EU - COLiBRI - Collaborative Crop Breeding Research and Innovation for a Green Europe

The COLiBRI project addresses status, hurdles and future perspectives for European plant breeding research and innovation. Considering the critical challenges for European agriculture, COLiBRI will develop strategies towards more diverse and resilient / adapted crops to better address climate change effects, food and nutritional security, biodiversity (natural and cultivated), and towards high value and bulk products for a competitive bioeconomy. These issues necessitate an accelerated transition towards agricultural resilience and sustainability and hence strengthening plant research and boosting the transfer from plant research to plant breeding to market. All farming and breeding systems and concepts are included - conventional and organic farming, participatory plant breeding, as well as different facilitating technologies. COLiBRI will map and assess plant breeding needs and gaps, infrastructure, funding landscape, and financial models at national, regional and EU levels. Based on this, COLiBRI's main goals are to develop a comprehensive R&I roadmap and implementation strategy for a future European plant breeding research and innovation funding scheme/joint activities and initiate a collaborative R&I network that brings together public and private actors. To achieve this the project will engage and cocreate with the stakeholders across the plant breeding value chain (academia / public research / research infrastructures, private breeding companies, farmers and producers, policymakers and funders, and end users) throughout the project, identify priority research and innovation bottlenecks and actions to develop its full potential.