Agriculture and climate mitigation - how do we achieve the transformation?

Around half of Germany's land - around 16.6 million hectares - is used for agriculture to feed people and livestock and to produce raw materials for energy and materials. Climate change poses major challenges for agriculture in Germany: too little rainfall, extreme heat, repeated heavy rainfall. At the same time, agriculture can make a decisive contribution to mitigating climate change and is of particular importance for the preservation of biodiversity and the protection of soil and water. Solutions to the climate and diversity crisis will therefore only succeed together with agriculture.

In addition to climate and environmental changes, farmers are also faced with many other challenges: increasing environmental protection requirements, more and more bureaucracy, a fragile economic situation and social expectations of environmentally friendly, resource-conserving and animal-friendly agriculture with healthy products. The recent farmers' protests, triggered by the cancellation of agricultural diesel subsidies and the motor vehicle tax on agricultural vehicles, have made the problems and the anger of farmers abundantly clear.

What can a sustainable agriculture of tomorrow look like? How can the balancing act between profitability and sustainable resource utilisation work? Where are the challenges, where are the opportunities? Where and how do politics and science need to become active in order to support agriculture? What solutions do biotechnology or agroecology offer? And how can society support the transformation to sustainable agriculture?

We would like to discuss these and many other questions with our experts. Join us and ask your questions!

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Alois Heißenhuber
Emeritus at the Chair of Agricultural Production and Resource Economics, Technical University of Munich-Weihenstephan

Andreas Puchner
Environmental Officer, Bavarian Farmers' Association

Tobias Schied
Young farmer and spokesman for the Baden-Württemberg Young Working Group for Rural Agriculture

Konrad Schmid
Head of Department, Ministry of Agriculture, Munich

Moderation

Renate Bleich
Chair, Munich Re Foundation

The event language is German.

Venue: Room Europe, Munich Re, Giselastrasse 21, Munich

Event time: Wednesday, 8 May 2024 at 18:00