Sustainable and resilient farming systems in the European Union

Abstract

Farming systems in Europe face a variety of environmental, economic, social and institutional challenges, such as volatile producer prices, extreme weather events, dependence on landowners and financial institutions, organizational changes in value chains, competing policy objectives and changing consumer preferences. Resilience theory provides an integrated framework to analyze the capacity of social-ecological systems to cope with these changes, and resilience is defined as the maintenance of essential functions of farming systems in the face of increasingly complex economic, social and environmental challenges, thus farming systems include interactions between farms, technologies, stakeholders, consumers, decision makers and the environment, and vulnerabilities such as intergenerational transfer and declining attractiveness of farming affect the demographic stability of rural areas. The paper explores the resilience of farming systems in the European Union in the face of growing economic, social, environmental and institutional challenges. The study identifies a wide range of risks to EU farming systems, from extreme weather events and price volatility to demographic and institutional changes, thus through dynamic scenarios, it provides a picture of the possible future of European agriculture, taking into account socio-economic, environmental and technological developments. The scenarios developed are used to test resilience strategies at the level of farming systems and to make recommendations for the Common Agricultural Policy and governance to support the long-term resilience of these systems.