How will the countryside develop? Who will work in agriculture? And many similar questions will be solved in the PoliRural project, which is currently starting at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, which coordinates another 36 partners from 16 European countries and Israel. The project is financed by the European Union from the Horizon 2020 program, which supports European excellent research, with a total budget of almost 6 million euros. With this scope, it is currently the most extensive project coordinated by a Czech entity.

The goal of the PoliRural project is to promote the attractiveness of life in rural regions across Europe. Using a combination of modern technologies and action research, in which local entities, farmers, self-government and researchers will be involved, the current state of life will be evaluated and the effectiveness of rural policies will be assessed in selected regions in Europe and Israel. The excellence of the project lies primarily in the multidisciplinary use of information technologies in the field of rural development. The researchers will design software that will allow policymakers to model future development scenarios and help them better understand and predict the effects of measures on individual regions. The results of the project will be freely available to all interested parties and the general public.

The bearer and manager of the project is the Department of Information Technologies of the Faculty of Operational Economics of the CZU in Prague. The project was launched on June 1, 2019, and the solution period is 36 months.

More about the project: https://www.czu.cz/cs/r-7584-projekty-a-spoluprace-s-praxi/r-8111-uspesni-zadatele/polirural-future-oriented-collaborative-policy-development-f.html

Official launch of the project by Prof. Petr Sklenička, rector of CZU in Prague (June 19, 2019)