Climate change and food safety: effects of climate change on food safety across food systems

Proposals should contribute to all of the following aspects:

• Proposals must implement the 'multi-actor approach' and ensure adequate involvement of academia, research-technology organizations, food businesses and other relevant actors of the value chain.
• Anticipate, including through modelling, how climate change may affect food safety in Europe and in particular by increasing the potential for the emergence/re-emergence of new hazards and the changes in exposures and risks;
• Propose methods to monitor the impact of climate change on food safety across food systems and their main critical areas. Explore how climate change could impact risk assessment methods and understand how risk assessment methodologies may need to evolve to meet new climate changed related challenges;
• Analyse the effect of climate change (extreme temperatures, etc.) and its impact with respect to: existing food safety hazards throughout the entire food supply chain (from farm to fork), and risk factors including the appearance of (re)emerging hazards.
• European regions should participate as "demonstrators" areas facilitating research and innovation under different climate conditions;
• Proposals should include a dedicated task, appropriate resources and a plan on how they will collaborate with other projects funded under this topic or other topics such as the HORIZON-CL6-2021-BIODIV-01-11 and HORIZON-CL6-2021-FARM2FORK-01-16 and ensure synergies with relevant activities carried out under other initiatives such as the One Health European joint programme and the LIFE programme ("Strategic Integrated Projects") due to their regional and climate approach.
• Proposals should also foresee the involvement of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) as part of the future action once the project starts.

In addition proposals are encouraged to:

• Increase the use of big data and/or artificial intelligence to elucidate the complex interactions between climate change and food safety. Proposals are expected to develop models to understand these interactions experimented and analysed for their replication potential. Proposals might build on existing and new knowledge, data, and models exploiting the full potential of big data and/or artificial intelligence;
• Explore, map and propose funding synergies strategies among European, national and regional programmes and instruments under this scope in a long-term vision;
• Connect research and innovation activities in this topic with start-ups ecosystems.