Sustainability of agricultural production systems in a changing climate

It is widely accepted that our climate is changing due to increasing atmospheric concentrations of the 'greenhouse gases' and these changes may determine strong impacts on different economic sectors. In particular for agricultural systems, such a change may have significant impacts for crop yield, cattle breeding and their management practices. Accordingly, the sustainability of agricultural production system in the future scenarios is a main concern especially for policy-making purposes. So far global change impact assessment in agriculture concerned mainly the performance evaluation of a single part of the system whereas a 'holistic' approach was neglected. On these premises, the objective of this paper was to couple a comprehensive toolkit of methods to assess sustainability of farming system, to the outputs of a general circulation model (GCM) (Tmin, Tmax, Rainfall and Radiation) for a more comprehensive global change impact assessment in agriculture at local scale. In particular an ecological-economic optimisation model already validated, was run for the present and future scenario for an integrated assessment of conventional and organic dairy farming systems (CFS, OFS respectively) in Tuscany region (Italy).