Digi4CSA

Compiling valuable information for stakeholders

Agriculture is a notable greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter. The European Union has set ambitious emissions reduction goals for this sector. Attempts to improve agriculture’s resilience to climate change and reduce its climate impact are often referred to as climate-smart agriculture (CSA). Despite an impressive start, CSA initiatives remain far from being the industry standard.

Digi4CSA will create a digital platform that integrates relevant data streams on CSA farms to facilitate agricultural stakeholders’ decision-making and enable novel business models and market exchanges to foster scaling up CSA initiatives. Digi4CSA will build novel ways of accounting that will holistically capture the climate and other impacts of CSA as it grows in scale. Digi4CSA has an extensive partner network, including Carbon Action, ACCC Flagship, worldwide PEcAn project and Ecological Forecast Initiative, science collaborators, and major companies and foundations working in the food and retail sector. The main goal of the project is to develop a system for Finnish field-specific greenhouse gas accounting.

Supporting the mainstreaming of climate-smart agriculture

Digi4CSA aims to build a digital solution to estimate and monitor CSAʼs environmental and economic impacts relevant to the different stakeholdersʼ decision-making and following CSAʼs outcome. This digital solution consists of an IT system that integrates measurements, models, and data analyses and delivers the results to various stakeholders through tailored application programming interfaces (API). Thus, such a system supports scaling up CSA into an industry standard in Finnish agriculture. The project group bases the current work on the Field Observatory system which it has created in previous projects and which represents a first-phase prototype of such a digital solution.

The project’s goals

1. Develop a methodology for i) collecting necessary data from farms and supply chains, ii) integrating these data with the IT system of CSAʼs impacts, and iii) informing decision-making about these impacts.
2. Improve stakeholdersʼ (farmers, companies, decision-makers and consumers) current decision support systems with the developed digital solution to help the stakeholders decisions in the complex decision-making landscape.
3. Create prototypes of the digital solution and the APIs that quantify CSAʼs impacts for different stakeholdersʼ needs by combining data collection, modelling, artificial intelligence, and IT knowledge.
4. Couple the prototypes created in 3) with social, economic, cultural, and policy factors (drivers and reforms) pertinent to value creation with stakeholders in the agriculture value chain and thus lay the foundation for CSAʼs expansion in society.

Jari Liski, Finnish Meteorological Institute, jari.liski@fmi.fi

Hanna Tuomisto, University of Helsinki, hanna.tuomisto@helsinki.fi

Jussi Heinonsalo, University of Helsinki, jussi.heinonsalo@helsinki.fi

Henri Weijo, Aalto University, henri.weijo@aalto.fi

Iivari Kunttu, Häme University of Applied Science , iivari.kunttu@hamk.fi