The second European congress Sorghum ID was held in Milan on 7-8 November 2018. Delphine Luquet (CIRAD AGAP) and Alessandra Fracasso (UNICATT) were invited to give a seminar in introduction to the workshop 1: “Breeding and genetic gain : which solutions to match novel challenges?”. Their talk entitled "Designing multi-criteria sorghum ideotypes adapted to climate change and novel societal challenges: Consequences for plant phenotyping and modelling” provided first an overview of the role sorghum breeding can play in changing socio-environmental context in Europe (opportunities for bio-products, multi-purpose cropping, end-use diversification, sustainability, climate change…). Accordingly, the tools made recently available by CIRAD, UNICATT and other institutions for i) phenotyping traits of interest for sorghum biomass and grain production, quality and tolerance to environmental constraints and ii) modelling / predicting phenotypes in current and future agro-environments, were presented. The way they could be mobilised in a sorghum multi-local experimental network potentially orchestrated by Sorghum ID was finally highlighted.