 Welcome to this joint meeting of FAO and four Italian research institutions and CNR, CREA, ENEA and ESPRA. And as you all aware, this particular technical meeting is part of the MOU between FAO and all the four Italian research institutions. That was renewed in 2021 and now this is currently ongoing. The second phase of the MOU is ongoing. And we had several meetings, bilateral meetings together with our technical divisions with all of you to stocktake what has been done in the past and what is going on now. And also we identified the priorities for the ongoing memorandum of understanding. In that context of joint MOU between FAO and Italian research institutions, this is the first physical meeting, physical technical meeting focusing on specific topic in which our colleagues in land and water division are taking the lead role. And they have a concrete joint activities with all of you. And the purpose of this particular joint meeting, the technical meeting on innovation for drought and agriculture is to share experiences. And also, what is going on to stocktake about the technical activities going on between our institutions jointly and also as part of our own mandate, our own individual organizational mandates, what is going on with respect to this particular topic. And what are the future priorities that we can enhance our collaboration, making sure that this is useful. And also, I contribute to the broader objective of addressing food insecurity issues, especially in the developing world, and also for the achievement of the SDG goals. I know that there are a lot of activities that are ongoing on this topic between our institutions with this brief introduction. Let us move ahead with the opening session of this particular meeting. And in this meeting, we have opening session that is between 930 and 1010 for about 40 minutes, and then followed by technical presentations by all the five institutions involved in this MOU. And then we will have a question and answer session for about 15 minutes for further clarification on the specific points. And then there will be a closing at 12 noon, focusing on the recommendations for our joint work in the future. This is the agenda and format of this meeting today. So with this brief introduction, I request Mr. Vincent Martin, Director Office of Innovation to give opening remarks for this meeting. Thank you. Thank you very much, Silver Raju. I would like to welcome you all to this to this meeting. We continue in this position, just come back to FAO three months ago. So, so it's, but it's great to be to be here with you and to understand the partnerships we're having with Italian institutions research institutions I think being based here in Italy, it's extremely important that we strengthen these links and we use the full potential of these expertise and the science we have here, we have here in Italy. To be totally honest, I was not even sure I was going to give some remarks this morning. So, so there will be a certain degree of improvisation, but, but nevertheless being at the, the head of the Office of Innovation. I think this discussion is really time and is really, really important. I'm glad to welcome you as institutions, Italian researcher institutions to see how we can do better in our collaboration. I'm very glad to welcome also our colleagues, I guess in the in the back of the room or from the technical divisions from, if I'm correct, and, and to see also how together with different technical division the Office of Innovation can really streamline innovation within your, your progress. I think that's really, that's also a great opportunity for me as a newcomer in this position to make this offer to the colleagues here to the institutions in Italy but also the colleagues within FAO and to think how can we work better together to make sure that innovation is at the heart of our work. It's something that is very important also for the, for our director general, as you, as you know, he has put innovation at the center of his mandate. Thanks to him, we now have an office of the chief scientist, and we have this piece of innovation that was created three years ago, approximately. And also, thanks to his leadership and the leadership of our chief scientist, we now have a science and innovation strategy, the first ever sense and innovation strategy of FAO that was launched in 2021. So that's really, that's really an innovation per se to have such an innovation, such a strategy and why do we have it. And also, to equal with the secretary general of the United Nations, as say during the last years, the uptake of sense and technology in our member countries is still extremely low. And at the same time, this is where we find the salvation, this is, we need sense and innovation to try to bring back the SDGs on track. This report in 2019, specifically on sense and innovation for the SDGs, which was called the future is now, and this report is quite alarming, but also gives us some direction on how can we better leverage sense and innovation to achieve our goals. So, everything put together shows that FAO is very, very engaged now in this, in this domain, and, and through this sense and innovation strategy while trying to identify what are the best solutions practices, newest technologies that we can leverage to address this issue. So today we're here to talk about the issue of drugs needless to say that the situation is, is deteriorating in many parts of the world. It's multifactorial by essence. It's a combination of extreme climate events of socio political crisis of socio economic crisis of conflicts. And when you put all these together, it's, it brings more people suffering from hunger, from food insecurity and my nutrition. If I'm correct, I think during the last years, these events have pushed 23 million people in poverty and in greater level of food insecurity, which is, which is daunting. And, and we know so that the agricultural sector is the one which is the most affected by this extreme weather, whether event. So the, I guess we all have a sense of urgency, urgency to find the solution to respond to what we are seeing these days. And we need to mobilize all the science and research we have these days to to resolve or try to resolve this problem. Two things I would like to say here for closing the first thing is, I very much look forward for the recommendation that will come out of this meeting. I really would like you to think of what we've done so far. I guess there is an element of capitalization on what we've done and stop taking on what we've done through this collaboration. But if we look at the future, how can we join our forces? What kind of innovation do you have in your research center that we can better leverage? At the same time from our side, how can we join forces across the different divisions who are working on drought to see how we can identify some key bottlenecks, prioritize, and then define some specific areas of work and collaboration. I mean, you all have in mind what you're doing in your laboratories and working on co-op tolerant varieties and drip irrigation, et cetera, et cetera. But here, of course, we can think also beyond that. We can think also how to leverage the power of artificial intelligence. How can we use maybe large language models for improving advisory services? So let's think of pushing the boundaries of innovation and science and see what is available today. What is coming next that we could use so that we can do a better job basically answering these very important challenges. So this is really what I wanted to say. So I'm very eager to hear from your recommendation of today's discussion. I've got this offer to the technical division saying you can rely on us or you can come to us to see how we can better partner so that we identify the best solution. I've got this proposal of pushing the boundaries and looking beyond what we already know, looking at what are the emerging technologies and innovation. You can see coming up and how we can leverage them to address these extremely complicated issues. And again, I would like to welcome you all and thank you very, very much for your participation and available for any questions or even for full of discussions we want to have in the future. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Vincent, for your inspiring words on how to integrate innovation in our work, especially at the same impact of drought and agriculture. Next, we will definitely provide you the recommendations comes out of this meeting and this will be integrated as part of our work plan for the future. Next, let me invite Mr. Piero Genovesi from ISPRA to provide the opening remarks. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for hosting us. It's really a pleasure to be here and also it's a pleasure to meet people in person because that helps exchanging ideas. So I think we all have been used to meet remotely in the past years, but I think meeting physically is always another value. And thank you also for your words. I think it's a very good call for trying to have a very focused discussion today and in the coming months of work of this cooperation. I know ISPRA joined later in the MOU, but we believe that this is really an important issue, this cooperation among the key research institutions working in Italy on innovation, agriculture and environmental protection that is our mandate. So ISPRA is the Institute for Environmental Protection and Research. And I think that this can help designing some of the ways for addressing these few challenges that we have ahead. Unfortunately, in Italy, our decision makers have seen recently how important and how urgent it is to address these problems that are not only, of course, a national challenge but are a global challenge. It's also important and this is what ISPRA will try to do in the future to combine the need for addressing the challenge of water stress but also the need for a better environmental protection, because this is definitely an urgent matter. So ISPRA took part in the negotiation for arriving to the UN Global Biodiversity Framework in Montreal last year, and we believe that putting together, keeping together the challenges of sustainable development and environmental protection and safe environment can help also the communities of the world to have a safe life, water, food and health. And I think that the message of the SDG that all these elements are together is really important. I apologize because in three quarters of an hour I have a meeting with the cabinet of the Minister of Agriculture, so I will need to leave just after my very brief remark but there are all the colleagues from ISPRA that will follow the discussion and will present some of the results. So I thank Ana Luisa, Stefano Mariani, Giovanni Braga that are part of a team working on this issue also with Martina Busettini. As I said in the beginning, I think the message you gave us to try to be concrete, to design, to write a work program, and to think of how to put together the skills that we all have for providing, I wouldn't say solutions but at least there are ways to go ahead, not only for finding ways to reduce the problems that the global community is facing, but also to monitor what's happening because we need to track progress. This is what we learned from the past, also from failures. One of the solid tools for monitoring progress is difficult to show to decision makers when we need to be more ambitious and when we need to change direction in our efforts. I really am really glad of this opportunity of exchange of ideas and I really believe that innovation in one of the key tools for improving agriculture and water management in the future. And we all know now that we need to have a sustainable future and I hope that this dialogue with among researchers, but also with an important role of FAO that has a key role globally to provide solutions for the communities that struggle with food safety and water safety is essential. So thank you again for this opportunity and I really wish the discussion of today brings some ideas how to improve the efforts that we can provide to you and to the global community. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Piero. And as you know, environment protection related aspects are integrated as part of the one of the major areas of cooperation, which focuses on biodiversity conservation as well as ecosystem quality. That's the one of the areas of work and we are really looking forward to strengthen this collaboration from this discussion. So next, let me invite Mr. Massimo Eneta, a good colleague and I have been contacting him almost on weekly basis, and he is very instrumental to strengthen this collaboration, not only between FAO and NIA and also between FAO and other research institutions. Thanks so much, Silva, and thanks for hosting this event. It's a very pleasure for me to be here and so we can see that the organization of the event come after a long period in which we work to a new program, the new program where we identified the seven different topics for our cooperation, for our collaboration between FAO and the Italian research institution. So, just something about the history of this collaboration because we signed our memorandum of understanding in 2015, and so the partnership promotes the implementation of activities, aiming at raising awareness, develop capacity and foster the exchange of knowledge in different areas such as agriculture, climate change, food quality, nutrition, sustainable food systems, value change, and development through a systemic approach to local innovation, land and water sustainable management, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem quality, also assessment of innovation in rural development programs. So all these aspects are strongly present in the framework of the NIA, Department of Sustainability, and are focused on innovation. For us, innovation on all these topics is very important for the development of this cooperation. And since 2013, the Barton Institutions collaborated in the organization and delivery of a series of events on topics connected to the sustainable development rules, such as advances and events, integrated pest management. I remember it was the first meeting that we organized here in FAO, also on healthy diets through sustainable food system and environmental sustainability and agriculture system in the Mediterranean, the international ear of pulses, including a focus on its nutritional and health benefits, and then prevention reduction of soil pollution and contamination, agroecology, water scarcity, access to safe, reliable and sustainable water benefits of the Mediterranean diet, and sustainable agri-food system, but also food loss and waste reduction. So, another important aspect of this collaboration was the development of a mechanism for young scientists from developing countries to treat with the Italian research institution and the implementation of study visits. During the period, 2008, 2020, the cooperation promoted the secondment of three visiting scientists to NIA from Burkina Faso, Republic of Congo and Camero, to work in the field of soil quality restoration and the macro-bion application for sustainable agri-food systems. And since 2019, NIA is involved with FAO in activities related to the One Planet Network under the Sustainable Food System program. In particular, the collaboration is on the project Sustainable Diets in the Contest of Sustainable Food Systems led by FAO and PUNEP and which NIA is one of the partners. So, as I said in 2022 to 2023, we have shared a new work program with the seven areas of cooperation, and today is the occasion to celebrate the World Day to combat drought and desertification with an event on innovation for drought and agriculture. So, NIA is