The Resilience Assessment Tool (ResAT) builds on broad academic literature that has identified characteristics of resilience-enhancing policies. However, it adds a distinction between policy characteristics that enhance either robustness, adaptability or transformability. This report presents the findings from an application of the Resilience Assessment Tool in eleven case studies across Europe to assess whether and how the current configuration of EU and national policies supports or constrains the capacity of regional farming systems to cope with the range of novel challenges. Understanding the CAP's effects on the resilience of regional farming systems requires an analysis of the interactions between the CAP and various other policies, which occur not only within the sector, but also across sectors and jurisdictional levels. ; BE; en; contact: Eewoud.Lievens@kuleuven.be
The influence of the policy framework on the resilience of European farming systems cannot be understood without analysing the interplay between the CAP and various other policies across sectors and jurisdictional levels from the perspective of regional farming systems. This report shows a bottom-up evaluation of policy framework for farming systems in five regions: dairy farming in Flanders (Belgium), extensive sheep farming in Hoya de Huesca, Aragon (Spain), arable farming in De Veenkoloniën (The Netherlands), large-scale corporate farms in East England (UK), and family fruit and vegetable farms in the Mazovian and Podlasie regions (Poland). The cases have been selected with a view to the variety of EU farming systems and associated challenges, as well as surrounding policy configurations. ; EU; BE; DE; ES; GB; PL; en; contact: yannick.buitenhuis@wur.nl
In its Communication on the future of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) after 2020, the European Commission (2017) declared their ambition to foster a 'resilient agricultural sector'. The study presented in this report identifies various promising options for the CAP, including national implementations, to maximise its contribution to greater resilience of EU farming systems. These options serve as input for ongoing political debates on the reform of the CAP post-2020, the development of the proposed National Strategic Plans that spell out national priorities and implementation choices, as well as the European Commission's "From Farm to Fork Strategy", which aims to foster a circular food system, as part of the European Green Deal. For the UK case study (see below), we reflect on promising courses of action for post-Brexit agricultural policy. ; EU; en ; contact: jeroen.candel@wur.nl
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
For improving sustainability and resilience of EU farming system, the current state needs to be assessed, before being able to move on to future scenarios. Assessing sustainability and resilience of farming systems is a multi-faceted research challenge in terms of the scientific domains and scales of integration (farm, household, farming system level) that need to be covered. Hence, in SURE-Farm, multiple approaches are used to evaluate current sustainability and resilience and its underlying structures and drivers. To maintain consistency across the different approaches, all approaches are connected to a resilience framework which was developed for the unique purposes of SURE-Farm. Results of the different methods were compared and synthesized per step of the resilience framework. Synthesized results were used to determine the position of the farming system in the adaptive cycle, i.e. in the exploitation, conservation, release, or reorganization phase. Results were synthesized around the three aspects characterizing the SURE-Farm framework, i.e. (i) it studies resilience at the farming system level, (ii) considers three resilience capacities, and (iii) assesses resilience in the context of the (changing) functions of the system. ; EU; en; contact: pytrik.reidsma@wur.nl
