Environmental risk assessments cannot cover all conceivable risks. It is therefore necessary to translate broader policies such as sustainable development into specific protection goals with the overall aim of protecting biodiversity and maintaining ecosystem services.
Climate change constitutes a relevant driver of emerging risks. While a broad range of forward‐looking studies and reports examine the impact of climate change on food security, future challenges for food and feed safety, plant and animal health and nutritional quality are usually not investigated in depth.The CLimate change and Emerging risks for Food SAfety (CLEFSA) project has explored the possibility of: (a) using the specific driver, climate change, for long‐term anticipation of multiple emerging risks, using scenarios of climate change; (b) using crowdsourcing and text mining to collect a broad range of signals from a variety of information sources; (c) using a knowledge network of experts from international organisations; (d) designing a Multi‐Criteria Decision Analysis tool for characterising signals through a participatory process, in which expert knowledge is used to identify relevant issues from the vast and often incomplete information; (e) developing methodologies and indicators for the analysis of the information available, addressing uncertainty.Climate change and its implications for food safety demand complex scientific study, given the number and diversity of hazards to be considered, the large uncertainties involved and the interconnections between the different areas. The effects of climate change are characterised by a multidisciplinary nature (human–plant–animal health and environmental sciences) and go beyond the recognition of specific emerging risks. CLEFSA has identified numerous issues that are driven by climate change and that may affect food safety in Europe. Climate change has the potential of causing, enhancing or modifying the occurrence and intensity of some food‐borne diseases and the establishment of invasive alien species harmful to plant and animal health. It has an impact on the occurrence, intensity and toxicity of blooms of potentially toxic marine and freshwater algae and bacteria, on the dominance and persistence of various parasites, fungi, viruses, vectors and invasive species, harmful to plant and animal health. Climate change is likely to drive the (re)emergence of new hazards, increase the exposure or the susceptibility to known hazards and change the levels of micronutrients and macronutrients in food and feed items. By the very nature of the challenge, this list is inevitably incomplete, and undoubtedly unanticipated surprises await us in the future.
The European Parliament requested EFSA to develop a holistic risk assessment of multiple stressors in honey bees. To this end, a systems-based approach that is composed of two core components: a monitoring system and a modelling system are put forward with honey bees taken as a showcase. Key developments in the current scientific opinion (including systematic data collection from sentinel beehives and an agent-based simulation) have the potential to substantially contribute to future development of environmental risk assessments of multiple stressors at larger spatial and temporal scales. For the monitoring, sentinel hives would be placed across representative climatic zones and landscapes in the EU and connected to a platform for data storage and analysis. Data on bee health status, chemical residues and the immediate or broader landscape around the hives would be collected in a harmonised and standardised manner, and would be used to inform stakeholders, and the modelling system, ApisRAM, which simulates as accurately as possible a honey bee colony. ApisRAM would be calibrated and continuously updated with incoming monitoring data and emerging scientific knowledge from research. It will be a supportive tool for beekeeping, farming, research, risk assessment and risk management, and it will benefit the wider society. A societal outlook on the proposed approach is included and this was conducted with targeted social science research with 64 beekeepers from eight EU Member States and with members of the EU Bee Partnership. Gaps and opportunities are identified to further implement the approach. Conclusions and recommendations are made on a way forward, both for the application of the approach and its use in a broader context.
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