involved in research and technological innovation on these topics to achieve sustainability and avoid economic and social crisis. For this reason, we are going to continue this collaboration focused on participatory tools, methods and approaches to include innovation in the agenda of sustainability. Thanks so much. Thank you, Massimo, for providing this very rich historical perspective of our collaboration and also outlining the importance of the seven areas of cooperation for this ongoing MOU. Thank you very much. Next, I would invite Giorgio Maduisci to provide the opening remarks on behalf of NIA now. Thank you. Thank you all and thank you for the common organization of these very important workshop on innovation and drought of agriculture. It's my pleasure to give all of you the welcome by the National Resource Council of Italy. That is the largest public research organization in Italy. And it's made up of seven departments. The department that is most involved in this memorandum understanding is the department on biology, agriculture and food sciences. And in this respect, it's dealing with all the research that are around the overall topic of food, agriculture and also forestry. And it's 900 researcher, researcher and technician working on this. And, and actually it's, it's nice that the different institute involved in the department are engaged in nearly 60 research project with developing countries, from the salary of Mediterranean, but, but not only and at least 25 of those projects are related to drought and agriculture issues on different perspective and I think it's, it's good that we have this common event here with all the Italian research institutions, because only by a multifunctional approach is possible to address in the proper way the relevant issue related to the increasing drought and the climate crisis that is impacting our agriculture. And I think this cooperation it's really relevant for that because the different expertizes and the different institution can provide different perspective and an overall global approach to address these in the sustainable development framework. And what I want to say is that also, this is really important, apart that is the memorandum and the safety between FAO and the Italian research institution but that is within FAO, because we can maybe bring innovation we can share our expertise we can do some capacity building but we have a lot to learn from what we can, what has been in the, in the years applied in other counties that maybe are also more impacted by by drought. We are not feeling this impact now also in Italy but surely in, in Africa and not only this impact it's really, it's really serious and actually, it is possible, it's actually sure that some of the solution that have been developed in the other counties can be brought together and in a way to deliver a sustainable food, food production. And, and I think it's really important in that sense that we are all working towards a open sharing of the result, particularly on these, let's say, live for supporting the activities like agriculture and now agriculture can be made more adapted and more and less subject to the impact of drought and global work. In that sense, it's also relevant that there are a lot of collaboration between the Institute and count and the countries in the, in the world the countries that are all under FAO. These are more than 150 farther to the project and I think we should build on that in a way that the sustainable development goals are more and more advanced in their implementation. Zero hunger, it's, it's really the base of all sustainable goals because without eating there is nothing else. So I think this is also really relevant that we are together here also actually as the first event of this new renovated memorandum understand. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Georgia for stressing the importance of knowledge sharing. And of course, this particular event is one such event to promote knowledge sharing, not only between CNR and FAO and also with other Italian research institutions and we are looking forward to continue this work. And now let me invite Mr. Filberto Altobelli from CREA to provide the opening remarks on the course of CREA. Thank you. Good morning everybody and thank you for hosting us in these important events that we are ugly too often. CREA is one of the main institutes, maybe the main institute of agriculture research and activities and we are very involved in all aspects of environmental issues in particular on the water sector. This is one aspect that we stress a lot during the years. But let me stress this aspect really to the agriculture water management issue that we are through during these years. At the end of the May, the long term drought that has affected Europe sure nothing about it, especially in Western Cemetery and Eastern areas. Indeed, a drought that can be tested back nearly two years persists in several parts of Southern West Europe. Also, May strains in some cases, even including as this year, have reduced, reduced accumulated short and medium term deaths. Above average, a rainfall in Italy has also been beneficial. What is it not being destructed as this year in the middle of Romania. Overware forecast for the coming months for seven or two in the July a center quarter European meteorological center most agreed in indicates a boom average value of all Europe. In Italy. These anomalies could be felt most over the north of the sector and part right now. So our alert is very. New challenge. Indeed, it should not be forgotten that in Italy the problem drove is absolutely requirements. The overheating trend in therefore, evident in Italy where the ranking on the office here so of the last two centuries concentrate in the last decade and includes 2014 2015 1819 and 22. Even 22. The first half of the year, ranked as the hostess here, ever in Italy with a temperature, even almost one degree above the historical average. This is a significant change. The nation along the peninsula was also practically with the 46% increase. So climate change has been accompanied by a clear trend toward super, super, super visualization. Especially a woman manifested by increase of frequent violence event sees or lengths short and dense precipitation and the rapid transition from sunshine and bad weather with a significant temperature swings. And create a work of the challenges this in this area conduct research on what the resource management in a cultural and combatting the certification with the full possible tools and methods, including nobody genetic ones. There are also many experience from the under the fall here in mall on this issue in recent years among the initiative should define be mentioned in the Italian suggestion of agri-metology in collaboration with prayer CNR. And in part with the WM original training center function here in Italy and with technical support of the file. And the water division as carry out the T edition on international bonds at school in agriculture meteorology with more sense on participation. The second edition in part of this to hear is a deal with a topic of agriculture meteorology for the system with water management in agricultural systems. The purpose of this course was to train and provide young research and professional with up to date knowledge on the most advanced method and technology applied to water management in a culture in the context of climate change. So we are very concentrated on this aim with our friends and colleagues here. Also, the second point I want stress for fairy and our colleagues in the frame in the work with the frame or or was I with a colleague is by colleague and model has on global frame more of water scarcity action, the Italian cooperation group was like that. Where there are all this institution, including power with the participation of water Academy lunch in the project through the technical guidance for appropriate design management of press rates irrigation distribution systems. This project with the carry out with a couple of the in couple of the will be at the case study area where this technical guide will be in the future. So in conclusion, I believe that the water application in cultural sex and then control the consumption of water source represent the important factor in the group and stabilization of a cultural productivity. Over the years, other ways, the growing interest in sustainable water management contribute to the guarantee a good quality for the action board for the next concept and market, generating the economic surplus needs by the rule of economics. Thank you so much. Thank you, Li Beto for the opening remarks and become a player. So this collaboration will benefit from your work on production as well as management also your engagement in was a related activities. So thank you very much. Five minutes before start of the introductory presentation. Let us start with the self introduction from that side, so that who we are and how we are connected with the MOU and what is the type of what we do. So let's start from there. Good morning to everyone. My name is Nicola Colonna from Menea, and I'm a senior researcher I'm an agronomist working in the part of Massimo Giannetta dealing with water issues. Good morning everyone. I'm Maria Bevivino from Menea. I'm head of the laboratory for sustainability of the system, and I'm microbiologist. Good morning everybody. My name is Gianfranco Diretto from Menea. I'm the head of the laboratory of biotechnology, and I am a biotechnologist. My name is Anna. I am responsible in the ISPRA that is the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research and responsible for the unit on global teams and agenda 2030. This is my focal point of MOU, and I represent also the scientific and technical correspondent of the UNCCB. And of course today my interest is also as represented this important convention where that we are celebrating. We celebrated on Saturday, but we are continuing to celebrate. Hi everybody. I'm Antonio Bonfante. I'm a senior researcher at CNR. I'm an hydroperidologist. I'm working with the modeling of soil plant atmosphere systems, experts in crop adaptation to climate change, and I head to the laboratory to support precision agriculture for this reason I'm here today. Good morning to everyone. I'm Massimiliano Pascui from CNR. I'm a physicist. I'm working in the observatory for droughts and seasonal forecast at CNR. Thank you very much. Good morning, Vieri Tarciani, Institute for Bioeconomy of the National Research Council. I did my research, principally with the climate services for agriculture in developing countries, mainly sub-Saharan Africa. Thanks. My name is Claudia Fontana. I work in CREA. I am a colleague for Alto Velli Piriverto, and my job is for agriculture and erosion problem in agriculture. I'm Sylvia Socciarelli for CREA Researcher. Good morning. I am Andrea Vizca. I am a researcher at NEO and I work with the Dr. Ruiuino, and I am a biotechologist, especially in molecular biology. Good morning, everyone. I'm Luciana Di Gregorio. I'm a researcher at NEO in the Agri-Food Quality Safety Lab with Ana Maria Bevivino and Massimo Yanetta, a biologist. Good morning all. Federico Sbarra, PhD student in NEO and UNITO. I'm working on soil microbiome and extending my knowledge to soil in general. So nice to meet you all. Good morning, everybody. I'm Federica Denaglia and I'm a technologist at the Department of Biology, Agriculture and Food Science of the CNR, and I support the management of the Memorandum of Understanding. Good morning. I'm Egana Di Paola. I'm a researcher at the CNR Institute for Bioeconomy. I deal with agrometology, modeling, climate change, and I'm a staff member of the drought observatory with my colleagues Massimiliano Pasqui and Moldi Giuseppe. Thank you. Moldi Giuseppe is me. I'm also from Institute of Bioeconomy. I'm a statistical climatologist. Hello, I'm Alessandro Delacuila from NEO. I'm the head of climate modeling and impact laboratory and I am a physicist and climatologist and I work on climate models and the climate service. Hello, everybody. I'm Ambrita Prisanti. I'm a researcher in the agro-biotechnology and agro-east industry division in the laboratory of biotechnology. Good morning. I'm Chiara Nobili. I'm a chemist and I'm working in Aenea in Agri-Hood Quality and Safety Laboratory and I am also the leader of the food safety and food waste and loss within the issues platform that is the Italian circular economy to take over the platform. Good morning. I'm Antonina Delfiore. I'm a food technologist and researcher at Aenea Food Quality and Safety Laboratory. Good morning. I'm Chiara Viscini. I'm a chemist. I'm a researcher and I am an expert to enhance and maintain the biodiversity in the agro-system. And I have the same experience on the effect of the climate change of Agri-Hood. Hello. Good morning all and sorry for my delay. My name is Massimo Canalito. I'm an agronomist and food technologist of Agri-Cultura Vita, that is the training and research center of the national Italian configuration of farmers. And I'm representing two projects you weigh, dedicated to how to cope with the climate change by water management and the other one is for that is focused on digital technologies that clean climate change. Thank you. Good morning Vera Berger, senior land and water officer leading the land team and the land and water division. Good morning. I'm Silvia Lisciani, researcher at Crea Center for Food and Nutrition. I work in the field of the food composition and I am a focal point for the MOU in the area of food and nutrition quality. Good morning. My name is Maria. I am an economist and I am working in the land and water division here in the field. Thank you. Good morning Maria Berger. I'm an irrigation engineer and I'm engaged in the irrigation project at the end of the division. Thanks. Good morning everyone. My name is Stefania Giusti. I'm a program officer working here at FAO together with other colleagues from the land and water division and I'm part of the agricultural water management team. Thank you. Good morning everybody. Olivia Pizer, also land and water division working in particular on the water data team and on a project that uses remote sensing information to monitor water productivity in agriculture. Nice to be. Hello. Good morning. Virginie Gillay, land and water officer, same team, water data here in FAO. Good morning. I am Jepa Hogevein and I'm a hydrologist at the land and water division. Good morning everybody. My name is Paola Piore. I'm head of the unit of institutional and international relations at Grail, a part of the memorandum on the semi and also focal point for the memorandum. Good morning everyone. Michela Marinelli, land and water division, environmental engineer, and I'm working in the integrated monitoring initiative for SDG6. And in this framework, I had the pleasure to collaborate with ISPRA last year for the disaggregation of the level of water stress SDG642 by river basin. Thank you. Good morning. I'm Federica Colucci. I'm an agronomist. I work at the NEA and I'm involved in ISPRA at the memorandum with cross activities. Thank you. Good morning. I'm Mitzalinti Maria Donati. I'm a PhD student in landscape and environment in the La Sapienza University of Rome, and now I'm collaborating with Filibert Altobelli in the Capo Verdecai study. Good morning everyone. My name is Marica Ferrari, and I work at the Grail. I'm a biologist and with a PhD in nutrition and physiology. I'm involved in the field of food consumption model in particular to develop sustainable dietary patterns starting from food consumption, actually food consumption. I'm responsible of sustainable chapter in the Italian food basic dietary guidelines. Good morning everybody. I am Giovanni Braca. I work in ISPRA. I am an hydraulic engineer and hydrologist, and now we are on our research is about water balance at national level. Hello everybody. My name is Stefano Mariani from ISPRA. I'm a mathematician, and I work on hydro-metrological streams and water resources. And my, I'm the focal point, the national focal point in the European ADOC task group on what discussing drought for in the framework of water framework directive. