Project on digitalization in rural areas

How can agriculture and forestry benefit from digitalization? For four years, the partners of the DESIRA project dealt with questions of digital transformation in rural areas across Europe. Now they have completed the project.
Aufnahme eines Handys, das eine Landschaft fotografiert
Digital tools for rural areas were the focus of the DESIRA project. (Source: DESIRA)

Digitalization has the potential to greatly impact society. However, at present, digital transformation is not being experienced equally across geographical regions, social groups, and industries.

For example, digital tools – from smartphone apps that enable collective exchange between village communities to fully autonomous milking robots for dairy farming – offer promising solutions to everyday challenges in rural areas. However, implementing such tools is difficult, and rural areas are therefore particularly at risk of missing out on the opportunities of digitalization.

To be applicable for potential users in rural areas, their expectations and needs must therefore be adequately considered in the development of digital tools.

25 project partners across Europe

This is where the now completed EU project DESIRA came in. During the four-year project, researchers from 25 partner institutes and companies across Europe committed to the principles of sustainable digitization worked together. Their goal was to improve the capacity of society and political bodies to respond to the challenges of digitalization in agriculture, forestry, and rural areas.

Digital stories from the Lake Constance Living Lab

Researchers from ITAS contributed to the success by establishing a living lab at Lake Constance. There, the scientists created digital stories of how digitalization can lead to either sustainable or unsustainable fruit production. They also addressed the challenges of sustainable fruit production and formulated recommendations for policy makers. In total, 21 living labs were created across the EU for the project.

Furthermore, ITAS took the lead in creating and measuring sustainability indicators in the field of digitalization in rural areas. These indicators can be used in other research contexts to monitor and measure the impacts of digitalization in agriculture, forestry, and rural areas. (09.10.2023)

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