Breeding for resilience: enhancing multi-stress tolerance in crops

The main goal of this opportunity is to help agriculture adapt to climate change by making crops more resilient to multiple stresses. It focuses on increasing biodiversity in farming systems and encouraging low-input, eco-friendly practices. Projects should explore new crop traits for stress resistance, develop methods to test and compare crop performance, and use advanced technologies to understand how crops respond to different conditions. The scope covers the European Union, associated countries, and regions such as Africa, India, and the Middle East, with a strong emphasis on international cooperation. The opportunity aims to support food security, biodiversity, and climate adaptation in agriculture.

• Proposals must follow page limits and layout requirements as described in the official application form.
• Projects should operate in a variety of farming conditions and include all types of agricultural systems.
• If organic farming is included, special attention must be given to organic varieties and diverse crop materials.
• Up to 20% of funding can be used to support third parties, with a maximum of 60,000€ per third party.
• Proposals should align with ongoing research projects and make use of existing knowledge and tools.
• Projects must be evaluated blindly at the first stage and clearly contribute to knowledge on stress tolerance and biodiversity-friendly practices.

Example Projects:

• Testing drought and heat resistance in local wheat varieties across several European and African regions.
• Developing new methods to measure and compare the performance of rice varieties under pest and disease stress.
• Supporting small-scale farmers to trial biodiversity-friendly cropping systems using advanced monitoring tools.

• Grants to third parties for research and development (up to 60,000€ each)
• Development and testing of tools for evaluating crop responses to multiple stresses
• Demonstration activities related to stress tolerance in crops
• Benchmarking and performance assessment methodologies
• Implementation of agro-ecological practices
• Advanced data collection (e.g., omics, high-throughput phenotyping)
• Computational modeling and artificial intelligence applications
• Collaboration and networking activities with international partners

Restrictions: Up to 20% of total EU funding may be used for financial support to third parties. Each third-party grant is limited to EUR 60,000. More details may be available in the official program guide.

• Budget for this Call: 14.000.000€
• Number of Grants attributed: 2
• Budget per project: 7.000.000€

• Consortium Composition: At least three independent legal entities from three different eligible countries, with at least one established in an EU Member State.

• Eligible Entities: Legal entities established in EU Member States or Horizon Europe associated countries.

• Action Type: Research and Innovation Action (RIA).

• Project Focus: Development of crop varieties with enhanced resilience to multiple stresses, including climate change, pests, and diseases.

• Financial Support to Third Parties (FSTP): Proposals may provide FSTP to develop, test, and demonstrate tools to evaluate genotype-environment-management (GxExM) interactions in the context of multi-stress. A maximum of 20% of the EU funding should be allocated to this purpose.