The Food Security Use Case (UC3) aims to address the impact of Climate Change on the productivity of essential food security crops from the food, social and economic perspective, allowing to determine the most suitable areas for specific crops and thus promoting sustainable management at the territorial level. The project is developed through the identification of specific climate indicators for target crops in specific areas, which allow the impact of Climate Change to be assessed and yield trends to be predicted over time. Moreover, it’s possible to determine the most suitable areas for specific crops cultivation over time and to define the sustainability of specific crop cultivation. This information makes it possible to anticipate potential yield declines and helps in the implementation of Climate Change mitigation solutions in larger territorial districts.  

Challenge

Climate change is a negative outcome of environmentally damaging food systems, and a threat to the future of food production and the livelihoods that depends on it. Food systems encompass all the interrelated actors and processes involved in the production, processing, distribution, consumption, and disposal of food. Rising temperatures, extreme and unpredictable weather patterns, and disruption to water cycles are already causing reductions in the yields of staple crops in some regions of the world. Climate change presents a key threat to agroecosystems, food security and the many livelihoods dependent on food production, particularly in the global South. In an already flawed and inequitable food system, climate change therefore acts as a threat multiplier, further aggravating existing problems such as hunger and food insecurity. In some geographical hotspots climate change is already undermining food systems, even where incremental adaptation measures are ramping up. Transformative adaptation in agriculture promotes long-term resilience by continually shifting the geographical locations where specific types of crops and livestock are produced, aligning agricultural production with changing landscapes and ecosystems, and/or introducing resilience-building production methods and technologies across value chains.

Solution

UC3, addressing food security, relies on a multitude of observation data types (from ground, satellite, production and climatic time series) to implement different services: 

• Impact analysis, mainly based on observation data
• Risk of loss or damage estimation, through the development of predictive algorithms, based on recent time-series, forecast data and the characterization of the impact estimates of the previous component
• Identification of new areas with favorable climate conditions for specific crops
• Identification of crops suitable for new climate conditions. 

Current status

The UC3 has made steady progress, reaching several key stages, having been integrated into the EO4EU platform. Specific indicators for the target crop, including climate, soil, and elevation parameters, have been developed based on the crops' physiological information derived from scientific literature and stakeholders’ contributions. The target pilot crop is tomato, a key element in the Mediterranean and Italian diet, with important economic value in the Italian regions under study.

The study areas have been selected based on diverse climatic conditions to better assess the impact of Climate Change on agricultural productivity. A predictive model has also been built, consisting of a Neural Network trained with climate, territorial, and production data from 2006 to 2022, covering both Italian and Spanish regions. This model has enabled predictions of tomato production in a target province for the years 2030 to 2040 based on two different CMCC climate scenarios.

Currently, other productivity assessment methods are being tested, which could extend the project to a more detailed scale, providing additional data to further train the model. Moreover, tests are underway to apply this methodology to other crops, such as corn.  

The whole workflow has been carried out with the support of stakeholders, who were able to provide crop-specific physiological, agricultural and management information and needs for their working sector.  

Relevant data for the UC3, including Earth observation, simulations, projections, and statistics, have been selected to train the model and use in production forecasts, and are described below: 

• Copernicus AgERA5 (temperature and precipitation) 

• NDVI and Sentinel 2 products available on WEkEO platform 

• ISTAT (Italian crop distribution and production at local scale) 

• Copernicus DEM 30 m of resolution 

• SoilGrid information (clay, sand, nitrogen, ocd, phh2o) 

• Very High-Resolution datasets from CMCC simulations (historical simulations and projections of temperature) 

Data have been downloaded for several Italian regions and for the whole Spanish country from 2006 until 2022 to have more comprehensive statistics and more data to train the predictive model.