About Augures!

Agriculture is a strategic sector for the EU, accounting for nearly 30% of its overall annual budget expenditure. With agriculture responsible for 12% of the Union’s emissions, the EU cannot achieve net-zero by 2050 without ambitious mitigation policies in farming. Meanwhile, climate change is already affecting food production, and context-specific information on these impacts is insufficient. A vulnerable agricultural sector can fuel political polarisation, undermining mitigative climate action. Moreover, decision-makers need to prepare for climate-related reductions to GDP and national budgets, while anticipating the associated costs of adaptation—such as direct support for farmers, rural development, and digital innovation. To break this cycle, holistic solutions are needed.

Augures! employs an innovative interdisciplinary methodology to assess the impacts of climate change on crop yields, farm income, and food security, providing action-oriented insights for local and international stakeholders. The project will provide a uniquely integrated approach to forecasting the impacts of climate change on the EU’s agriculture. To achieve this, in 2025 we will:

What will Augures! Achieve? 

Our goal is to deliver information that helps stakeholders act quickly to strengthen resilience, plan for a long-term shift toward sustainable farming practices, and build public support for more ambitious climate policies. We also examine the socio-economic impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities, which is essential to ensuring a just transition for the entire food system.

• Practising cutting-edge science at the interface between quantitative models and the real world: we are working with latest-generation models to connect high-impact data to the real needs of stakeholders in the agriculture sector.
• Establishing international research collaborations: we are mobilising academic interactions that will contribute to building local research capacity, which is fundamental for the long-term sustainability of the service.
• Providing decision-makers and agricultural stakeholders with actionable information on climate impacts: we are producing clear and tangible findings to enable decision-makers to develop evidence-based and context-specific policies that enhance climate ambition, support farmers’ resilience, and boost food security.
• Enhancing public understanding of how climate, food and agriculture are interconnected: we are building a communication strategy to increase awareness and support for stronger climate policies.

Augures! in 2023-2024

In the first year of the project, partners built the interdisciplinary infrastructure of this strategic service and demonstrated its impact. Throughout 2023 and 2024, Augures! assessed how the changes in weather conditions and the consequences of climate change affect corn and wheat yields in Southeastern Europe.* Through the integration of climate, crop and economic modelling, as well as robust stakeholder engagement, our research outcomes were tailored to the needs of key actors in the sector at different decision-making levels. This phase of the project helped to advance inclusive conversations on the links between resilient farming practices, food security and the future of the European agricultural sector in the face of climate change.

This phase of the research filled a knowledge gap by providing more accurate, bottom-up projections based on local data, as opposed to predictions that rely on global datasets. The methodology developed under this phase of Augures! will increase the accuracy of seasonal forecasts, including the potential to use these methods to provide predictions for wider geographies and over longer timelines (e.g., over 10 years). These tools and findings will enable decision-makers and other stakeholders to limit the risks of crop failure and food insecurity in Southeastern Europe.

2023-2024 at a Glance:

*Southeastern Europe comprises Greece, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania, and, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Project Reports

Key Policy-Relevant Findings Emerging from Augures! 2023/2024 Results

Explore takeaways from the first year of the Augures! project, during which the research team studied seasonal forecasts to provide early estimates of how changes in weather conditions affect maize and wheat yields in Greece.

Anticipating agricultural climate shocks: Augures! 2024 Workshop Report

To explore these topics and discuss initial outcomes from the Augures! project, researchers, policymakers, agricultural industry actors, and representatives from the farming community came together for a stakeholder workshop in Athens, Greece and online on October 16th, 2024. During the event, researchers introduced the Augures! methodology and shared preliminary results from the project. This report examines how climate information produced with advanced modelling tools can help build resilience for EU agriculture. You can access a recording of the workshop and copies of the speaker’s presentations here.

Real-World Applications of Augures! Research

Agronomists at Wikifarmer are using Augures! seasonal outlooks to make data-driven predictions about how conditions might affect crops across Europe during the forecast period. They identify potential risks and advise farmers on management measures.

See how farming stakeholders are applying our findings to make real-world recommendations!

Seasonal Climate Outlooks

Seasonal climate forecasting aims to estimate how likely it is for a particular geographical region to experience warmer or colder and wetter or drier than average conditions in the coming months. This is crucial information for weather-sensitive sectors like agriculture. Despite the chaos in the atmosphere, getting such a glimpse into the future is possible due to the presence of slowly evolving fields (e.g., sea surface temperature, soil moisture, snow cover) and phenomena (e.g., El Niño-Southern Oscillation) in the Earth system.

Given the pronounced and unavoidable uncertainty in predicting the long-term evolution of the Earth system, seasonal forecasts have to be probabilistic. To that end, probabilistic estimates about the average weather conditions in the months ahead are derived by running one or, ideally, several different models multiple times to produce an ensemble of equiprobable outcomes. Despite the ever-growing availability and accessibility of seasonal forecasts, it has to be emphasised that these long-term forecasts are characterised by significant uncertainty and aim to estimate the tendency in the monthly and seasonal evolution of average weather conditions. Daily and local weather conditions may differ significantly from the monthly average conditions in a broader region. Therefore, a seasonal forecasting system is neither built nor able to foresee extreme weather episodes, like heat waves and tropical cyclones, months in advance.

Explore monthly seasonal outlooks conducted as part of the Augures! project.

The interdisciplinary methodology at the heart of the Augures! project is made possible through collaboration with the following partners:

• National Observatory Athens (NOA) (with the support of MeteoMe) retrieves, analyses, and verifies real-time and past forecasts from several weather centres across the globe.
• Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) (coordinated by Columbia University) builds on climate data to analyse the consequences of weather and climate variability on crop yields and socio-economic impacts on the agriculture sector.
• Climate Strategies Facilitates stakeholder engagement throughout the project to maximise the impact of the research among practitioners and policymakers.
• FACETS provides strategic and scientific advice to the project.