1. Introduction
There seems to be a growing consensus on the inevitability of the climate change due to increase of the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. The climate change would manifest in various ways, most of the time with negative implications on the economy, environment, human health and other various aspects of which in the present case the focus is on food safety. The issue of impact of climate change on food quality and safety has not been discussed sufficiently in open literature and is now receiving more attention (Jaykus et al., 2008 and Miraglia et al., 2009).
This work focuses only on the impact of climate change on increasing vulnerability of food due to microbial contamination. The mechanisms by which climate change may influence the food safety are various and have been discussed elsewhere (e.g., Jaykus et al., 2008 and Miraglia et al., 2009). For example, increased water temperature may promote growth of microorganisms which would in turn increase the microbial load on the fish products or even cause contamination by species not normally present in those waters since climate change could allow warmer climate pathogens to survive the more northern zones. Effects of climate change may not necessarily influence the growth of certain pathogen, it may affect the natural microflora of the food product and this in turn may create better conditions for growth of certain pathogens. The ways by which climate change may influence the contamination of food products with SFP and growth of SFP are not well known and are not in the focus of this research.
In this work it is considered whether the predictive modelling would be able to reduce the impact of the climate change on the safety and quality of food products. A system which is developed as part of the Chill-On EC FP6 Programme based on a HACCP–QMRA–SLP approach should be able to indicate that the environmental conditions are changing in such a way that can affect the safety and/or quality of certain food product in the supply chain. The QMRA and SLP should be able to detect these changes before they are detected by HACCP or the supply chain operators, providing this way sufficient time for corrective actions in order to reduce the impact of the climate change on the food product’s safety and quality in the supply chain. It is proposed that the system would make use of continuous monitoring of environmental parameters, e.g., temperature, pH, as well as results of testing for SFP and Specific Spoilage Organisms (SSO). The system would use the Supply Chain (SC) data stored in the system database over a period of time in order to recalculate periodically changes in model parameters used for prediction of risk levels or shelf life, e.g., probability for contamination of the product with certain pathogen, growth rate, initial count of spoilage microorganisms, etc. Application of appropriate statistical analysis would identify significant variations in the trends in terms of decreased safety or shelf life of the product which would require further attention and corrective actions. Such system can be applied for reducing the negative impact on the food products due to climate change and possibly due to seasonal variations.