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The objective of the special issue "Assessing the Effects of Climate Change on Food Sustainability, Safety, and Quality" is to examine current trends in climate change and its impact on food safety and food waste and spoilage.
It also provides a set of modeling techniques, predictive tools, and decision support tools to assess the effect of climate change on food safety and quality. Some illustrations are made in the dairy sector, as it is an economically important sector globally and a good example of the farm-to-fork continuum that contributes to climate change by causing greenhouse gas emissions while experiencing the effects of climate change.
The Guest Editor's job was to i) propose the special issue to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Trends in Food Science & Technology, ii) coordinate the writing of the 8 articles and finally iii) oversee the evaluation of the articles.
Note that the 7th article of this special issue was carried by our unit, Secalim. It focuses on strategies to mitigate food safety risks while minimizing environmental impacts in the era of climate change.
This action was conducted in the framework of the European project ITN PROTECT (No. 813329).

Climate change and food safety have become interdependent research priorities on a global scale. Climate change will clearly influence food safety in the short to medium term. For example, changes in temperature and precipitation will increase chemical and microbial risks. To control or prevent these additional burdens, mitigation strategies must be put in place and these measures must be defined and evaluated in a way that ensures the sustainability of the food sector, otherwise they will not be valid in the long term.

The work of Guest Editor consisted in coordinating and supervising the evaluation of 8 journals now published in Trends in Food Science & Technology (doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2022.07.003).

The seventh article co-authored by the PhD student supervised by Secalim (doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2022.02.027) , goes beyond the fact that climate change impacts pose significant challenges to food security and human health: it points out that ignoring life cycle impacts when defining and implementing food security mitigation strategies can affect the environmental performance of a value chain and, as a result, create a vicious cycle. To overcome this problem, the authors review, even outside the food sector, frameworks and case studies for integrating life cycle assessment and risk assessment and suggest approaches for mitigating food safety risks while minimizing environmental impacts (win-win solution).
 The work conducted in the ITN PROTECT project is coming to an end (2019-2023), we wish to continue it, building on the European network built in PROTECT in particular. We plan to coordinate a European IAN project by responding for example to the Topic HORIZON-CL6-2024-FARM2FORK-01-4 Climate change and food safety: effects of climate change on food safety across food systems.

A special issue containing 8 artciles : https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/trends-in-food-science-and-technology/special-issue/10BQ8G0694N

Bibliographic references:

• Hospido, A. and Membré, J.-M., 2022. Evaluation of climate change effects on food sustainability, safety and quality. Trends Food Sci. Technol. 126, 205-206.
• Feliciano, R.J., Guzmán-Luna, P., Boué, G., Mauricio-Iglesias, M., Hospido, A. and Membré, J.-M., 2022. Strategies to mitigate food safety risk while minimizing environmental impacts in the era of climate change. Trends Food Sci. Technol. 126, 180-191