The geodatabase on weather-related disasters in agriculture is a part of the cloud storage which hosts the materials of the Observatory for Agricultural meteorology and climatology of the Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA). A specific relational SQL geodatabase has been created by data entry from the official decrees of disaster declaration of the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, food sovereignty and forests within the “National Solidarity Fund for natural disasters in agriculture” (Italian law d.lgs. 102/2004). From this database, managed by CREA for internal research purposes, a dataset has been extracted for the period from 2005 to 2021 and published in the Zenodo repository in text format (.csv file) annotated with discovery and structural metadata. The dataset aims to make available useful data for weather-related risk assessment in agriculture and for agrometeorological analyses of extreme weather events leading to disasters. The following types of weather-related disasters in agriculture are included in the dataset: drought, excess of snow, frost, hail, heat stress, heavy rain leading to flood, persistent rain, tornado, strong wind and sirocco wind. The dataset will be periodically updated.

Agriculture is highly dependent on environmental, climate and weather conditions and on extreme weather events leading to natural disasters. Such events are more and more frequent in Italy, and in the last decades huge public investments were dedicated to risk management policies in agriculture. In order to set an adequate weather-related risk assessment, a robust analysis of the hazard is needed, which requires an agro-meteorological approach to detect the potential impacts of weather extremes on agricultural activities. With the aim of assessing the effectiveness of the current risk management policy in catching the main hazards, specific agro-meteorological indices were applied to highlight occurrence, trends, and spatial patterns of extreme events. The analysis was based on reanalysis datasets and focused on a study area in Southern Italy (Campania region) during the 1981–2021 period. The findings are reported in terms of maps and statistics aggregated at administrative unit level (5 provinces) and show a general intensification of weather extremes in the last decades, both in frequency and intensity of the events. The main indications refer to growth rates of heavy precipitation, potentially leading to flood, locally exceeding 3–4 mm/year, an increasing number of months with severe/extreme droughts, mainly concentrated during the growing season. An upward trend was also observed for days with extreme maximum temperatures, which already exceeded or approached 50% between June and September in the 1981–2021 period in most areas. Maximum temperatures above 35 °C are becoming more frequent and in the inner areas they were reached in 10 days in the 2021 summer quarter. On the other hand, no significant trends were detected for late frosts. In terms of policy implications, the results seem to suggest that some extreme weather events can no longer be considered as exceptional at the present time and in a trend perspective, making them less suitable to be addressed through the risk management tools based almost exclusively on the strategy of transferring risks (insurances and more recent mutual funds) both for farmers and for the allocation of public resources. Therefore, the need is underlined for improving the design of the risk management policies to increase farms’ resilience and adaptation to climate change. Moreover, the study highlights the information potential of agro-meteorological indices in supporting evidence-based decision making in agriculture.

Il contributo illustra lo stato dell’arte nella ricerca sul rischio climatico, delineando le priorità di analisi nel settore agricolo e i possibili sviluppi degli studi in corso. L’inquadramento della tematica rispetto agli studi e agli statement dell’IPCC sulle calamità naturali nel contesto dei CC evidenzia la stringente necessità di studi sugli eventi estremi a scale adeguate, approfondendo aspetti quali l’impatto sulle produzioni, la riduzione del rischio nelle aziende e la definizione di strumenti efficaci per gestire il post-calamità. Sono poi descritte le banche dati disponibili, esempi metodologici di analisi meteo-climatiche e i modelli di impatto in uso, nonché le loro prospettive di applicazione a supporto del contesto agricolo italiano (progetto CREA AgroModelli, obiettivi e risultati attesi). Il contributo si conclude con riflessioni su ulteriori necessità di innovazione, quali studi di impatto su diverse colture di interesse nazionale (vite, altre arboree), sviluppo di modelli previsionali stagionali, integrazione tra dati storici, geostatistica e remote sensing.