Workshop:Current Challenges, Trends and Experiences for Enhancing Agriculture Value Chain Decisions under Uncertainty

Posted on September 27, 2019 Updated on April 28, 2020

On August 28^th, 2019, an International Workshop took place in the University of Liverpool Management School, involving participant from the H2020 RUC-APS project (www.ruc-aps.eu), which consider a unique University Of Liverpool Cross Faculty involvement such as: Faculty of Health & Life Sciences, Faculty of Science & Engineering and the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences. In addition to this, Industry partners from UK, coming from the Royal Agricultural Society of England with their Innovation for Agriculture representative and the Lucana Agriculture Agency from Italy also got involved in this event. Ms. Rachel Brockley, RUC-APS project Administrator and Dr. Jorge Hernandez, RUC-APS project Coordinator and Principal Investigator, organized this event.

In this occasion, the themes and subjects covered were as follows. In the first place, Dr. Jorge Hernandez, from the Management School and H2020 RUC-APS project coordinator, presented current overall progress for this project, within a special emphasis on the current IMPACT related work on which he is working on, plus other IMPACT cases that are being support by RUC-APS. After this, Prof. Martin Mortimer, from the Integrative Biology Institute, linked to the University of Liverpool Centre of Excellence of Sustainable Food Systemsand the RUC-APS WP9 leader, addressed the current developments and challenges to combine sustainable and intensive approaches in agriculture, specially once dealing with complex uncertainties in the environment. Following this presentation, Prof. Andy Morse, from the Geography and Planning department, presented current advances on Climate change analysis, and how the links between international research grant can support next agriculture generation issues yet to be discovered. Next, was the turn for two PhD students from the Risk Institute, Francis Baumont and Dominc Calleja, who presented their current work on Decision Support Tools for enhancing urban agritech in order to mitigate key risk and uncertainties in agriculture, which is linked to the RUC-APS WP7 led by the Risk Institute. Then, Dr. Arturo Caponero and Mr. Emanuele Scalcione, linked to the RUC-APS WP6, and who are coming from the Lucana Agriculture Agency from Italy, addressed the most key and up-to-date challenges and work done, in practice. Hence, the key aspect from their talk was about dealing with current and new pest and diseases in agriculture, which links to one of the key international IMPACT cases led by the RUC-APS consortium in making more efficient the current Integrated Pest Management processes. Finally, Ms. Deborah Crossan, coming from the Innovation for agriculture UK, presented the current British challenges on soil management and how current uncertainties in climate and regulations is generating the need for developing more impactful research in the field.

Tag cloud created by the workshop paticipants

This international event considered the participation of senior academics and researchers, as well as PhD students who are, currently, seeing in RUC-APS an opportunity to extend their research work, but also their networking possibilities for future research developments.