On the 2nd December 2020, the European Commission organised an event on ‘Climate services for a climate-resilient Europe’. In this event, the MED-GOLD and VISCA projects hosted the session “How can climate services support adaptation to climate change in agriculture?’
Climate services can deliver climate information and knowledge to a wide audience, including businesses, policy-makers and the general public. Therefore, they are expected to play a crucial role in achieving the ambitions of the European Green Deal for a carbon-neutral economy and a more informed and resilient society.
MED-GOLD hosted an online session on climate adaptation in agriculture as part of the full-day event organised by the European Commission, EASME Executive Agency and the Climateurope project, ‘Climate services for a climate-resilient Europe: Success stories, lessons learnt and remaining challenges’. The event, attended by 190 participants, built on the results of a portfolio of Horizon 2020 projects, which contribute to the implementation for the European Research and Innovation Roadmap on Climate Services.
More than 60 attendants joined the agriculture session, whose objectives included (i) showcasing the added value of climate services in agriculture, with a focus on the wine, olive oil and pasta industries, (ii) identifying barriers for the full deployment of climate services and ways to overcome them, and (iii) sharing lessons learnt and good practices.
The session was split in two parts, starting with a series of talks about the experiences from both projects, which was followed by a round table discussion with climate service providers, users and policy-makers, on challenges, gaps and opportunities for the exploitation and replication of climate services.
The gap between weather forecasts and longer-term climate projections was highlighted during the session, thus stressing the importance of having climate forecasts for the next months, seasons and years to adapt the agriculture sector to climate change.
The need to present climate services as a long-term investment to farmers was one of the topics that raised interest. In this sense, assessing the economic value of forecasts was key to make agriculture stakeholders aware of their relevance.
The MED-GOLD Dashboard, a web-based tool providing past climate data as well as future climate forecasts for the next months and long-term projections, was presented in the Adaptation Playground session through a short video illustrating various use cases.
See agenda of the session here.
Written by Marta Terrado (Barcelona Supercomputing Center)
