Development of Resilient and Competitive Business Models for the Olive Sector

The growing exposure of the olive sector to the physical risks arising from climate change – such as water scarcity, soil degradation and the occurrence of extreme weather events – has reinforced the urgent need to integrate climate adaptation and mitigation practices into the agri-food sector’s business models.

The true potential of the Climate Smart Farming approach lies in a strategic pathway that focus on creating value, in which the adoption of sustainable practices contributes to efficiency gains, cost reductions, product differentiation and valorisation, and/or access to new markets and sources of funding, allowing the risks/opportunities of changing practices to be distributed across the value chain.

One of the major challenges of this integration is materialising the transition into concrete indicators that allow the impact to be weighed up. The 2nd Portuguese Community of Practice therefore aims to analyse which indicators are most relevant to the olive sector, attending to various frameworks, benchmarks and other relevant sources, allowing to materialise the changes made on the farm into concrete data.

In addition, the CoP also aims atexchanging knowledge and methods within the team, allowing competences in Climate Smart Farming to be built.