STERN’s overall objective is to assist European Regional and Local Authorities to adopt recent outcomes of research and demonstration European projects as regard policy instruments and procedures needed to be developed and implemented for managing and reusing organic waste on agricultural land and sustainable strategies to prevent agricultural soil degradation mainly from nitrates leaching. To this end, STERN will focus on: - Setting the scene, by defining and analyzing regions needs, priorities, gaps and preconditions, procedures, techniques, policies and recourses needed. - Identifying policies, measures and means to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and regions’ implementation instruments - Boosting exchange of knowledge and experience between regions, stakeholders and scientists and develop Action Plans, conformed to the specific need of regions’ environmental status as well as society and economy priorities. - Developing an informative web application (platform), which will host all relevant STERN data as well as background knowledge on reusing organic waste on soil and good practices/exemplars for wide knowledge exchange and dissemination to other European Regional and Local Authorities. PHASE 1 Sub-phase 1.1 Experience exchange-Interregional learning (MONTHS 1-24) Sub-phase 1.1 aims at exchanging knowledge, experience and good practices among partners on issues related to soils overloading with nutrients (especially nitrates), the consequences of uncontrolled reuse and disposal of agricultural waste on soils, as well as environmental, social and economic impacts of the above. During this period partners will mainly focus on identifying local/regional problems related to the overloading of soils with nutrients and the management of agricultural waste by identifying hot spots, dimension/condition of sites, causes, current technologies/techniques/policy instruments to address them, regional needs, establishment of cooperation and dialogue pathways with regional stakeholders interested in these issues, a.o. Sub-phase 1.2. Merging experience and development of Action Plans-AP (Months 25-36) Experience and knowledge gained as well as lessons learnt during the EEMs and the various meetings of the previous phase, will be merged into a report for each country in which participants will define measures, means, policy instruments and procedures that can be developed and implemented in their regions, as they have been defined during previous phase and also through the exchange and share of experience and good practices among the partners and the stakeholders. Regional AP will be developed defining the activities required to improve policy instruments, including transfer of good practices from other regions. PHASE 2: Action Plans implementation (months 36-60) In Phase 2, the partners will implement the Action Plans developed in Phase 1. Actions to monitor the effectiveness are also foreseen.