Feeding the future: The science of smart agriculture
Climate change constitutes imminent and lasting threats to food security. Smart farming helps agricultural processes in terms of resource optimization, controlling climate effects, and improving crop yields. An overview of the future of agriculture through climate sciences.
Agriculture, food security, food production, and even our food culture: all these sectors interact with the climate system, all of them contribute in some way to the changing climate and each of them is affected by climate change impacts.
Climate change’s negative impacts are already being felt, in the form of increasing temperatures, weather variability, shifting agroecosystem boundaries, invasive crops and pests, and more frequent extreme weather events. On farms, climate change is reducing crop yields, the nutritional quality of major cereals, and lowering livestock productivity.
The problem also works in reverse. Agriculture is a major part of the climate problem. It currently generates 19–29% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, consumes large amounts of natural resources, results in biodiversity loss and negative health impacts (due to both under- and over-nutrition) and does not allow fair economic returns and livelihoods for all actors, in particular for primary producers.
This is why, according to the EU “Farm to Fork” strategy, we must redesign our food systems. Substantial investments in adaptation are required to maintain current yields and achieve production and food quality increases to meet demand. New technologies and scientific discoveries, combined with increasing public awareness and demand for sustainable food, represent powerful tools in a changing world.
Smart agriculture is an integrated approach to managing landscapes — cropland, livestock, forests and fisheries involving the engagement of recent technologies, such as the Internet of Things, big data analysis, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and remote sensing aimed towards the optimization of production efficiency, along with reductions in the usage of water resources and energy with minimum environmental effects.
Among CMCC research, the SIMPLe project implemented strategies to reduce environmental impact and greenhouse gas emissions generated during the production cycle, modernise facilities, and address challenges that can reduce crop productivity, such as climate variability or the presence of pathogens. CMCC researchers provided the necessary agroclimatic indicator information for short and medium to long-term crop planning. They also conducted a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) analysis of the horticultural production process to estimate the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (carbon footprint) and water consumption of an intelligent eco-greenhouse compared to a traditional greenhouse. The project aims to present and provide the regional horticultural sector with an automated and highly efficient greenhouse production system, thanks to the use of sensors capable of monitoring the entire crop cycle, making it smart and sustainable.
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Climate Foresight is published by the CMCC Foundation , a research center that develops models and predictions to study the interaction between changes in the climate system and social, economic and environmental changes. Climate Foresight is an observatory on tomorrow, a digital magazine that collects ideas, interviews, articles, art performances, and multimedia to tell the stories of the future.
