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When developing strategies or policies to increase resilience, private and public decision makers need to anticipate to future shocks and stresses affecting the systems they manage. However, they face the difficulty that the future is not fully known. Uncertainty exists with respect to key factors affecting the actions of interest. Scenarios are a useful tool to cope with such future uncertainties and can be used both as a way to explore—not predict—the future through the identification of potential opportunities and threats and as a way to make action more future-proof. The objective of this deliverable is to develop medium- to long-term explorative scenarios describing possible futures for the external environment that EU farming systems face. The external environment will include environmental issues, economic issues and social issues. Consumer trends are typically not or insufficiently included in farming systems related scenarios and will therefore get particular attention. The purpose is to produce scenarios that encompass a wide range of issues characterised in both a quantitative and a qualitative way that can be used to guide further work in SURE-Farm. ; EU; en; contact: erik.mathijs@kuleuven.be

Farming systems in Europe face a vast range of environmental, economic, social and institutional challenges. Examples include more volatile producer and input prices, higher probability of extreme weather events, increasing dependence on land owners and financial institutions, organizational change within value chains, competing policy objectives and increasing administrative demands, and new societal concerns and changing consumer preferences. In this paper we define resilience as maintaining the essential functions of EU farming systems in the face of increasingly complex and volatile economic, social, environmental and institutional challenges. A farming system is a system hierarchy level above the farm at which properties emerge as a result of the formal and informal interactions and interrelations among farms, available technologies, stakeholders along the value chain, citizens in rural and urban areas, consumers, policy makers, and the environment. Existing resilience frameworks do not sufficiently capture the regional interplay of the multiple processes and stakeholders apparent in farming systems. In order to capture the described developments in EU agriculture, and in order to proactively address those challenges, we propose a framework to analyse the resilience of EU farming systems. The integrated framework can be applied by public and private decision makers to formulate differentiated strategies across EU farming systems depending on context-specific challenges and available resources. ; EU; en; Contact: miranda.meuwissen@wur.nl