Ecological approaches to farming practices are gaining interest across Europe. As this interest grows there is a pressing need to assess the potential contributions these practices may make, the contexts in which they function and their attractiveness to farmers as potential adopters. In particular, ecological agriculture must be assessed against the aim of promoting the im-proved performance and sustainability of farms, rural environment, rural societies and econ-omies, together.The overall goal of LIFT is to identify the potential benefits of the adoption of ecological farm-ing in the European Union (EU) and to understand how socio-economic and policy factors im-pact the adoption, performance and sustainability of ecological farming at various scales, from the level of the single farm to that of a territory.To meet this goal, LIFT will assess the determinants of adoption of ecological approaches, and evaluate the performance and overall sustainability of these approaches in comparison to more conventional agriculture across a range of farm systems and geographic scales. LIFT will also develop new private arrangements and policy instruments that could improve the adop-tion and subsequent performance and sustainability of the rural nexus. For this, LIFT will sug-gest an innovative framework for multi-scale sustainability assessment aimed at identifying critical paths toward the adoption of ecological approaches to enhance public goods and eco-system services delivery. This will be achieved through the integration of transdisciplinary sci-entific knowledge and stakeholder expertise to co-develop innovative decision-support tools.The project will inform and support EU priorities relating to agriculture and the environment in order to promote the performance and sustainability of the combined rural system. At least 30 case studies will be performed in order to reflect the enormous variety in the socio-eco-nomic and bio-physical conditions for agriculture across the EU.Read less <