According to the latest projections presented in the 2022 Revision of World Population Prospects by the United Nations, the world’s population is constantly growing and will probably reach 9.7 billion in 2050.

To meet the expected increasing demand for a safe, sufficient and sustainable food its production must be increased. The difficulty in finding new cultivable areas and the huge damage caused by extreme climatic events to agricultural productions makes it necessary to find innovative cultivation methods, in order to optimize yields and quality of the productions. Indoor agriculture is the hydroponic cultivation of plants in industrial multilevel systems integrated with LED lights where to grow vegetables without the use herbicides or pesticides and with a reduced use of fertilizers and water.

It is representing a real revolution for the possibility that can express to support the increasing demand of foods not only of the populations within the urban areas but also in extreme environments such as spatial ones, in the perspective of being able to regenerate resources and support with fresh ready-to-eat food the future long-lasting missions towards the Moon and Mars.

The speaker of the event, Luca Nardi, PhD, is a permanent staff scientist at the Biotechnology Laboratory

(https://bioagro.sostenibilita.enea.it/structure/biotec/en), ENEA Division Biotechnology and Agroindustry.

He is an agronomist, specializing in Tropical and Subtropical Agrobiotechnology.

Dr. Nardi has more than 20 years’ experience working with controlled environment agriculture, cytogenetics, molecular biology, flow cytometry, in vitro plant cell culture.