Agriculture is highly dependent on environmental, climate and weather conditions and on extreme weather events leading to natural disasters. Such events are more and more frequent in Italy, and in the last decades huge public investments were dedicated to risk management policies in agriculture. In order to set an adequate weather-related risk assessment, a robust analysis of the hazard is needed, which requires an agro-meteorological approach to detect the potential impacts of weather extremes on agricultural activities. With the aim of assessing the effectiveness of the current risk management policy in catching the main hazards, specific agro-meteorological indices were applied to highlight occurrence, trends, and spatial patterns of extreme events. The analysis was based on reanalysis datasets and focused on a study area in Southern Italy (Campania region) during the 1981–2021 period. The findings are reported in terms of maps and statistics aggregated at administrative unit level (5 provinces) and show a general intensification of weather extremes in the last decades, both in frequency and intensity of the events. The main indications refer to growth rates of heavy precipitation, potentially leading to flood, locally exceeding 3–4 mm/year, an increasing number of months with severe/extreme droughts, mainly concentrated during the growing season. An upward trend was also observed for days with extreme maximum temperatures, which already exceeded or approached 50% between June and September in the 1981–2021 period in most areas. Maximum temperatures above 35 °C are becoming more frequent and in the inner areas they were reached in 10 days in the 2021 summer quarter. On the other hand, no significant trends were detected for late frosts. In terms of policy implications, the results seem to suggest that some extreme weather events can no longer be considered as exceptional at the present time and in a trend perspective, making them less suitable to be addressed through the risk management tools based almost exclusively on the strategy of transferring risks (insurances and more recent mutual funds) both for farmers and for the allocation of public resources. Therefore, the need is underlined for improving the design of the risk management policies to increase farms’ resilience and adaptation to climate change. Moreover, the study highlights the information potential of agro-meteorological indices in supporting evidence-based decision making in agriculture.

农业高度依赖环境、气候和天气条件以及导致自然灾害的极端天气事件。此类事件在意大利越来越频繁，过去几十年来，巨额公共投资专门用于农业风险管理政策。为了进行充分的天气相关风险评估，需要对危害进行强有力的分析，这需要采用农业气象方法来检测极端天气对农业活动的潜在影响。为了评估当前风险管理政策在捕捉主要灾害方面的有效性，应用特定的农业气象指数来突出极端事件的发生、趋势和空间格局。该分析基于再分析数据集，重点关注 1981 年至 2021 年期间意大利南部（坎帕尼亚地区）的一个研究区域。研究结果以行政单位级别（5个省份）汇总的地图和统计数据形式报告，显示过去几十年极端天气事件的频率和强度普遍加剧。主要迹象是强降水增长率，可能导致洪水，局部超过3-4毫米/年，严重/极端干旱的月份增多，主要集中在生长季节。极端最高气温日数也呈上升趋势，1981-2021年期间6月至9月期间大部分地区已经超过或接近50%。超过 35°C 的最高气温变得越来越频繁，在 2021 年夏季，内陆地区在 10 天内就达到了最高气温。另一方面，没有发现晚霜的显着趋势。就政策影响而言，结果似乎表明，目前和从趋势角度看，一些极端天气事件不再被视为例外，因此不太适合通过几乎完全基于气候变化的风险管理工具来解决。为农民和公共资源分配转移风险（保险和最近的共同基金）的策略。因此，需要改进风险管理政策的设计，以提高农场对气候变化的抵御能力和适应能力。此外，该研究强调了农业气象指数在支持农业循证决策方面的信息潜力。