Overview of the project

Given that climate change and market globalization have a relevant impact on environment and agriculture, and that agriculture plays an important role on Trentino’s socio-economy, the project is composed by the following parts:

1. The development of the most suitable tool for the assessment of climate change impact on crop quality, plant protection and farm economy at the regional scale, specifically the development of a combined innovative EM/GIS/RS tool to provide science with an extremely versatile and powerful instrument to evaluate complex interactions and Trentino governmental agencies with the scientific basis for developing policy required to adapt to climate change.

2. The evaluation of crops, areas and farms that may be affected by climatic and global changes and if sustainability of crop production in Trentino will be "of concern".

3. The estimation of current vulnerability, to provide scenarios for the short term (up to 25 years) and to propose adaptation strategies.

4. The formulation of adaptation strategies taking into account the impact of climate change at the multitrophic level, the availability of existing tools and the development of innovative approaches based on the proposed scenarios.

5. The evaluation of economic consequences of the most likely factor to be affected in the short term by climate change (i.e. plant quality, pest and diseases and land use change) at the farm level and at the local system level.

6. The evaluation of the economic, environmental and social sustainability of the proposed strategies.

7. The identification of a set of policy instruments necessary to support the choice of the most sustainable strategies and the evaluation of social acceptability of these instruments. The output will therefore be the estimation of the magnitude of the climatic change impact on quality, pest and diseases, their effect on the environment and sustainable agriculture in Trentino, the exploration of tools and decisions that can be taken for the adaptation and consequent policies, the further development of exiting low impact tools to cope with effects of climatic change, the impact of strategies that can be applied at a socio-economical level considering a multi-risk evaluation, but also tools for impact assessment, sustainable development indicators and interplay between social, economic and ecological systems.

8. Last but not least the project aims to integrate existing expertise present in Trentino, to obtain a synergistic effect in a previously unexplored field of knowledge with dramatically increasing importance.