Agriculture and climate change: launch of Life ADA, a project to increase resilience in the sector

The launch of the LIFE ADA (ADaptation in Agriculture) project will aim to increase the resilience of the agricultural sector through developing knowledge and planning tools that groups of producers and farmers can use to adapt to climate change.

The main targets of the project, which will have a total budget of almost €2m, with about half co-financed by the European Union, are individual farmers and producer organisations in three farm produce supply lines: dairy products (Parmigiano Reggiano), wine, fruit and vegetables.

The project, which will involve UnipolSai as the lead company and partners like ARPAE Emilia-Romagna, Cia-Agricoltori Italiani, CREA Politiche e Bioeconomia, Festambiente, Legacoop Agroalimentare Nord Italia, Leithà and the Emilia-Romagna Region, will be subsequently copied in Veneto, Tuscany and Lazio for a total of 6,000 individual farmers in these regions and 15,000 farmers at national level. In the long-term, the potential number of users of the ADA tool in the three supply lines chosen will be 242,000 farmers representing about 1,140,000 workers and 2.6 million hectares of UAA (Utilised Agricultural Area).

The project will be presented on 13 November at 15.30 during the webinar “LIFE ADA – Agricoltura e cambiamenti climatici: adattamento e resilienza per fermare la febbre del pianeta” (“LIFE ADA - Agriculture and climate change: adaptation and resilience to stop the world’s fever”), which will be attended by Pierluigi Stefanini (Chairman Unipol), Alessio Mammi (Councillor for agriculture and the agricultural and food industry, hunting and fishing of the Emilia Romagna Region) and Dino Scanavino (President of Cia-Agricoltori Italiani). The project is based on the implementation of an innovative public-private partnership model between insurance, the public authorities (Regions), technical-scientific institutions, NGOs and producer groups (Italian agricultural producer organisations (OPI) or cooperatives).

LIFE ADA intends to provide producers with knowledge regarding the climate scenarios, risk management and adaptation measures to improve the capacity of farmers to face current and future climate risks, build tools to support their decision-making processes in the establishment of efficient plans of adaptation at the level of the farms or industry and promote an innovative approach by insurance to reinforce the capacity to reduce climate risk (current and future) in order to maintain the insurability of farmers in the long term, despite the increase in catastrophic and systemic risk.

In the long-term, certain impacts forecast by LIFE ADA are the reduction of CO2 emissions by 1%, NH3 emissions by 2%, water consumption by 5% and energy consumption by 5%, with a 3% improvement in the resilience of people to floods and a 17% increase in the sustainable management of agricultural areas over the three years of the project.