Overview of the Potential Impacts of Climate Change on the Microbial Safety of the Dairy Industry

Climate change is expected to affect many different sectors across the food supply chain. The current review paper presents an overview of the effects of climate change on the microbial safety of the dairy supply chain and suggest potential mitigation strategies to limit the impact. Raw milk, the common raw material of dairy products, is vulnerable to climate change, influenced by changes in average temperature and amount of precipitation. This would induce changes in the microbial profile and heat stress in lactating cows, increasing susceptibility to microbial infection and higher levels of microbial contamination. Moreover, climate change affects the entire dairy supply chain and necessitates adaptation of all the current food safety management programs. In particular, the review of current prerequisite programs might be needed as well as revisiting the current microbial specifications of the receiving dairy products and the introduction of new pretreatments with stringent processing regimes. The effects on microbial changes during distribution and consumer handling also would need to be quantified through the use of predictive models. The development of Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) models, considering the whole farm-to-fork chain to evaluate risk mitigation strategies, will be a key step to prioritize actions towards a climate change-resilient dairy industry

Holistic risk assessments of food systems

Food systems are composed of interrelated activities that transform agricultural products into food. Their operations need to meet several food security, food safety, and sustainability requirements. Therefore, risk assessment of food systems must be multidisciplinary and include food safety, nutrition, environmental, economics, and social criteria. However, combining these criteria to assess multiple impacts remains a challenge in complex and multi-stakeholder systems. Until now, only a few holistic assessments, whether domain-oriented or generic and with different levels of quantification, have covered all criteria and the whole food systems. We reviewed and presented the various assessment methods and their applications in food systems, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. Recommendations were made for a tiered approach combining different holistic assessment methods