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Selvaraj Ramasamy. I'm senior agricultural officer working with the Office of Innovation, working with the Subvention Martin. I'm a CEO of VocalMind for the MOU between FAO and the Italian research institutes together with the Julia and Leonardo from our partnership division. And of course, this particular event is technically led by our colleagues in land and water. We are just facilitating from our side. So I thank our land and water colleagues for their active participation and also taking forward the program of work on drought and agriculture. Thank you. My name is Chiara Lizzi, and I'm a biologist working at ENEA in soil microbiology. We have a team of communication specialists for the Office of Innovation, most of you know me, and I give support once the project is set to be done. I'm very glad to make it. Thank you. Sorry. Yeah. Okay, thanks. In the name of our colleagues, Julia, because she has been so helpful in this period that we are to support our cooperation and water. Really, you know that it's a really, it's a real feeling that I will express the name of the CNR, CREA, and ENEA, and myself as well. Thanks, Julia. Thank you so much for. Yes, yes. Yeah. Thank you so much. And with this, we thank all of our institutional focal points for giving us the inspiring opening remarks for this event. So thank you so much all the focal points. So let's move on to the technical presentation, which is introduction to the event by Mr. John Paolo Cesaretti, coordinator of the ASVAS Working Group for goal two of the 2030 agenda, Naples University. Good morning. All people that participate with this very interesting convention. First of all, I want to thank Massimo Giannetti, because invited me. He is a very old good friend of mine from time and from the University of Naples. So I am very glad to see to stay here and just I want to remember you. I am an economist, so I am not a technologist. So my approach to the presentation will be a little bit different for what maybe you are acquainted to. I gave this title. First of all, I have me as a representative of ASVAS. ASVAS is the Italian institution that promoting sustainable development in Italy. The co-coordinator with Professor Vangelo Riccaboni for goal two. So I gave this title towards the new food frontier innovation for droughts and agriculture. This title combined three keywords. The first is goal two of agenda 2030. The second is climate change and droughts. And the third is innovation. Innovation that together with public policies and social responsibility are the responsible to improve goal two and as well as other 16 goals to move towards sustainable development. The thesis that I want to support here is that agenda 2030 of the United Nations can be seen as a lever to empower society towards sustainable development. But now we have to confront with drought and we are asking if and how drought can make can be a risk to reach goal two as well sustainable development strategy of the United Nations. But in this we are at FAO. So another important thing to remember is that drought is put at risk just the improved countries of the world. They are strongly dependent from agriculture. So the demand that we have to sustain here is which are the relationship between droughts and what I call the new food frontier that now I will explain you. What I mean for new food frontier. As you know, goal two is divided in four parts, ending world hunger, reaching food safety, improving nutrition and promoting sustainable agriculture. Well, I, I say that this means, lastly, that we have, we have to have the capacity to connect the new right to food with sustainability or well being. Why I say that we have a new right to food, because usually in our society, we have an segmented approach to food, food access, food quality, food proximity and food leisure. What we have to do is to have a not segmented approach to write to food. So in this way I call a new right to food. We have to combine and we have to see how the new right of food can be combined. It must be connected with the sustainable development. That means sustainable development in now in 2011, the OECD with this document how is life presented this new this document where the crucial point was demonstrating that the sustainable sustainability well being depends upon the capacity of preserving the full capital stock, human capital, social capital, economic capital and natural capital. So the to move towards sustainable development, we have the, we must have the capacity to preserve the capital stocks. So the new frontier of food means the capacity of connecting the new right to food to preserving capital stocks. Now if you look at the drought, which are the main results, the main efforts. Of course, we have a drop in production rates. This means rising food prices. And this means a worsening of non integrity approach to well being in affluent countries. In other words, we have the problem that up to now, we still have this segmented approach, but dropping production, a rising prices. This will worsen this kind of approach in in Polish areas, famine, food scarcity and migration. And lastly, the drought affect to the ability of this country to develop from an economic and social point of view because they are many, very much based on agriculture. So we have to the result that the drought can put at risk the outcome to reach sustainable development and increase the distance from new food frontier. But we have to see this problem from two different point of view, which are main responsible for global warming, and which are the, the countries that will be affected more from the results. You know, the ecological footprint better than I do. You know the EC or to a mission. And if you look at these two maps, you can see that is easily to see that developed countries are the main responsible of these results. On the other side, we have many asymmetries, the dealing with the impact of drought. The first is that, if you look at this map, the global rigidity hit mainly in Polish countries. Then we have to look at another problem. In 2015, the, what we expected in the dynamic of the population, it is expected that we pass from 7 million, billions of people to 10 billions. But this is a different trend in different areas of the world. And again, if you look at this map, poor countries will be main hit from this kind of dynamic. So, on one side, you have developed country responsible for drought climate change and drought. And on the other side, what will be the effect on this poor country. But there is another asymmetries in the reaction capacity of these countries, because the investment in research and development is much less in these countries, and then also the investment in human capital is much less. So this is the result. On one side developed country hit on drought of global warming and the other side, other are the victim, we can say. So, in this scenario, we have to ask, which is the role of innovation to favor to move from now, the present situation to towards the new food frontier. So we have to look at the problem from three point of view methodology objectives and strategies. And we have, there is the necessity for an integrated approach to innovation. And this must be based on international cooperation that hopefully hopeful. I believe that could concrete in global interactive platform where all innovation can be gathered and ready to give made to available to all countries in the world. Each are the objectives of innovation activity. Because what we said before, rich countries, north of the world, south of the world. We, the first objective that we have to reach is we have to fight, we need innovation to fight global warming. On the other side, we need innovation to produce for drought, for produce food in drought condition, and ultimately, we need innovation to empower society to access innovation. These are the three objectives. We have the strategy to go to this direction. So, if we believe, as we will see now that decision models are the main responsible of the global warming, we have to shift paradigm to mitigate the effort of climate change. And we need new technology to adapt agriculture, and we need innovation in educational frameworks, so to lead to reach the result to have a level of innovation to empower food for sustainability. What I mean, we don't have to look at the problem of food as food, we have to look at the problems of food for sustainability, food for well being sustainability. So, which are the implementation of these strategies. Well, if you look at this scheme, just I scratch the problem. We see that the main responsible are actual the present decision model. We have a globalization, we have a globalization I call variable geometry. We have territorial government that acts in some way. We have supporting sector so research institute that's not not always going the right direction to help these countries. And also we have the no profit sector that they do not actually the, the, the just the good advocacy to push society in the right direction. So, the result is that production consumption model governance on the full capital stock. We have this result, weakening the carbon sinks greenhouse gas emission and weak resilience strategy so we have the global warming, but this global warming as the effect to hit on the full capital stock. So, put at risk the sustainability or well being in general, and in particular the, the, well, the possibility to go to solve the problem or go to. So, they hit on availability on quality proximity and peculiarity. And what we mean then for paradigm shift. This means that the innovation has helping improving availability quality proximity and peculiarity for capital stocks. Then innovation has to help to find new products, new processes to minimize negative externalities and innovation has to help to find new action, new resilience strategy to minimize these externalities. So, which is the general framework is the pierce turner model pierce turner model that they put forward in 1990. In this model we can see we modify this model that supporting sector so innovation as to the very responsible duty to hit to help capital stock production models consumption model to reach the result that we have discussed before. So, this is for the shift of paradigm, but what innovation has to do for from a technical and economic point of view, producing necessary food stocks in condition of water shortage. For example, precision agriculture and bio technologies. But this is not sufficient. And for what we said about the in the asymmetry of developing countries in investment in research and development but in particular investing in human capital. So, the necessity to put forward to find a new figure, the innovation facilitator, which is the aim of this innovation facilitator to transfer this innovation, we need a new professional profile that is able to advocate society, and advice society to do this, we need that educational institution must offer knowledge and skill for the institutionalization of innovation facilitator. So, what we how we can conclude that agenda 2030 goal to climate change are the three problem that innovation institution has to solve mitigating global warming, combining right to food with well being sustainability. Adapting food production to draw and support the impoverished areas for access to innovation. These are some reflection that I offer to you for your. Thank you very much. Thank you, Professor Cesaretti. Sorry, but the separation give me the rule of chair of this. And so I think that we have a lot of message to take home from the presentation for such as a ready. And so the now we have a step on the justice for the first team on a new solution for irrigation to optimize the management of water resources. Director of the division power land and water. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. And good morning. Again, everyone. Also to colleagues who are attending online today's this event. So as I was saying before my name is the funny address the program officer of the agricultural water management team of the land and water division of FAO. And today I'm here to illustrate you the recently launched FAO drought portal and share some of FAO's work on this topic. And so the land and water division is the responsible technical unit to coordinate FAO drought related activities, and my team coordinated by senior officer my her salmon has developed the FAO drought portal as a knowledge sharing hub to support countries and stakeholders in announcing resilience in agriculture and improving food security. So the project is also part of a Jeff on the project in which we collaborate as a fail without the global partners like the UNCCD WMO and others. The main idea behind the portal is to share the extensive experience of FAO on integrated drought management or IDM as we often call it with a global audience that may not be fully aware of tools, practices and ongoing initiatives for drought and agriculture. Such extensive experiences often scattered among field applications and sectoral actions, we moved along two directions. On one side, we collated all of FAO develop tools for IDM in agriculture. And on the other, we gave access to FAO project database for the consultation of FAO activities on drought and agriculture. The portal is designed essentially to respond to four key objectives. The first one evidently is to share knowledge, not only of FAO as individual agency but also of similar platforms of partner entities, like for instance the drought toolbox by UNCCD and others. The portal is also built to contribute to both improve resilience and drought preparedness and to respond to emergency by providing access to tested tools and approaches for IDM. Last but not least, the portal serves as a tracker for drought financing. This is actually a newly added function which is still very strategic and I will illustrate it later in more details although it must be said is still in the beta version in the portal. So the objective of enhancing resilience is addressed by providing resources along the three pillars of IDM established since 2013 by the global community as the three main pathways of preparedness. You may be familiar with them already. Under these page and sub pages you can thus find items cluster as early warning systems and monitoring vulnerability and impact assessment and response and mitigation. The key message we always highlight as FAO is the need to shift from a reactive and crisis based to a proactive and risk based approach in drought management. This section of the portal responds exactly to this call and provides a wealth of knowledge resources to improve livelihoods resilience according to the three pillars of IDM. So what kind of products can you find in the portal and how can it support you in your daily work in drought management as we hope. The main categories you will come across are listed here and they are essentially of three kinds, FAO projects, FAO tool kits and FAO success stories. As projects we included in the portal the massive project database of FAO more than 2000 records addressing drought. Projects are aggregated by pillar and summarized with activities practices lessons learned and other valuable indicators. This database I would like to highlight this this database