The 2025 EU Agri-Food Days brought together European institutions, Member States, farmers, agri-food businesses, researchers, and international organisations to discuss how Europe can secure food production in an increasingly uncertain and resource-constrained context. Across two days, discussions focused on food security, competitiveness, resilience, innovation, and the climate and environmental pressures shaping the future of EU agriculture. BrightSpace was represented by colleagues from WSER, JRC and PLAB.
A recurring message was that volatility has become a structural feature of the agri-food system. Climate impacts, water scarcity, rising input costs, geopolitical tensions, and demographic change were widely recognised as long-term challenges rather than temporary disruptions. At the same time, the EU remains largely self-sufficient in key commodities and a major global exporter, though under growing cost pressure and increasing global competition.
Beyond trends: the need for longer-term perspectives
The launch of the EU Agricultural Outlook highlighted that, under current policy frameworks and assumptions, EU agriculture is expected to maintain production capacity while continuing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, many speakers also stressed that significant uncertainties and risks lie beyond the medium term, particularly after 2030, when climate impacts and resource constraints are expected to intensify.
These discussions underscored the importance of analytical approaches that not only describe likely trends, but also help explore how different policy choices, technologies, and behavioural changes could shape longer-term outcomes.
What this means for BrightSpace
While the term Safe and Just Operating Space was not used during the EU Agri-Food Days, the questions raised throughout the event closely relate to the core challenge that BrightSpace seeks to address: how to align agricultural development with environmental limits, economic viability, and social objectives over time.
BrightSpace uses the Safe and Just Operating Space as an internal guiding concept to structure its modelling and scenario analysis. It provides a way to assess whether alternative agricultural pathways are compatible with planetary boundaries and social considerations, and to explore trade-offs and synergies between competing objectives.
Informing modelling questions and toolbox development
Messages from the EU Agri-Food Days are helping to refine the modelling questions that the BrightSpace toolbox is designed to address, including:
- how agricultural, climate, trade, and energy policies interact over the medium and long term;
- under which conditions productivity gains, climate mitigation, and income stability can be achieved simultaneously;
- where risks, thresholds, and potential lock-ins may emerge under different future scenarios;
- how policy choices made for 2030 perform when assessed against longer-term developments to 2050 and beyond.
By integrating biophysical and socio-economic dimensions within a harmonised data framework, the BrightSpace toolbox supports forward-looking and policy-relevant analysis, complementing existing institutional outlooks rather than replacing them.
The role of stakeholder perspectives
The EU Agri-Food Days also illustrated the diversity of perspectives, priorities, and constraints across the agri-food system. Translating this diversity into meaningful analytical questions is a central challenge for forward-looking modelling.
For this reason, stakeholder input is an essential component of the BrightSpace project. Farmers, food processors, retailers, consumers, policymakers, scientists, civil society organisations, environmental movements, and innovators all hold knowledge about emerging risks, practical constraints, and unintended consequences that are not always visible in quantitative data alone.
BrightSpace invites stakeholders across the entire agri-food chain to contribute by sharing the most pressing and relevant questions they believe should guide future policy scenarios. These inputs are particularly valuable in identifying:
- critical issues that may not yet be well captured by existing data,
- areas where data gaps or uncertainties matter most for decision-making,
- and policy choices that warrant closer examination through modelling.
By grounding scenario design in stakeholder-relevant questions — while remaining transparent about data availability and limitations — BrightSpace aims to ensure that its analytical work remains both scientifically robust and closely connected to real-world concerns.
Contributing to future policy alignment
The EU Agri-Food Days confirmed the need for better alignment between agricultural, climate, trade, and energy policies, as well as for improved anticipation of long-term challenges. BrightSpace contributes to this effort by providing research-based insights into system-wide interactions and trade-offs, helping policymakers and stakeholders reflect on whether future strategies are coherent and sustainable in the longer run.
As the project progresses, continued engagement with EU-level policy debates and with stakeholders across the agri-food system will remain central to BrightSpace’s mission, supporting the development of consistent, forward-looking pathways for European agriculture.
Source: PLAB
