An agrometeorological analysis of weather extremes supporting decisions for the agricultural policies in Italy

The future European Common Agricultural Policy foresees Strategic National Plans founded on recognised needs for intervention and indicators in order to select the more effective policy measures. The Strategic plans start from a "context analysis", describing the current-starting conditions. In support to the policy theme on climate change, the authors proposed a context analysis on the main agrometeorological variables and weather extreme events, both at national and subnational (NUTS1) level. This paper describes the methodological choices made and the results obtained, considering the contents required by the European Commission for the context analysis (agrometeorological indicators and an indicator of economic damages due to natural disasters). The data source chosen is ERA5, the climate reanalysis dataset produced within the Copernicus project. The study demonstrates the importance of cross-reading data on hazards and data on vulnerability for policy decisions. In particular this is shown for the resulted most impacting weather condition: the drought, measured through the SPEI index, affecting all the country. There are also other hazards frequent and quite impacting, first of all heavy rain. Further improvements of the analysis are programmed in terms of spatial scale, time scale (seasonal approach) and in terms of correlation hazard-vulnerability.