upscale-h2020.eu

UPSCALE aims to take key steps to realize the transformative potential of push-pull technology, to address food security, livelihoods and climate change resilience in the sub-Saharan region of East Africa, while reducing the environmental impact of agricultural practices. For this, it will foster the design, adaptation and adoption of strategies for integrated agro-ecological management based on push-pull technology for wide-spread and climate-resilient sustainable intensification.

UPSCALE is a highly ambitious project that advances both science and technology beyond the state-of-the-art, representing the springboard to unlock uptake by addressing and involving ‘critical levers’ at all levels and scales of society, including applied research, policy and multi-actor value chains in Africa and Europe. In practice, UPSCALE will introduce a novel application of ecological methods, modelling tools and social-ecological approaches to the barely explored ground of providing data-driven, quantitative and qualitative tools to assess and improve social-ecological resilience of ecosystem services and farms. UPSCALE will examine this under state-of-the-art scenarios of climate change, closing the gap between small-scale models and coarser large-scale models, to build an improved cross-scale social and ecological modelling framework which yields key information for management, dissemination and policy decisions. Moreover, UPSCALE will develop and adapt dissemination toolboxes including a Knowledge Exchange Hub (KEH), mobile app, interactive integrative maps for spatial targeting of dissemination efforts, long-lasting multi-actor communities (MAC). Multi-actor design and integration of empirical models for push-pull adoption and effectiveness are the basis for targeted and rapid spread of push-pull and sustainable intensification information to key stakeholders, thus ensuring the relevance of research, as well as the feasibility and increased uptake of proposed solutions and implementation of results.

The UPSCALE consortium consists of a group of 18 partners from 4 European and 6 African countries teamed up under the lead of the Leibniz University of Hannover (Germany). The UPSCALE consortium is ideally composed to tackle the challenges of developing and upscaling the push-pull management system in East Africa: the expertise of icipe in development of push-pull management systems is complemented by other partners’ skills and track record in key research areas such as research synthesis, cropping systems ecology, spatiotemporal modelling, chemical ecology, landscape ecology, food-web ecology, soil science and social science including socioeconomics, sustainability science, gender, and policy, as well as international experts on stakeholder engagement and communication.