Climate Change and Agriculture in Europe: Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation Potential.

This paper will highlight some recent developments in Europe on impacts, adaptation and mitigation, based on current and future European programmes. The European Commission has recently started a Grand Challenge Programme on Food Security, Agriculture and Climate. Europe also wishes to play a constructive role in international impact modelling activities and the paper will come with suggestions of where European expertise can contribute – mainly in the availability of data, suggestions for important elements to be included in models and some new ideas regarding emission modelling. European adaptation studies in climate change and food security have focussed around the food system model and results from a study of the European food system will be presented, as will an international study of the food systems of three capital cities. The latter is particularly relevant given the fact that more than 50% of humans in the future will be city dwellers. A main conclusion is that as cities enlarge they sequester ever more areas of land but in a positively non-linear relationship to their population, as a result of the fact that land from areas in the world that have low yields is used to support consumption in the cities. Finally recent research on the role that cities and their hinterlands can have in regulating carbon emissions will be presented leading to what I have termed the net community exchange of greenhouse gases. This is defined as the difference between carbon emissions of greenhouse gases from the energy, industry and transport sectors and the balancing uptake of carbon into the green areas within and surrounding cities.