is the repository of over 20 years of FAO projects that so far were not accessible to a global audience and can now be consulted through the portal. In the tool kits category, you can find listed and directly accessible the software web application and digital solutions developed at FAO to manage drought in agriculture, including vapor which is a tool developed by my colleagues from the data team here. Again, all of these tools are categorized by pillars. Finally, the success story category of products displays any relevant field operation and on the ground action performed by FAO to support drought resilience of communities worldwide. Moving ahead, the portal showcases FAO's work in emergency situations. As part of its mandate the organization supports drought from countries and rural communities affected by drought events through the provision of rapid response intervention and the application of mitigation plans. The page here in the portal gives access to details of a few projects which can be filtered by different categories and location. The portal collects knowledge resources also for emergency response actions, practitioners and stakeholders can navigate to review practices applied by FAO in foster context and identify solutions that may apply to their cases. The map shows location of FAO ongoing and past operations with links to detailed information. Items and products under this section include crisis driven responsive actions and tool kits for post disaster management. Field experiences to respond in emergency context are illustrated through project best practices and results from lessons learned. Responsive approaches are outlined as part of the global FAO approach to drought emergency and can be thoroughly reviewed by clicking on the pins on the map where you can find the exact location of the intervention. In addition to giving access to FAO project database for drought preparedness and drought emergency as illustrated so far. The portal also contributes to global knowledge on IDM and shares contents to enable the implementation of relevant policies under the section policy to action, and to facilitate peer to peer learning under the learning section. The objective once more is to open up learning opportunities for all and provide in a one stop shop, all of FAO and not only FAO learning materials related to all dimension of management. So starting from the learning tab, the different categories of products can be found for knowledge sharing that go from the learning courses to events, being them either global or country actions, as well as reference publication. The first category of products, the e learning courses for self training are developed by FAO research partners. The courses are self paced, and anyone can directly link on them and follow the courses at any time. It is also present a link to the website of the Italy funded building forward better initiative that Mr Alto Belly knows very well, where additional training material for IDM were developed. In the portal more over FAO events are included and present global and country level meetings workshops and high level engagements to know more about FAO activities. Under publication, a number of technical and outreach products are presented, whether related to events or a standalone digital materials. Emily. The portal, it needs to be mentioned, has been designed also to respond to the mandate of the UN CCD cop 15, which call for the translation of drug policy interaction. FAO then embarked in a broad consultative process still ongoing to identify relevant indicators to monitor progress towards the establishment of drug resilient systems. The resulting framework will cluster these indicators into three categories, natural resources and ecosystems food production systems and economic economy and livelihoods for the monitoring and impact assessment of interventions on environment societies and economies. I would say critical section of the portal looks into the financial component of drug management, another important consideration of UN CCD cop 15. It should be mentioned that existing statistical tools for the financial analysis of investment, generally refer to broader climate finance and compassing drought investments. So the drought finance tracker is the first analytical tool to examine trends of investment and financial commitments purely related to drought. The tracker is built on the OECD database of official development assistant programs and present statistics on deployed investment and financial allocation by different indicators. The ultimate objective of the tracker is to support decision makers and donor partners in the definition of their resource mobilization strategies for improve drought management. So here we present a short video of the tracker, which as I mentioned before is still in the beta version so I will briefly demonstrated. In the statistics tabs financial data are included for drought related project. The data set, as you can see is global and can be filtered by region, country, year, sector, gender objectives and financial instrument. Results can then be saved and downloaded in PDF and Excel format. And as I said that you can find in this portal statistics related to drought development finance for the last 20 years from 2000 to 2020. So, moving ahead. The overview tab provides key statistics visualized as graphics. Hence, easily readable at a glance. Visualization helps to provide to track drought finance, according to major parameters, and we noted it to be a good reality check to compare statistics against what is happening on the ground about drought investment. It displays critical information on drought financing by sector, socio economic components, and so on. The explore more tab is a complimentary section of the tracker for more ones and insightful analysis of drought financial flows. The last step of the tracker is the analysis one, which presents readily made statistic. In this case, this is not an interactive page. And is based on and based on filters as the previous one, because the idea here is to provide key information that should reach decision makers directly. The scope is to better understand the issues that need to be specifically tackle and summarize crucial messages for more effective intervention. In synthesis, I hope I managed to illustrate the main scope of this tool, which we intend to officially launch in the coming weeks. So this was just a preview, but I hope I really managed to gain some interest and I invite you to visit the portal and and see more about the financial tool. I don't know if we have the time we also prepare a short video demonstration of the drought portal so I will briefly go through it, but just to summarize what I've been saying before so on the homepage. As mentioned, you can see this is a Jeff on the project and the portal comes with the collaboration with Jeff and other global partners. The success stories and also on the main page are indicated as global fio initiatives. Under the collaboration here as well mentioned the trial toolbox it directly links to the UNCCD drought toolbox. Under the highlights that you can click on the pins and go directly to the page where more information are displayed on the interventions on the ground. I'm going ahead under the preparedness section of the project we included toolkits projects and resources according to the three pillars of integrated drought management. And you can find here the toolkits as I mentioned here is the list of the filtering system where you can go through the results of the fio entire database of projects, and you can filter by either keywords, or by location if you are interested to see here is just a short demonstration of how the filtering system works so if you click on if you select Ethiopia you will find all of fio projects, of course on drought, carried out in Ethiopia with key indicators and summarized information again. This was a database that up until the launching of the portal was only available to fio staff and was not open to global audience but we really thought it is a very useful it can be very useful to anyone to reach these resources and see, not only what fio does but also in partnership with different institutes and other global partners working on on drought and emergency and preparedness for cases. I think I will not show you the rest of the video but I'd rather go ahead and conclude this. As you can see here, you will include the QR codes so if you want you are free also to take a pictures of the codes if you are interested to see the portal and also the building for we're better initiative which is an initiative sponsored by the Italian corporation where we also included e courses and learning materials on drought management. And with this I would like to conclude and thank you all for the attention. Thank you. Thank you stephania for introducing fio products and services. Thank you so much. Now let's move on to the team to that's the biotechnologies for the biotechnologies for the improvement of performance and the water stress conditions. Gianfranco, director, head of the biotechnology laboratory biotechnology and agro industry division in India. Okay, again, good morning everybody. I'm going to to present to the all the activities that we are running at an air and in the frame of the biotechnology applies to the mitigation of water stress conditions. Just briefly, as mentioned before, I'm the head of the laboratory. We have this kind of nomenclature, which is referred to, let's say units for biotechnology. And we cover in the in the frame of the biotechnologies we cover all the different colors of the biotechnology since we have activities in the in the field of the agro food production the so called the green biotech, then for the pharmaceutical sector biotech and also for a series of activities on nanotechnologies for the gold biotech. And we are quite the vote to, to have a series of facilities for harmic sciences that we applied to different research activities as for instance in the in the frame of the water stress studies. Okay, so we have a briefly facilities for flow cytometry we have. Okay, we, we have a skills and facilities for different kind of omics in the in the field of genomics transmit omics and metagenomics to generate a series of massive data that has to be analyzed and by through different informatics approach and we have facilities for metabolomics, either for bulk that means to analyze by destroying a specific sample all the list of compounds. That can be found in a specific sample or also by special metabolomics in order to detect by in situ analysis the presence and the accumulation of a specific metabolites. Okay, so briefly, we are talking about drought and water stress. effects on on plant. Our perspective is especially focus on the plant metabolism. And it has to to say very briefly that of course, the drought and in general all the different water stress conditions they exert a very deep alteration of a plant metabolism. I'm not going to much into the detail but the the the massive extent of alteration is hitting either primary and secondary metabolism with the plant cell that is trying to facing the effect of the water stress condition in order to mitigate the negative impact. And so, here I included in this slide that our approach. So basically we are, we are using three different approaches so one that is based on a elicitation and primary and priming. The other one that's trying to exploit the genetic diversity, and then the third one is genetic engineering so I'm going to give you a few example of the ongoing activities that we are doing for all the different approaches but overall, the objective is try to to to force the plant cell and the overall plant to better face and respond to the water stress condition. And so basically what we are doing is trying to modulate the plant metabolism in order to achieve a idiot types and in general to to obtained plants that can better respond to the water stress condition while keeping a quite good level in terms of nutritional status and so for food quality. Okay, just a few examples that the first approach is the elicitation of priming. We are doing these activities in collaboration with other issues and national levels like the University of Perugia University of Naples. The idea is just to use the selenium that can promote the the better tolerance of plants towards a salt and water stress condition. We have done a series of activities in this perspective on Maze. We published the first paper just to find the better condition in which selenium can promote the water stress resistance as well with at the same time the achievement of products that can have a good balance in terms of nutritional status and we obtained plants that better face the water stress while having also an increase in molecules, nutritional molecules like phenylpropanoids and carotenoids. We are also working in the same field but changing a crop now we are working on rapeseed in order to investigate again the effect of selenium and the salt stress on the transgenerational level in order to combine metabolite information and epigenetic involvement in the acquired tolerance of these plants. On the other topic we are working on the application of a microorganism like trichoderma in the case of tomato, we did quite a lot of work showing that trichoderma can prime the resistance to the tomato to different stressors. We started with biotic stressors to be honest but also considering other studies that have been done in the frame of biotic stress like water stress we are also working in this field. The second approach is to exploit the availability of a quite good genetic diversity so what we do is to apply the so called association mapping program. So briefly the idea is that we will use a quite large genetic diversity panel that can be composed by a collection or a population in which we have interagress traits of interest. We start with a massive activity of phenotyping, metabolomics and other approaches of omics in order then to perform bioinformatic analysis to identify genetic materials that can be characterized by improved traits for instance for water stress responses and then to identify candidate genes for that trait. So we have done this activity on several species, these activities have been the object of a series of European funded project, but what we were able to achieve for instance by through the these activities was the development of varieties of tomato for instance, which were characterized by improved water stress tolerance, as well also a longer shelf life in terms of their very end, even more interest also varieties that were able to produce with an increased level of pigments like flamonoids and carotonoids and also more ABA. But basically the two approaches that have been described have been also merged in a series of activities that we are running in a tight cooperation with the Agri-Food Sustainability Quality and Safety Laboratory which is led by Anna Maria Bevino which is here. And in the frame of these activities, the idea is to combine the genetic diversity and the application of a series of microbes, bacteria, fungi, and so on. And so on or in combination by through the constitution of microbial consortia in order to promote a better response of plants towards a specific stress of like in the case of for instance in the case of the today event for water stress and drought. Okay, but we are also in approach three, we are using genetic engineering. Of course I have to remark we are dealing with classical transgenics and the GMO products but using this system is fundamental to understand the modification that can occur. And so this material can provide very useful and powerful information and knowledge that can be then applied and I will be