About the project

The idea

The idea of the project develops from the relationship between sustainable agricultural techniques, which have direct impact on climate change mitigation. An evaluation of the Life Cycle will be carried out in order to achieve a systemic picture of the production processes and of products through a quantitative assessment of the carbon footprint associated with the production of extra virgin olive oil. This process is going to be tested in the Mediterranean countries with heterogeneous environmental conditions and with significant olive cultivation records, in three different geographical contexts: Italy, Greece and Israel. The goal is to test useful strategies for creating a sustainable olive oil sector and promoting products deriving from integrated and organic cultivation methods that can determine the improvement in the balance between absorbed and emitted CO2, and to demonstrate them in the countries addressed for their uptake.

The mission

Innovative cultivation models will be proposed, changing the varieties of olive trees or cultural techniques used in order to reduce the farming inputs and increase the supply chain sustainability. A focus point of the project is to calculate the amount of carbon absorbed by the olive grove ecosystem and the comparison of such amount with the emissions associated with the cultivation process in order to determine the break-even point after which the amount of carbon sequestered exceeds the emissions related to the supply chain activities.

A new land-use calculator will be applied for the optimization of the agricultural solutions for climate change mitigation.

The results obtained will be also compared to the possible scenarios for climate change, thus defining tools for stock and sink forecasting and therefore refining or identifying the most appropriate options to mitigate the imbalance between emissions/stock under different combinations of climate and farming/management scenarios. The project will lead to the carbon footprint of the olive oil in compliance with ISO 14067 verified by an accredited third party certification for the olive oils of the stakeholders’ companies involved. In this way it will be possible to enhance the high quality of olive oil according to an evaluated and not estimated procedure.

The handbook

The project will also implement a Handbook providing guidelines for the:

• sustainable management of the olive oil supply chain
• management of soil and olive oil sector’s waste
• use of olive cultivation as tool to mitigate desertification and preserve biodiversity
• quantification and certification of the carbon credits.