Agriculture and climate change: Life Ada kicks off
Life Ada project (Adaptation in Agriculture) kicked off with the objective of increasing resilience in the agricultural sector through the development of knowledge and planning tools for farmers with respect to climate change adaptation.
The main beneficiaries of the initiative, that counts on a total budget of nearly 2 million euro and is 50% funded by EU, are individual farmers and producer organisations in three value chains: dairy products (Parmigiano Reggiano), wine, fruit and vegetables.
UnipolSai will coordinate different partners such as Arpae Emilia-Romagna, Cia–Agricoltori Italiani, Crea Politiche e Bioeconomia, Festambiente, Legacoop Agroalimentare Nord Italia, Leithà and Emilia-Romagna Region. The first phase involves Emilia-Romagna and will be extended later on in Veneto, Tuscany and Lazio up to a total amount of 6.000 farmers in the selected regions and 15.000 farmers at a national level. In the long-term, the potential number of users of tools developed by the project in the 3 selected value chains is 242.000 farmers, representing around 1.140.000 workers and 2.6 million hectares of utilized agricultural area.
The project was officially presented last 13 November with a dedicated webinar with the participation of Pierluigi Stefanini (President of Unipol), Alessio Mammi (Councillor for Agriculture of Emilia-Romagna Region) e Dino Scanavino, (President of Cia–Italian Farmers). Life Ada will implement an innovative public-private partnership model between insurers, public administrations, scientific institutes, NGOs and producer organisations (POs).
Life ADA focuses on knowledge transfer about climate scenarios, risk management and adaptation measures to producers, in order to improve their ability to face current and future climate risks, to create appropriate and useful tools for the decision-making process and to put in place efficient adaptation strategies at farm and value chain levels. Insurance perspective will foster an innovative approach to build capacity on risk reduction: the objective is maintaining insurability of farmers in the long-term despite the increase of catastrophic and systemic risks.
Some of the expected impacts of the project are reduction by 1% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, 2% ammonia (NH3) emissions, 5% water consumption, 5% energy consumption, as well as a 3% improvement of resilience to flooding and 17% increase of agricultural areas' sustainable management.
Click to download the programme of the launch event (in Italian).
Click to watch the webinar recording (in Italian).