What exactly is
resilience and how can it be enhanced? Farming systems in Europe are rapidly evolving
while being at the same time under threat, as seen by the disappearance of
dozens of farms every day. Farming systems must become more resilient in
response to growing economic, environmental, institutional, and social
challenges facing Europe’s agriculture. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the need
for enhanced resilience has become even more apparent and continues to be an
overarching guiding principle of EU policy making.
The aim of this book is
to show an in-depth resilience assessment of European farming systems in
response to economic, environmental, institutional, and social challenges that
will determine the future and sustainability of farming systems in Europe. Four
novelties explain the added value of this book: i) It provides a unique insight into the
resilience challenges of Europe’s diverse farming systems, consisting of eleven
case studies; ii) It considers numerous stakeholders and their role in making
farming more resilient, offering a more integrated and wider view; iii) It addresses
components both separately and collectively to create an integrated synthesis;
and iv) It provides policy and business recommendations to make farming systems
more resilient.
The book builds on the SURE-Farm
five-steps resilience assessment framework. This framework is designed to
assess resilience to known and specific challenges (specific resilience) as
well as a farming system’s capacity to deal with the unknown, uncertainty and
surprise (general resilience). Due to the complex multifaceted nature of
resilience, the framework suggests the following five analytical steps with
guiding questions: (1) resilience of what? – characterization of the farming
system; (2) resilience to what? – identification of challenges; (3) resilience
for what purpose? – analysis of system functions; (4) what resilience
capacities? – evaluation of system responses –; and (5) what enhances resilience? – examination
of resilience attributes.
Based on this framework, the
book first presents findings on four key processes that affect the resilience
of farming systems i.e., risk management, farm demographics, governance and
agricultural practices. Findings are substantiated through a combination of
methods and measurement approaches.
The empirical centrepiece of the book are the eleven case study chapters (Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain and Sweden) that provide in-depth insights into the challenges and resilience capacities, and strategies of very different farming systems across Europe. In the final part of the book insights from the systematic assessments are synthesised regarding the assessments of farming systems, roadmaps for the enabling environment, lessons learned from the various co-creation methods and the SURE-Farm approach to assess the resilience of Europe’s diverse farming systems.
Resilient and Sustainable Farming Systems in Europe by Miranda P. M. Meuwissen, Peter H. Feindt, Alberto Garrido, Erik Mathijs, Bárbara Soriano, Julie Urquhart, Alisa Spiegel
Dr. Bárbara Soriano is an Associate Professor in agricultural economics at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Her research focuses on agricultural risk management and resilience from a multi-stakeholder approach. She has expertise in empirical and quantitative methods in macroeconomic analysis of global food security...
Erik Mathijs is Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at KU Leuven. His research focuses on the practices, metrics and policies underpinning the transformation of the European agricultural and food system towards sustainability and resilience. He coordinated the FP7 project TRANSMANGO and the H2020 project SUFISA....
Dr Julie Urquhart is an Associate Professor in Environmental Social Science at the Countryside & Com-munity Research Institute, University of Gloucestershire. She is an environmental social scientist with research interests in human-environment relationships, particularly relating to tree health, small-scale fisheries and farmer behaviour....
Dr. Alisa Spiegel is researcher at Thuenen-Institut, Coordination Unit Climate. In her research, she focus-es on risks and resilience in agriculture, risk management at farm and in farming systems, as well as deci-sion making under uncertainty....
Professor of Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics and Vice-Rector of Quality and Efficiency at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). His research interests are risk management in agriculture, farming systems’ resilience and agricultural insurance, water resources economics and policy, climate change and agriculture and agricultural...
Prof. Dr. Peter H. Feindt is head of the Agricultural and Food Policy Group at the Thaer-Institute for Agri-cultural and Horticultural Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. His research addresses a broad range of questions in agricultural and food policy, in particular links to environmental policy, sus-tainability transitions, the bi...
Miranda P.M. Meuwissen is professor of risk management and resilience in food supply chains at the Business Economics group of Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands. She coordinated the SURE-Farm project (Towards sustainable and resilient EU farming systems)....
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