AGRI ADAPT – Sustainable Adaptation of Typical EU Farming Systems to Climate Change
Good Practices Category
Good Practices Summary
The project develops a specific action plan for farms with sustainable adaptation measures, in the four main climate risk regions of the EU in the 3 main agricultural systems (farms, permanent crops and livestock farms).
Mitigation
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted in its 2014 report that climate change would have negative impacts on agriculture for the rest of this century, even in temperate zones such as in Europe. LIFE AGRI ADAPT aims to increase the resilience of EU agriculture to climate change by demonstrating sustainable best-practice adaptation measures with an ecosystem-based approach at farm level.
Replicability/Knowledge Transfer
A vulnerability assessment has been developed and is conducted on 120 pilot farms (30 farms in each of the four EU climate risk regions). After the evaluation, the creation of individual action and monitoring plans will lead to concrete results for climate adaptation strategies at farm level.
Meetings with experts. Demonstration workshops in pilot farms.
Expert workshops on food regulation. Expert workshops for agricultural insurance companies. Webinars
Resources
Baseline reports for the 4 main EU Climate Risk Regions are available at:
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/life/project/Projects/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.showFile&rep=file&fil=AGRI_ADAPT_Baseline-Reports_EN.pdf
Different technical documents like “Farming & Adaption Manual” or Farming adaptation training pack” are also available at wesite project.
Target Audience
Policy Implications
The overall objective of the AgriAdapt project is to demonstrate that three of the most important farming systems in the EU (livestock, arable and permanent crops) will become more climate-resilient through the implementation of feasible and sustainable adaptation measures which also have positive crosscutting environmental benefits. This will make it possible to further integrate adaptation into the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Cohesion Policy, the Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection and EU Biodiversity strategy
Social Dimension
The AgriAdapt project focuses on the adaptation measures that maintain or improve the farm competitiveness, that address other environmental challenges and, of course, that enhance the farm resilience to climate change. We are interested in demonstrating in the main four Climate Risk Areas of the EU that other environmental and socioeconomic synergies can be met when fighting against climate change, such as ecosystem services maintenance, biodiversity conservation, water and air quality, better jobs, integration of vulnerable communities, better supply security for the industry, etc.
Innovation Type
Awareness, Guidelines, Methodology, Process, Social, ToolInnovation
Two tools have been created to help in the decision market process in order to assess the vulnerability to climate change at level farm, and implies the conversion of climatic events into agronomic impacts for a determined crop or activity (profitability, crop pest, etc…):
-Agro-Climatic Zone tool: an assessment of crop vulnerability to climate change at Agro climatic Zone Scaled is performed.
-Farm vulnerability tool: a farmer interview to get a farm description; Agronomic vulnerability scoring; animal vulnerability scoring
Outcome/Barriers
A catalogue of sustainable adaptation measures for each of the three main farming systems (arable, livestock and permanent crops) enables farmers to reduce their vulnerability in the near future.
Adaptation measures tailored to arable land, livestock and crop farmers for the 120 pilot farms participating in the LIFE project have been compiled. Reduce vulnerability to climate change by 50% on each of the participating pilot farms. A tool for the assessment of climate change vulnerability at farm level in the four EU climate risk areas has been development.