back to the approach to advanced breeding products. So since, as mentioned before, we were dealing with the ABA that was over accumulated in a varieties showing increased tolerance to water stress as well, longer shelf life at very level. And the ABA is producing the frame of the carotenoid metabolism. What we did though we we produce a series of lines that that had increased carotenoid so from a nutritional point of view. And a trait of interest as well a BA and we were able. Sorry. We were able again to achieve lines that were characterized by increased tolerance to water stress, as well also a longer shelf life, which is an interesting point of view from an economical and commercial aspect. The last point is again in the approach three is to take advantage of the modern technologies of gene editing in order to improve the again genetic level. Some traits like water stress in and generate novel idea. Again, carotenoid metabolism but in this case we are dealing with molecules that are involved in the carotenoid catabolism we have already spoken about a BA the abyssal acid, but there are so many additional molecules that can generate very interesting activities in the perspective of of water stress. And basically we are now working on stravolactin zaxenon beta cyclocetrol in the in the tomato as a first model system, either at the root and again vegetative part and fluid levels in order to obtain the novel idiot types that might combine water stress tolerance and fluid quality. Okay, so just in in conclusion, we have different activities in which we take advantage of omics sciences to face and to improve the tolerance to the stress of different crops of interest. And we show that we are working on three approaches that the first one is using elicitors or micro organism that can prime the defense of the crops. The the other one, the other approach are based on the genetic intervention that can occur either at advanced reading level or by using genetic engineering and we now a series of lines that have been produced by gene editing that we will we will just use to evaluate their response to water stress. And the idea is just to generate novel idiot types that can combine a series of traits of interest. Thank you. Thank you, John Franco for a very interesting presentation focusing on the genetic engineering and biotechnologies in addressing water stress. And just to give an information about fios work on this fio has published an issue paper last year on genetic gene editing and I could put systems and covering the role of gene editing in addressing the food insecurity related issues and also other crop improvement related aspects. We have also published a document which focuses on the low tech biotechnologies that was published in 2013, and that is being revised and updated, and it will be published soon this year, which focuses on the biotechnology application in smallholder agriculture, including mostly focusing on the low tech biotechnologies. So thank you very much and we will save that information as well to you so that we will have a further discussion on this topic and we will also connect to other colleagues working on biotechnologies in different divisions, especially plant production and protection and also FAO joint center in Vienna FAO IA joint center in Vienna, forestry and fisheries. Thank you so much. And let's move on to the theme three, which focuses on routes water stress water availability current situation and what to expect in the future. Thank you to climate change and human pressures, and we invite Martina. Giovanni Embraca and Stefano Mariani from ISPRA to make a presentation on the topic. Today we have Stefano Mariani presenting the overview of this group of people working on this. Thank you for the introduction and for the introduction and thanks for inviting us to present our activities, which more related to monitoring and assessment about water resources and drought and what scarcity condition. First of all, I wanted to mention one of the technology that we are developing in ISPRA and also here, which we have developed in ISPRA which is at the basis of all our assessment and estimates about drought, water scarcity and water resources. This is an hydrological water budget model called the Big Ben, which provides one kilometer amount to estimate over Italy of a water budget component components and other hydrological variables. And this is based on hydro-metrological data, official data provided by Region Autonomous Provisions, also from historical data. Together with some national layer information for soils, hydrogeological characteristics and soil sealing rates based on Copernicus data. Based on this model we have estimated from 1951 to 2022, there is an update every year, the water budget component hydrological variable. And also based on this model, we also done some initial studies about impact on waterability based on different climate change scenarios. And most started with some of the findings. Let's start with total precipitation and how and the impact of the deficit in precipitation that we had last year in Italy. If you can see the red bar on the right of the graph, this represents the annual value of precipitation in Italy over last year. And how you can see there is a strong deficit, about 24% with respect to the long-tempera annual average, which in the last 30 climatological periods corresponded to about a little bit more than 900 millimetre. How this change in order to see how on a special scale, how this impact the different part of Italy, you can see that especially on the northwestern part of Italy and also over Sicily and Sardinia and we had a strong deficit. Especially for the Piedmont and Lombardy region on the northwest of Italy. This actually had a strong impact on water resource availability and for water resources for the use of water resources in the different in specific agriculture and industrial use. If you have just to give you an idea what happened last year in Italy, we have estimated a high annual value of 221.7 millimetre, which represent for Italy the historical annual minimum since 1951. This is what occurred last year in Italy. And as you can imagine, this adds a big impact, especially for agriculture, since agriculture in Italy is the use of water in agriculture is the major use. More than 50% of the withdrawal of water resources withdrawal is for agriculture in Italy. So you can imagine how this had an impact. So we have estimated minus 50% of the water availability with respect to not only the last 30 climatological period, but also with respect to long term annual average. So this is our robust, robust senior. Moving over the stream drought has the one occurred in Italy. In the last period, in the last analysis, we have noticed a statistical significant increase of the percentage of Italian areas affected by extreme drought. In the last year, as you can see, in the final bars of the graph, only more or less around 20% of the area that was affected by a stream drought. This adds a big impact because of food in some other parts of Italy where there is the maximum concentration of agricultural production and industrial, agricultural production. So even a reduction, a percentage of area, with respect to other previous extreme events have a bigger aspects. Yeah, just to give you an idea, not only that the south part of Italy was affected by drought in the past, but also the, let's say the entire part, the entire territory of Italy was also in the past affected by drought. You can see here the reporting that we've done for the UNSCC last reporting period, and you can see the comparison between the different baseline period from 2000 to 2019. And you can see that in the different period, most of the territory was affected by drought. And especially in the last period, as was occurring in 2017, as occurred in the last year, most of the parts affected by drought was the northern part of Italy. The situation of 2002 was a situation that was common to all Europe for this reason, and also on the basis of different study that the European letter was conducted, that the European Commission decided to have an adoptive task group on water scarcity and drought. And they said how European country is dealing with this topic, which are the instrument tools that they have implemented in order to have a common discussion to be level and try to understand how to move on from this also considered that common change is going to raise the impact of drought on the economy. Just to give you an idea on the basis on European study, it's the cost of drought, the annual cost of drought for Europe plus UK is 9 billion of euro. And this cost can be arrived to 45 billion of euro in case of an increase of temperature of three degrees. Just to give an idea, and this cost doesn't cover the cost that we have for ecosystems. So this cost does not cover ecosystem losses due to drought. As you can see, we can move from different scale and different, and on the base on different spatial and temporal scale, we can use different instruments on different, a different indicator to set to assess the impact of drought. So moving from an European level where we can use some use special model use special data to national level where we have to use information based on for instance of Rengage data so based on observation. But also we can use satellite data to understand the impact on water bodies of drought. As I mentioned before, the impact of drought last year affects more the northern and the center part of Italy and this is a map of a battery or water storage at the national level. So we can indicate some shortage of water for the different uses, especially in the north part only on the on the last part of the year, the situation was a little bit better. And only this year on May, finally, the severity of the water state shortage in Italy is low. So just to give you another idea of the of the impact of drought, you can see that if you consider only the precipitation some part of Italy was was affected by a streamed route. You can see an evaluation temperature and the impact that high temperature give to ever to ever transpiration that to reduce the, the quantity of work of precipitation available as water resources, you can see how the impact was was mentioned, just to give you an idea, based on the on the last estimated that we have done in 2002, the amount of evapotranspiration due to high temperature was 70% with respect to the, the mean that over 50% that we usually estimate over the previous period. So we can the same, the same analysis we have done the same analysis for different short, short, short time period to see how moving from the beginning of the winter to the autumn how the, the drought to change the from from site to site over, over Italy. To finalize my presentation, another point that we have to consider how this shortage of water can have an impact in term of water stress. And also in this case, we can use different instruments, a different tool to assist to assist water says, and based on this instrument we can refine or have a gross estimate of water stress. To show you that the last one of the last activity that was mentioned before, which was this cooperation with the in the with power in the framework of the may hope and the memorandum of understanding that we analyze at the river basin this level the level of water stress done using the SDG 6.4.2. And this is an example of the level of water stress for 2015. With respect to the total resource water available over the period annual annual water resource available over the period 1991 2020 which is the last climatological period. And how you can see the, the, the this, the poor river beast this it was in, in medium stress on, on the base on this, on this indicator, and why I put this map because 2015 was not a drought period. So even when the reason we are not in shortage due to drought, so we can have a stress where we can have water stress due to pressure done by which or what. So that's all. Thank you. Thank you, Stefano for a very interesting presentation and some new perspectives especially focusing on the temporal and spatial dimensions of the drought variability and also increasing frequency and intensity and putting economic value into this impact is a really powerful message. So thank you very much. And let's move on to the, the team for now. It will be presented by CNR. And the topic is empowering communities with precision agriculture and the climate seasonal climate forecast to address climate change challenges in developed and developing countries, and we invite Mr. Similiano Pascui, data science researchers from, researcher from CNR to make a presentation. Okay, thank you very much for this opportunity. And I'm a Similiano Pascui and from the Institute of Bioeconomy. Along with my colleagues, we will show you a series of efforts made by our institute and our CNR entity in order to cope with droughts, but providing our vision of how to cope with that. First of all, climate changing, of course, and according to our last assessment reports, the regions in the world where that are affected by an increasing risk of drought is quite numbers. And there is, those areas are experiencing an increase pressure from droughts. And of course, we know, we all know that even if drought is a natural phenomenon, the anthropogenic climate change is exacerbating its impacts. And according to a specific study, we know that both agriculture and ecological droughts are increasing essentially due not only to the shift of precipitation patterns but also for the evaporative demand that is increasing in many region of the world. We know also that the water storage may have a very complex network of impacts both in the ecological ecosystem framework but also in the societal system. And we know that there are some direct effects that are visible and also quite simply identified but also some other are less evident. For example, the food prices increases but also problems related to the conflict since conflicts among users is essentially one of the main impacts of the reduction or water storage periods. And also from a recent report of FAO, the amount of impact in agriculture due to drought is more than one third of the overall estimates of the pressure of precipitation reduction. But we also know that drought is as a slow onset stressor, it is a powerful paradigm and training ground to test and develop new climate change resilience strategies because it needs a change, it needs a transformative effort to cope with such kind of events. So, climate is changing but are we ready for that? Well, we know that from perceiving a risk and adapting and transforming to cope with that risk, it is a long path, it is a process divided in two different steps from learning, understanding, practicing and transforming. And climate change challenges are unprecedented for humanity and of course it is recognized as a priority topic for present and future research and we have to remember that we have to change our way of thinking or when behaving because this is critical is the key points of the transformative process. We try to focus on our attention on preparedness that could be essentially understood as the short term adaptation strategy. It is a process, it involves a serious steps of action taken to anticipate, adapt, mitigate impacts, but it is not a one time event, instead it is essentially a dynamic and interactive process that evolves over time to ensure the resilience of communities and consistency in the face of climate change impacts. And for many aspects, the such kind of efforts could be also intangible and economical unmeasured, unmeasurable. The, for specifically the preparedness specifically related to drought is something which is related to the fact that from drought