Climate stress testing the UK food supply chain using earth observation

The project will support stakeholders within the UK food supply chain to understand and assess their climate-related risks. The UK's 'just-in-time' supply chain model leaves the UK vulnerable to changes in food availability caused by climate change as well as other stressors, such as our departure from the European Union and the COVID-19 pandemic. The UK imports around half of its food from overseas, with the considerable majority of this coming from relatively few countries. Therefore changes in food availability in a few locations abroad will have a large effect on food availability here in the UK. As climate change will affect agricultural productivity abroad and in the UK, the points of the supply chain with the greatest vulnerability must be identified to ensure UK food security is not jeopardised.

As the UK food supply chain is global, understanding the threats requires a global assessment. Earth observation (EO) data is uniquely-placed to inform this, as it brings the advantages of high quality consistent assessment across political boundaries and repeatable monitoring. EO refers to the use of remote sensing technologies such as satellite sensors to study the Earth.

The UK EO industry has considerable relevant expertise, products and services, but they are struggling to reach potential users within the UK food supply chain. Through a placement at Space4Climate, a coordinated effort across government, industry and academia to promote UK EO capabilities, this project will undertake knowledge-broking between potential users of EO data for understanding climate risk and the suppliers of these products and services. This will include mapping user requirements to supplier capabilities and creating functional specification(s) for climate stress testing tool(s).

This work will contribute toward climate change adaptation by stimulating the development of UK commercial climate data services to help the organisations within the UK food supply chain better understand their exposure to climate-related risks. This project therefore has the capacity to create employment opportunities while also increasing the resilience of the UK to climate change, bringing societal and economic benefit.