Food Security

The Food Security case study concerns various aspects of food security and natural systems safety, climate change, mitigation and adaptation, as well as the sustainable management of agricultural systems. The related development activities consist of the determination of specific climate indicators for the evaluation of the impact of extreme climate events and adverse phenomena such as the spread of destructive species on crops, risk estimation, forecasts, and alerts for potential production losses as climate mitigation services. 

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

Use case 3, addressing food security, relies on a multitude of types of observation data (from ground, satellite, production and climatic time series) to implement different services: i) Impact analysis, mainly based on observation data, (ii) 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, (iii) Identification of new areas with favorable climate conditions for specific crops, and (iv) Identification of crops suitable for new climate conditions. Through this use case, EO4EU also aims to contribute and support Farm to Fork strategy main objectives, by promoting a sustainable food chain from start to finish, fighting food fraud along the supply chain, to protect the transparency of the made-in-Italy quality brands, ensure sustainable food production, ensure food safety. Within this use case some specific pilots will be identified and supported. The pilots will concern some typical autochthonous crop productions which are particularly exposed to the effect of the climate change. A specific pilot service concerning agricultural product traceability will also be included. 

Current status

A preliminary selection of the relevant data (Earth Observation, simulations, projections, and statistics) that could be of importance for the use case has been performed:

• Copernicus AgERA5 (temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, wind speed, solar radiation)
• Sentinel-1 and -2
• Copernicus Corine Land Cover
• ESA World Cover
• ISTAT (crop distribution at local scale)
• EURO-CORDEX (historical simulations and projections of temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, wind speed, solar radiation)
• Very High Resolution datasets from CMCC simulations (historical simulations and projections of temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, wind speed, solar radiation)

Moreover, the data processing steps to train the Sentinel-2-based model for NDVI estimation with Sentinel-1 have been identified.

For what concerns the data accessibility, a dedicated EO4EU ADAM instance has been implemented which will expose the abovementioned data to support the use case analysis.

The upcoming interaction with the involved stakeholders has been scheduled. Such an interaction foresees the identification of the crop/field to be monitored, the time range to be analysed and the ancillary data to be used to complement the climate and EO data.