developments to the drought emergency management, there is a temporal gap and we can play with that gap in order to increase our efforts facing the impacts of the precipitation or the water storage reduction. A few burning questions, are we as scientists really contributing coping with the risk drought and the consequences on the agri-food systems? What about dissemination knowledge and information between data providers, providers and then users? And is the information trustable and actionable enough for the transition towards sustainable agri-food systems? Okay, just let's try to, I'm going to show you a few examples on this, in this framework, providing you a few practical examples coming from our day by day experience. Covering the world process from scientific research through training and down to operational practice. An example is coming from the one of our project, Anadia, in sub-Saharan West African country, Niger, relating to developing information, climate and meteorological, agro-climate and agro-metrological services to improve production. And what are the key points from these experiences that essentially we are tailoring information for farmers or communities. This is an effective way to increase their resilience, but this service should be tailored for their needs and should be developed within an iterative co-development approach with farmers. And for our experience, international national agencies, for example, also the educational, the MEO institution may harmonize or take into account the caring these kind of processes. And another key point is that the integration of different form of knowledge is another important key, combining scientific understanding of hazards, disaster risk and climate change phenomena with local knowledge in the framework of a participatory approach. Another experience is related to the precision agriculture activities related to the fact of moving and taking different kind of information from satellite, from modeling, from monitoring the ground. And this information combined this huge amount of information into a simple one just related to the specific needs of farmers taking their decisions on the ground. This is the experience coming from our agro-sat systems, which during the last years, so a huge increase of users in a way in which we are, which is grounded in our, let me say in our soul, which is providing information in an open access mode. Again, another example is the drought observatory, where we put most of our efforts and our experience in collecting information from different experiences and providing them for free through a free web application to support decision and support the action towards or coping with droughts. Another interesting exercise we gave is for another place in, again in Africa, in Mozambique. We built a system according in cooperation with the WFP regarding the capability of forecasting the, or the so-called forecast-based financial system for droughts, a way to size monetary actions with months in advance on an operational basis in Mozambique. We think that there is a sufficient scientific information and enabling technology to tackle the planetary grand challenge for agriculture, both for how to face the increasing of food needs due to increase the raising population changing dietary styles. We know how to reduce the use of limiting resources for intensive agriculture and how to mitigate the global change while producing sustainable sustainability food and feed resources for organisms, but we need a few notes for a new paradigm to do that. First of all, climate change adaptation is not a state to be, to reach, but a continuous transformation process which implies continuous changes at different levels. We must think and act in a global mode, which is a merger of words from Bauman sociologists, global and local at the same time. We must strengthen the communities informed behavior frameworks beside the informed decision framework because the key points are communities, local communities. We must enhance social learning support action and products to fill the gap between individual knowledge and scientific knowledge, and there there is a great chance of being or producing an active action from institution, both at national and international level. We must remember that using it is not just a glamour keyword is a key around that is a is a route around them. The, the, the tailoring this information must be developed. And we also remember that's the social negotiation process, for example, water management may be enriched by the knowledge coming from local communities as a result of a complex resolution process and finally coping with climate change imply not all individual readiness for personal change which is the basis of every transformation but also the readiness of the society as a world. I end up with a famous quotes, if you do not change direction, you might end up where you are eating from loud so thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Massimiliano for stressing the importance of dynamic and iterative process in the drought preparedness and also adaptation to climate change and also the how to the highlighting the different elements from the analysis of co-creation and also decision making and how to engage the communities in your co-creation mode that enhances the adoption of the practices etc. So thank you so much. Thank you everyone to the team five on food and consumers ratio to reduce waste and improve the diet with the products with the lower water footprint and the presentation will be by Mariko Ferrari and Laura Rossi from player. In this presentation with my colleagues Laura Rossi and the probably I don't know if he's in connection now line because I don't know. Okay, because I think that has some problem of the connection but no problem I can do that. Yes, my presentation is food consumers ratio to reduce waste improve the diet with the products with the lower water footprint. Me and Laura Rossi works in the crea food and nutrition research center my colleagues Laura Rossi in particularly is a coordinator of the food base at the dietary gathering in Italy, and they also is a responsible of food way observatory also in Italy. In the farmer to fork framework that consider a different phases of the food chain with the production distribution consumption and the food waste, nutrition and dietary aspect have a key role in the achievement of the most of the sustainable development goals. In particular in this presentation we want to focus of the SDGs, SDGs number 12 of related to responsible consumption and the production. In addition to food consumption, sorry, yeah, in 2018, Korea was engaged to develop the updated national could visit the other guidelines. It's to translate the power in Italy national nutrition recommendation into the ethical practical guideline for the consumer mother older for the cheaty gen of the colder of the chain. So in this line we started for the energy nutrient reference intake and we develop a scientific dossier that for for the literature all the literature review. That for each guidelines that we take in account of our daily guidelines, and we develop a document consensual documents for the data new healthy how to reach how to achieve healthy dietary plans for the consumers but hold for the stakeholder. In this sense, we, we published two, we published healthy dietary plans also weekly healthy dietary plans, this means the frequency of food group and so group during the week also the portions for adults, but also for the children. And in this in the in the last updated of the other guidelines for the first time we introduced the sustainability aspect in a one chapter. In the sustainable chapter, and in this case we introduce not only we taking account not only environment aspect but also social and the economic aspect the economic aspects means all all the. The territory that they can account to the cost of diet also related to the to the quality of foods and the social economic classes of populations. We tried to in the, this is this was the first the first time so we try to give some suggestions that the most of that are of this are in line with the healthy suggestions so we can do. We can, we can say that the most of our healthy the other suggests that are in line with the sustainable side is sustainable aspects so. The, the first is to consume a large quantity of kind of foods, respect to animal foods. This is in our studies we find that we, we, we, we, we adopt a healthy diet from our data guidelines, we can reduce the greenhouse gases emission from more than 25% This is for greenhouse gases emission but also for what they put in. We give, we give also some suggestions about food group specific food group animal food group for example consume milk and yogurt according to the recommendations milk and yogurt are important foods for the balance of the diet with the lower environment and that is back to the animal food in the in the other animal foods they do they do some meat consumption, especially a red meat consumption you know that also the healthy suggestions healthy recommendation is to not more consume red meat more than 302 grams of week. Put all these strategies to prevent the reduce also put waste this is important to enable the aspect that we consider in our data regard the lines. We also we give some suggestions about doing a shop to shop to buy some foods, this is a whole. Also, they seek a left overs for new recipes paying attention to the conservation methods in order to prevent food deterioration and so on a choose a tap tap water, then that are nutritional excellent productivity for the environment. So, I want to show you the results. Okay, sorry, so I want to. We do after to publish the data regard and say we want to understand how is the perception of the people that. adopt these data results suggestion and then we found that in Italy, 1551% of the people is the first from to the data regard and second recommendation males young people and who live in very large families pay less attention to the other recommendations, this is the result of our study. People that is in line with the food base data regard the lines could prevent the food waste being able to manage the household shopping. 40% correct evaluated quantities avoid the impulsive shopping is able to avoid the way say knowing how to stop food, for example, who said the left lovers, we publish a special book how we can use left lovers for a new recipes. And had a good example at home. But now I want to come back to the guideline to the development goals sustainable the development goals related to responsible consumption production and also the number two that longer because we need to move. We know all that we need to move rapidly versus the reduction of carbon water and land footprint related to production consumption process is a distribution ensuring adequate the food availability in all population the world without the distinguish among social economic different social economic classes and sustainable strategies to achieve these. SDGs are to to move it together, for example, if we we we get the action to improve healthy data repartenance we have in the same time. to get the action to improve the sustainable production method so this action have to to go together and to basically sustainable food consumption pattern that they is our expertise in our. Institute of the Center of Korea to evaluate the change along the time quantitative impact facility is very important to have better data quality of food intake because you know that the better data quality is a possible to identify better policy, for example, the other basic data guidelines versus healthy diet healthy plan. And to to improve the better data quality it's very strategic to harmonize the data. To harmonize among all the countries, for example, using the same food category categorization. In this sense, each country can do can can can know a evaluate the food into a specific group in the same way, also using the same methods of collection of to collect. data, food intake, this is an harmonized way that improve the quality data that we use when. We do new policies food policies. Korea is encouraged not only for food basic data, national food basic data guidelines, but also to do food consumption national food consumption survey. The last is a 2017 and 2020 that we finished to collect the data. And we it's very important to also really sharing micro data at the individual level of the harmonize the food consumption, our data are part of the we do the survey in according to the harmonized methodology from. As proposed by FSA, our data are a part of the food comprehensive database of FSA that they use in principle for a special assessment of substance and chemical in the food. But that they use the food categorization classification name the food access to the same food system, the food classification system was recently also adopted by our. By file gift platform where we have a collaboration, we have to share our individual data in the file platform, and they also we are in collaboration to find the suitable environment indicators and data set to include the in this platform to evaluate to evaluate. The environment environment impact of the different data intake from different countries and how we use the food consumption data we use a food consumption not not only to understand the if the population the coverage of nutritional nutrition is coverage in the population and but also to develop new and healthy sustainable data repartments. We use different methods for this is our publication because we started with the food consumption data and apply a mathematical approach. For a linear problem program to find the optimal solution of diet that the ashore nutritional requirement and at the same time ashore also lower environment factor in terms of greenhouse gases emission. We work not only for food consumption data but we work only on the receipts data in particular to optimize school meals in the in it. And not only greenhouse gases mission but in line with the thematic area of this meeting of what the footprint that we also study our food consumption data to evaluate the food, what the footprint impact of our food consumption but also if we adopt a Mediterranean diet. So we, we use the, not the last update the food consumption data but the era sky 2005 2006 data. And we found we, we, we relate the other answer score from the territory from Sophie, and in the figure figure to do, we find the distribution of the Italian adults diet by the other ends of Mediterranean score. And we find in that this normal distribution we work on the two tails, the things that represent the minimum adherence of the people and the details to that represent the maximum adherence. And in these two days we find the quantity of foods that was consumed and the relative energy, also, and the water footprint and we, we observe that if we, we pass from Taylor one at the lower adherence of Mediterranean diet to higher adherence of Mediterranean diet we can have 25% of reduction of water footprint. This, this means that the higher adherence to Mediterranean diet lower is the environment impact in terms of water footprint. So the two tails is in terms of food group choices and amounts greater than increase of an energy intake considering that the Mediterranean diet consider a high consumption of plant food. This is just a case study to understand that the knowledge of the water footprint of foods and diet will arise evidence among the producer of agri-food to adopt for weighty for water saving production. And among the consumer to adapt the day data rehabits to the just suggest sustainable healthy pattern. This is just a little case study but can give some information to support the strategy to achieve the sustainable development goals related to responsible production and the consumption. This is just the one case of our study. