Plenty of AGRO input to the Forsk2025 catalogue

AGRO is a prospective actor in an agenda-setting activity that the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation has initiated. The work will result in a FORSK2025 catalogue in spring 2017. The catalogue is designed to form the basis for prioritisations in the government’s budget negotiations.

The task is to identify particularly promising research areas and the Danish prerequisites for making a concerted research effort in these areas. Crucial national and global challenges for society form the background for this initiative.

In the Faculty of Science and Technology, the Dean's Office asked the departments to initially submit suggestions for research proposals to initiate the process which involves a series of consultations and working groups before the university’s June deadline with the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation.

We used our strategy and flagships as background and – with the help of our section managers – we ended up with two research proposals: ’Sustainable Intensification through Targeted, Site-Specific Resource Optimization’ and ’Climate-Smart Agri-Food Systems’.

The Dean’s Office at Science and Technology received a total of 34 proposals. There were large variations in how the departments had tackled the task. Some departments had chosen to aim wide, while others, like AGRO, had chosen some more consolidated and strategically-based proposals.

The two proposals from AGRO can be seen here and here.

The Dean’s Office grouped our two proposals thematically into the relevant three of six prioritised themes: (i) Water, (ii) Climate and Environment and (iii) Circular Economy. The outcome was a merger of proposals with the Department of Environmental Science (for the water theme) and the Department of Geoscience. In such an exercise it is always a challenge to combine the different perspectives so that they make sense. There is the stamp of AGRO on all three proposals, which, incidentally, were well received.

The three proposals can be seen here, here and here.

Within the past few months AGRO has also participated in another agenda-setting process, namely the university’s contribution to the revised proposal of the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation to the EU Commission’s formulation of the Horizon 2020 working programme for 2018-2020. This process will be explained in a later issue of Agro Biweekly.