Climate-resilient sunflower crops can help to reduce the EU dependency on imports of vegetable oils and proteins shifting towards sustainable alternatives, to mitigate the impact of agricultural production on water use and greenhouse gas emissions, to grow resources for pollinators, and to promote biodiversity. HelEx will generate the knowledge and use innovative tools to accelerate the breeding of sunflower varieties adapted to extreme drought and heat stresses, while improving their environmental impact and assessing their socio-economic value of the resulting innovations along the value chains. HelEx will thereby consider two related groups of traits increasingly impacted by climate change, i.e. the eco-systemic service to pollinators and seed quality. For this, HelEx brings together scientists, SMEs, and industries representing an international consortium of experts in sunflower ecology, physiology and genomics; plant biotechnology and breeding; pollinator biology and ecology; environmental impact assessment and feedstock processing; and socioeconomic assessment at different scales. This HelEx multi-disciplinary consortium will explore the genetic and molecular processes involved in tolerance to drought and heat in wild extremophile Helianthus species, and identify favorable wild alleles introgressed into cultivated sunflower, for seed quality and pollinator attractiveness resilience (WP1). These processes will be transfered using classical marker-assisted selection and innovative genome editing approaches (WP2), and the environmental and biodiversity impact of these new climate-smart sunflowers assessed (WP3). HelEx will investigate the socio-economic impact and benefits in relevant value chains for different feedstock (WP4). Our communication strategy (WP5) will engage a variety of societal stakeholders to ensure feedback and enhance project progress and outcomes, and make transparent the broader dimensions of plant biotechnology, biodiversity, and benefit sharing

Threats to pollinators and pollination services that support agriculture and provide benefits to people are a worldwide problem. AGRI4POL’s ambition is to assist the transition of agriculture from being a pressure on pollinators to becoming a positive force for managing and restoring pollinator biodiversity, crop pollination services, and co-benefits to ecosystems and people. To achieve this transition towards more pollinator friendly farming systems and value chains, AGRI4POL will advance scientific understanding of crop-farming system-pollinator relationships from the crop gene to the agroecosystem. By evaluating the genetic basis of crop floral traits attracting and rewarding crop pollinators, we will identify candidate crop lines suitable for breeding future pollinator-smart varieties. We will study how pollinator-crop relationships are modified in space and time, by the diversity and rotation of crop species and varieties, by ecological infrastructure (EI) comprising landscape features and non-crop habitats, and by future climate or land-use change. Synthesising this information from the gene to agroecosystem scale will allow us to provide integrated recommendations for optimising landscapes for crop pollination, pollinator biodiversity and multiple ecosystem benefits. AGRI4POL research will be framed and supported by early and sustained multi-actor engagement along agri-food chains to assure its relevance and the acceptability of management options to farmers and society. This multi-actor approach will also enable assessments of the socio-economic and policy obstacles and opportunities affecting the feasibility and uptake of pollinator-friendly farming at [sub]national, European and international scales. AGRI4POL will therefore showcase to farmers, agri-food actors, policymakers and society the importance of pollinator-friendly farming to food security and sustainability goals (EC Green Deal, Nature Restoration Law; UN SDGs).