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you. Thank you Laura for very interesting presentation linking sustainable healthy diet to the environmental footprints including the water footprint so thank you so much. We are 15 minutes behind the schedule. I think we will open up 10 minutes for the question and answer. Please remember that there are more than 120 participants are online. So they are also listening to what we speak in this room in addition to 50 plus physical presence in this meeting. So now let's open the discussion for question and answers. So there are three questions from online participants and probably in the meantime you can think. Oh yes. So please. So we welcome the director land and water division in FAO and he's the key for this topic. And Mr. Lee Fang Lee. So welcome Mr. Lee for this meeting and you know we are we have just completed the presentations we are moving to the question and answer session so we are behind the schedule by about 15 minutes. So we request you to, you know, please wait for us. So I have three questions from the online participants. In the meantime, you can also please consolidate your questions for the presenters. We have the first question from Raphael. Do you include soil drought definitions as well. And I see that his question is focusing on we discussed more about hydrological drought and meteorological drought, but are we focusing on agriculture drought as well. I think there are a lot of things mentioned about the agricultural droughts and I think this question could be specifically focused to Stefano and also to Massimiliano so you are the two colleagues focused on this particular topic and also from FAO. Thanks. Thanks for the question. The answer is yes I mean we are considering all the, all the type of drought, all the impact that they had over the economical and environmental issue. So also the soil drought is in terms of agricultural drought is considered in our analysis independent and analysis is done with different temporal, temporal scale that reflect the different impact of drought in the different part of the ecosystem, the economic use of water. Thank you very much for the question. Yes, sure. The soil moisture and what is related to the soil conditions are part of the game. And actually, the, the, the, the ambitious challenge of identify impacts, both on agriculture on another sector, for example, water viability or whatever, even though the, the, the, the economical losses losses as Stefano just mentioned is being derived by a holistic overview of the system where all the components should be integrated otherwise we have just a part of the, of the overview just as part of the reality so the soil condition is, is a fundamental and pillars in terms of evaluation but also an estimated impacts. And if Stefania is able to answer directly, indeed, it's very specific so I don't know about we can let, we can let the person know afterwards. Thanks. So, so we will contact you with specific response to this particular question so we don't have specific answer focusing on the projects, we don't know which project you are referring to. So let's move on to the third question from the online participants, which is from Christiana Spini question for Laura Rosie. When will the results from the 2022 survey on food consumption in Italy be available. This is Marica Ferrari. Yes, the, the full consumption, the updated the full national full consumption data are just available and downloaded in the EPSA link because in the food comprehensive database that is free, and it's possible to download the data this in the food access to categorization. You can, you can have the quantities of subgroup and under group because food, food access to have a different level of disaggregation of groups, so you can download the quantity of food the consumer, but not for to have information on nutrients. So, we are finalizing the, the paper because we have to publish the data before to to share all the old data, obviously, and I think that the inside the summer we have to publish the data. And after we can share all data with the EPSA links and the whole the we have the summer need to elaborate. Do you can do a dog collaboration of our full consumption data, depending on the email of the study but if we can, we can do an according and to share all that after the publications, but now it's a possible to download the food quantity consumer in the EPSA links. And if we wanted to write to me, I send us the link of EPSA to where is it possible to download the data. Thank you. So, any questions from the participants here? Yes, me. Oh, sorry. Yeah. I have a question regarding the drought prediction. I thought you said you could do that in Mozambique for months in advance. And, and then I would like to know how many months and how do you do that. Actually, well, we have to say that Mozambique is one of the best place to play with season forecast. Okay, this is for sure. But we are using the ACNWF system system five for prediction from one to six months in advance to seven months in advance, just after a calibration of the treasure to be used and to have information regarding to the reliability related to that specific treasures. And how reliable is that then? The reliability is very high. So you are able to define what the season forecast are for. I mean, windows of opportunities. So the information, for example, measuring SPI index is really, really reliable over there. Not only when we have an end surface, but essentially over a wide range of climatic patterns. The reliability is quite high and the problem is to adapt the forecast to the treasures for action. So these are coming from the end users in this case the WFB. And can you then connect that also to production, to reduction of agriculture production? Yes, but this part is coming from the knowledge of the WFP in terms of their activity over there. And the idea is to anticipate their action and just to move from the emergency to the preparedness. Again, that place in the world is very, is quite interesting for a place where test season forecast over this long range with so many months in advance. Massimiliano, I think it's an example for that. So it's a 52 member ensemble forecast. Yes, I think you can adapt the probability measure of that into the type of model to relate to the impacts on the crops. Yeah, I think it's very interesting work. So thank you so much. Yes, thanks. I have a question for Massimiliano Pasquini about digital technologies and how it is possible to use them. We are improving our farms and from the side of farmers and speaking. We are improving decision support systems and all kinds of digital technologies to be able to prevent PCs and to prevent and to cope with water shortage. But we have on the other side a problem with rain disaster like floods, water floods and so on. So what are, what is the state of the art to prevent in such a way the evolution of the climate change for heavy rains and similar accidents. And what is the state of the art also of the studies, how to deal with avoiding so water waste like we have in these cases like rain falls, because we should be able to organize our water management in such a way that water saving is one of the most important issue. Thank you for your question is very complex question I tried to provide my experience. First of all, the, the, there, there was a huge effort from the European Commission in empowering and developing knowledge scientific knowledge to cope with such kind of impacts. We have to remember that farmers are used to take decisions in advance. So, probably the agricultural sector is the more the most advanced sector economical sector that is able to use every inch of knowledge. And the, the farmers are really able to use every effort that we can make and provide them but the, the, the, I mean, the, the main limitation is that you have to tailor the information. Of course, we are not able to prevent totally the risk, we can play to reduce some part of the risk. Especially related some with some, let me say, some part of the wall range of hazards. For example, I say that the Mozambique the plane with season focus is quite efficient. But in, in the Mediterranean, we don't know, we don't have the same kind of skill in the forecast. And here there is a doctor delacra from India. He was the coordinator of a very prominent European project called met gold for providing information from three specific agricultural sector in the Mediterranean wine, olives and wheat. We are some information that could be tailored for specific part of the, of the process of the decision process. Most of them are related with the large scale odds are, for example, for drought, this is a, this is a positive thing. We have less tools dealing with floods for example, we have the chance to advise for flash floods, flash droughts for example, but it's very, very difficult to provide information for flash floods, which for example in Italy was clear, big, there was a very intense and extreme flood just one months ago. So we have a knowledge that is able to provide some part of information that these needs, but we have to think about that. There is no one single information there is a specific information for specific practice, but again agriculture is probably the most prominent and also useful playground to test and advance in this direction. Thank you, Massimiliano. That's the end of the technical presentation session. Please join me in thanking all the six presenters who have questions at the base. And also, also active participation and also questions from more than 120 participants joining online. So thank you very much. Let us move on to the closing session. My apologies for this delay that most 15 minutes delay. So, I request the director of land and water division, Mr. Lee Feng Lee, to provide the closing remarks of this meeting. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning colleagues. Today's events. It's very important. And you can see we have a number of the colleagues from the land and water division participating here but also many colleagues are following this event online. So I believe this event really highlighted the importance of the impacts of the water on agriculture. And also highlight the inter linkages between the food security with George water stress, and also water availability. The discussion and the five themes presented this morning also shares all the solutions and innovative ideas from the technical institutional and policy dimensions at FAO, they fully committed to transformation into a more resilient, more inclusive, more, sorry, transition to more efficient, inclusive, resilient, and the sustainable agri-food system in the future. And the impacts, the increasing impact of climate change and the drought necessitates the development of adaptation and mitigation measures that's across all the aspects of agri-food systems. The analysis of anticipates the change resulting from climate change from the human pressures as we discussed this morning, it's fundamental to better to understand the ongoing trends, but also enhance the broad management and planning strategies. At FAO, we promote the transformational changes and also assist the countries in developing appropriate cross sector policies and effective measures for risk mitigation and preparedness. At FAO, which revolves around the three pillars of integrated drought management. First, a major challenge we're facing is really the lack of reliability, sufficient reliability as we discussed already in monitoring and also early warning systems, which fall under the first pillar of integrated drought management. While monitoring the past and the present conditions is essential, greater accuracy and the procedures are required to predict the likelihood but also the severity of the future droughts. Towards this objective, the adherence to international quality standard basically and the public and the private sector can certainly work together to collect and also to improve the data and ensure the reliability and also accuracy of the data and information. Also, governments need to know when that's opportunities to pursue the standardization of the data monitoring and also the information that can be built into all the forecasting systems. Additionally, the current tools do not accurately meet the needs very often by the users by the decision maker. We need a user-friendly and also accessible tools are necessary to enable the end users to enable the decision makers to make their informed decision. And in line with the second pillar tailored vulnerability and impact assessment measures are essential because we all aware that unevenness of the drought variability but also not only within the country but also among the countries. And in that perspective, remote sensing can provide a valid have that need to be complemented with the first hand, first hand in these two, you know, the data that's collected on the ground, which will ensure especially some of the social economic vulnerability data will be fully included and incorporated into those data platforms. The technological advancement should be pursued to strengthen the drought impact assessment, exploring innovative methods to collect data such as utilizing the social networks, cities of science, you know, mobile technologies can enhance the understanding of vulnerability particularly regarding social economic factors. Digitalization play a crucial role, but efforts need to be, efforts are still needed to ensure its accessibility to the end users. Despite significant technologies, you know, we made many individuals, especially those living in developing countries in the rural areas, and they still lack of access to all the digital tools, the platforms and the information systems. Technology is also crucial for drought mitigation and preparedness, which is the third pillar of the drought management, particularly in sectors like water, irrigation, water distribution storage, irrigation, all of these are very vital for ensure communities to have access to those information systems. Research and technological innovations are crucial tools to avoid economic and social crisis when extremely event occur, and the biotechnologies for improving performance and water stress conditions. As we heard today, highlights the rule of advanced techniques technologies in enhancing crop resilience and also the productivity in drought prone regions. However, in many countries we already mentioned that lack of access, especially the rural poor, is still the challenging that we try to have them in the future. This approach that's implemented by FAO worldwide is really involved to implement the comprehensive new approach that's addressed both the science technology, but also the institutional framework and also the capacity of the end users, the capacity of the key decision makers in those countries that need our assistance. At the core of this approach, certainly is the understanding and also the build drought resilience in agriculture in was not only in the developing infrastructure, but certainly really look at the capacity perspective, so it is important to really to prioritize a cross cutting activities. There's an encompass of the policy development, knowledge sharing, high state development, and also the innovative solutions and the technologies. All these actions need to be broadly assessed, address the specific conditions related to health and nutrition in drought amendment and also mitigation effort within the agro food systems, as well as illustrated through the food and consumer ratio approach that's discussed this morning. End events today really provide a platform to discuss and explore the innovative approaches and the collaborative efforts that can contribute to effective drought management and also the development of the resilient agro food systems in the face of climate change, which are all fully aligned with the goal of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. At FAO at both of the Office of Innovation and also the Land and Water Division, we stand ready, look forward to really to successful partnerships with the Italian Research Institute and many partners involved in this initiative going forward. