Good practices and food quality production in the climate changes context

In the context of climate change, to be sustainable, any practice must be environmental friendly, to provide an adequate source of livelihood for those who decide to adopt it, and be cost-effective. At the same time, trade may be considered one of the most valuable adaptation instruments, as countries/regions adversely affected by climate change can mitigate these effects by relying more extensively on imported products. Against this background, the effect of adverse weather conditions may be more severe for GI products, and PDO products especially, than for any other agri-food product, as they can use only domestic (local) inputs and cannot rely on the use of intermediate inputs coming from outside the local production area. 
 

The operational plan involves:
1) to use the Carbon Footprint methodology, establishing whether the practices adopted are sustainable or need to be improved; 
2) to measure potential carbon sequestration, by considering the citrus scenario, a tree crops that by definition, if managed correctly, have an important capacity to absorb this element and store it in the soil;
3) to assess the adaptation capacity of Italian PDO producers vs. non-PDO producers to extreme weather events, by looking at the technical efficiency. 
4) to disentangle the impacts of weather and climate variability on the economic activity of Italian PDO and Non-PDO agrifood producers.
 

The strength of this proposal is twofold:
1. to measure the involved companies emissions in order to make them aware of the need to adopt sustainable practices designed for this purpose. By involving producers in the measurement of sequestration capacity, this action can generate credits on the voluntary carbon market for each ton of CO2-eq sequestered from the atmosphere;
2. to observe substantial heterogeneity with respect to technical efficiency between the two firm groups: PDO and Non-PDO firms. Since firms in the PDO group are under considerably higher distress we would expect those firms to utilize their inputs more efficiently compared to firms in the Non-PDO group.