On January 26, 2012 the Joint Programming Initiative “Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change (FACCE)” has launched a public consultation in order to gather views from stakeholders on the key priorities and areas for research to contribute to the goals of food security and sustainable agriculture in the context of climate change.

In its conclusions of October 14, 2010 the Council of the European Union has invited the Member States to develop a Strategic Research Agenda for the JPI “Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change (FACCE)” and to jointly implement this Strategic Research Agenda.

The FACCE JPI Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) has elaborated a Scientific Research Agenda which outlines the JPI’s most important research themes and planned actions. Together with foresight and mapping activities, the consultation results will feed into the development of a Strategic Research Agenda which is to be published in 2012. The Strategic research Agenda will establish medium to long term research needs and objectives in the fields of agriculture, food security and climate change.

20 countries, including Germany, are participating in FACCE JPI which was initiated by France and the United Kingdom.

The consultation is open to all interested stakeholders dealing with the JPI’s topics. This includes the scientific community, either individually, as consortia or as research performing organisations including universities; funding organisations including national Ministries; farmers and extension services, including farmers associations; the related private sector including SMEs and industry; Non-Governmental Organisations and civil society.

The consultation questionnaire addresses the following core-themes of FACCE JPI:
Core theme 1: Sustainable food security under climate change
Core theme 2: Environmentally sustainable growth and intensification of agriculture
Core theme 3: Assessing and reducing tradeoffs between food supply, biodiversity and ecosystem services
Core theme 4: Adaptation to climate change
Core theme 5: Mitigation of climate change

The consultation will be open from January 26, 2012 to March 3, 2012.

A summary of results of the consultation will be published on the FACCE – JPI website.