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Leafing Lee for guidance to enhance the collaboration between FAO and also the Italian Research Institute. There are four of them. They have shared very rich experiences and also their work and how we can benefit from each other. The message about linking data tools and assessments with the pillars of integrated drought management is really the center point of the discussion that will be integrated as part of the work plan after the further discussion with all the partners. So thank you so much. And so with this, we move on to our colleague from INEA, Mr. Massimo Ineta to say a few words and concluding remarks. Thank you so much for this very interesting day. First of all, congratulations to all the speakers for their contributions. Thanks so much to Selva for the organization, to Julia, Julia Palestini, and also to Leonardo Peroni that is not here in this moment, but his effort was very important for the organization also for the meeting before this one to organize all the work program and the seven collaboration areas that we shared. So just a consideration about our work because I think that is more and more important, especially in this moment in the report of the United Nations for Development Goals 2022, we register a negative trend in the achievement of the target because climate change, because of the COVID pandemic and the wars. So our effort is important to invert this trend and go ahead in the right direction. And the last consideration is about the open science because during all the presentation, also in the last one by Mr. Li, there is an emphasis on data sharing and we are a community, a community and so we can follow an open science community for sharing data information and all is in need for our progress in this field. Following the approach, the so called fair approach, data is important that they are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. So, all together we can do this. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you, Massimo, for further reiterating the importance of the data and the whole process. So thank you so much. And let us invite Mr. Filiberto Altabelli from there to be closing the meeting. Thank you so much. Thank you for this. This day is very interesting contribution to our worker. We have an opportunity to share knowledge and each other and it's very important on one topic is a it's very important and where we have to face now. And our, maybe our for the future, for the future we should try to move all this energy and knowledge in order to go ahead with our work and so in terms of a proposal proposal proposal project on something similar in order to make all together a step forward. And this should be one of our things because the knowledge that we are are very high and we are conclusive designs our work in order to go ahead in this design. So, we are forced to European level very well integrated with our network as you know we are a horizon project funding or some other funding that we are very well know our context. So, a file could help us to step all this board and go ahead with our knowledge and we can carry out in these proposal project and the institution research academic with a high level of knowledge at European level. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for raising this very important point on the joint projects of course we don't have the joint project so far in the last seven eight years. Since the start of this collaboration I think this is a very interesting point. Please send us your interest and also the topic so that we can connect to the technical divisions for example, sustainable healthy diet, we will connect to the our nutrition division and also food systems division, and they may be very much interested to have a joint projects and also other topics you know. So our colleagues from Land and Water the director is here if it focuses on the drought and agriculture. So please send us your interest and topics so that we can connect to the technical colleagues. So next, we will invite our focal point and the institutional representative from CNR Mr Antonello. Thanks. It's, it's difficult for me to add the other info after the speakers of today and the presentation about the new innovation and growing agriculture. It's clear from the presentation that we have a different possibility to face drought in agriculture. And this is my point of view really important because we have to face with this problem in different pedocratic condition different different social context with the different capacity also to assess to the resources in agriculture. And as we have seen we can discuss about the rule at the different spatial scale, different approaches. And what I would like to stress is that the problem drew will emphasize the differences between the countries in terms of achievement of build the production that in some country for some crops reach the to plateau or production. There is this gap with the other countries that with the draw the emphasize so good to climate change will not fill it. And this is a very important issue that we have to take into account. And these must part of world are due to the difficulty to access to the resources like water. That's when we look to the to effect of growing agriculture we look to the water management and soil and soil print and atmosphere system then we go to from big scale that we have seen today to really local scale at which the processes are and in this sense is important to me to stress that we, we have a lot of sensor that can be used to face the problem to manage the water, different condition and today the sensor become more cheap, and then I can be used and applied in different conditions. The CNR had a co-operation project with the in Burundi with the Lehman Institute that use a specific sensor that is by a restore that is like a wire that's put inside of stem of plants is able to see for example the the plant health, and this signal is used to guide and solar and eco friendly irrigation systems. This is really important because it's not so much expensive system that can help to to optimize these are water, because the problem you have to optimize the water that you have. And in this context, I would like also to stress the importance of the basic knowledge about the agriculture and the system that we want to manage. And in these we have a, I think that we have to take care about soil about soil health because if you if we are able to maintain the health, the afternoon soil good, the soil ecosystem function that are produced by the solar are better than soil non helping also in the condition. And finally, I just few words about the problem that the action that we can realize, move a different velocity, if you if you look to the system, and then the system that soil plant and and then with the climate. If you want to face the problem of growth by climate to face climate change the time windows is bigger, because you have to reduce gas emission and you have to to change your system responses as told by massimiliano we have to adapt to this dynamic system is we cannot change completely. I come back to before the change in gas emission, while the action that we can meet on soil can really improve the water management and, and at the same time, the improvement by genetic approach to genus right on plant performance to do is a is more rapid in action and in effects in our system compared to the other one. That's what I can saying I closed with this two words my, my contribution is that in any case I think that we have to do an effort to make this. The, the study of the problem of the world very multidisciplinary, we cannot think that only in apologies or pedologists agronomists can face this problem. And today we have also a lot of a bigger by people that work with the modeling like. Artificial intelligence or other kind of mathematics approach that applied on knowledge from system. We really can help to to improve our production and then please do. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for bringing in the systems approach perspective in in promoting timely action so thank you so much. Let's move on to the last presenter on this closing event, this is Anna Louisa from ISPRA. Hi everybody, so I have to count on my position to be the last speaker, not least, I hope so. And I can avoid to repeat what my colleagues, especially my calling from Seattle now was the same before the interdisciplinarity is really relevant. It's economic and social issues, for example, that are often considered ancillary and not crucial enough in the focus so we are all of us we are we agree in the time of climate change we need to act on obtaining the better information to reach a sustainable and equitable situation. And I mentioned what Nancy was saying, we are on where the ecological quote unquote situation is worsened by COVID by wars. And at the same time, to cope with the environmental resilience could help to have a positive effect that also on the country and in the wars that are all around the world where we have a look at the main war in this moment. This is the conflict, Russian, Ukrainian conflict, but there are, if I remember well, 230 small and bigger conflict around the world, without mentioning the Syrian is especially driven by water scarcity and water in the drought event. So, we need not all information, as sorry for mentioning my colleagues but despite my institution, they say that we need to know how much water is necessary. How much is withdrawn, how much water is returned to water bodies, and has become a really a basket of information, whereas yes, the artificial intelligence could help, but maybe also our intelligence to combine the different factors and to give them the appropriate authority, the appropriate way to have them. We are trying to offer at the national level these, these kind of expertise, and we hope to be an example to other countries. So, ISPRA and FAO, we had an interesting experience on a project, one goal project because we are updating the data on the 6.5.2. Yes, the agenda 2030 is our mantra. I'm working on this field for different aspects, so I am very passionate of this and this is a good example. Starting today, Mr. Martin called us to valorize the innovation. And the valor innovation is also the cooperation to find a way to collaborate, not to have academic conflicts or jealousy among the institution. And I believe that this kind of event favorize so strongly the conversation among us. We are very happy about not only with FAO, we are very happy to have to work with them, with some of them we work also in other fields, there are those very well-referring. I work also at the international, international negotiation, and we met often at this level. We go to have a conversation among us to have a comparison, not between data but on how to approach data. So this is necessary to have this, how to approach data. What are the questions that we go, we ask to data. The data are needed for what, and this is another interesting and important in achievement, given that our role is to offer the best of our scientific production to another level that as Pierrot mentioned today, Pierrot Genovese, it is the crucial role on the effective dialogue between science and knowledge at all level, technical, and the decision-making processes. All of us, we know how difficult is this. How difficult to build these kind of bridges. The bridges between two different languages, and there is not one language better than another, there are different. When we as a people of the scientific organization often say that the political field that they are not, they don't understand what we need, they don't understand what we propose. So they have another approach, is an another point of view, and we should be able to intercept this kind of necessity. So, I repeat, I talk often about building bridges and building new languages. This is our role. In a good moment of our MOU, there are many years that are working, but now we are going toward a more concrete operational behavior. So let's go ahead. Oh, sorry. Last words. Last words. I am the only lady in this panel, very proud of this. Very proud of this, and especially because the World Day to Combat the Certification and Drought is devoted to celebrate the women and girls with a slogan, very nice slogan, that is, her land rights in order point very interesting to explore is the woman empowerment that goes through also through also through the right to the land and the access the powerful access to the DC, which isn't making processes. So, data for ladies, that's all. Thank you. Thank you, Anna. It's always pleasure listening to you, not only today and also in all of our joint meetings in relation to this collaboration. All your messages are related to the science policy society interface is very well noted, and also your gender balance message that you mentioned. In the science policy interface with the beta for some years and the Portuguese CCD was a strong experience for us. Thank you, Anna. Thank you so much. And just say a few words. Thanks message to all the colleagues who have contributed to this very important meeting. First physical meeting after very, very long time, discussing about the joint activities and also way forward to start with, I thank Mr leaping Lee, and also his team from the land and water division for providing the strong technical collaboration focusing on drought and agriculture, and also other aspects related to climate change, etc. and climate change is also one of the priority seven priority areas of this, this collaboration. I also thank Vincent Martin, the director of office of innovation for providing the key messages and also opening remarks this morning. And I thank all the institutional focal points and the institutional representatives of the four Italian research institutions for your both opening remarks as well as the closing remarks and also Mr. Mr. John Paolo from from Naples, Naples University for his keynote speech this morning, focusing on the whole, the broader aspects of this collaboration. And I thank the the focal points of our Italian research institutions for this MOU, Mr. Massimo Ineta from Inaya and Federica from CNR and Anna Lewis from ISPRA and Paola Fiore from CREA for your active contribution. Not only of course today and also for preparation of the MOU and also for the consolidation of the work plan in the last years. So thank you so much for all your contribution. And I take this opportunity to thank my colleagues working as a focal points for this MOU, Julia Palastini and Cristiano Consolini who has contributed for organizing this meeting and he has taken care of all the virtual aspects of this meeting and also for several support he has provided. And Leonardo Peroni is the focal point from the partnership division and he is very instrumental to start this particular physical meeting together with Massimo and unfortunately we are not having him here today because of his other commitments. So thank you so much and I thank all our man and water colleagues for their contribution and readily accepting to organize this physical meeting and taking a lead technical role on behalf of FIO. So thank you so much.