Participatory assessment of critical thresholds for resilient and sustainable European farming systems

Understanding and Addressing the Resilience Crisis of Europe’s Farming Systems

“…However, while these attributes are perceived to contribute to robustness and adaptability, the contribution to transformability was questioned by stakeholders, with the exception of infrastructure for innovation, if it is implemented with a vision. In assessing the resilience capacities, the identification of critical thresholds is essential, even if exact threshold values cannot always be determined (Chapter 17;Biggs et al, 2018;Paas, Accatino, et al, 2021). Many farming systems in the case studies seemed robust at first sight but on closer inspection appeared to be operating near critical thresholds.…”

“…Across the case studies, an accumulation of challenges was assessed as pushing the farming system towards critical thresholds, i.e. as threatening the continuation of the status quo (Chapter 17; Paas, Accatino, et al, 2021):…”

Integrated Assessment of the Sustainability and Resilience of Farming Systems

“…The first workshop (FoPIA-SURE-Farm 1; Paas et al, 2019Paas et al, , 2021a was focused on the resilience of current systems: we assessed the main challenges, the perceived importance and performance of functions, the strategies adopted to cope with past challenges, and the resilience attributes. The second workshop (FoPIA-SURE-Farm 2; Accatino et al, 2020;Paas et al, 2021b;2021c) was focused on the resilience of future, hypothetical, systems. The quantitative methods included the assessment of current and future ecosystem services based on data and models and the simulation of farming system behavior based on system dynamics modelling.…”

“…In order to explore future sustainability and resilience, stakeholders were asked to determine critical thresholds for main challenges, functions, and resilience attributes, and, next, assess system performance in case critical thresholds would be exceeded (Accatino et al, 2020;Paas et al, 2021b;2021c). Impacts on performance were classified as strongly negative (À2), moderately negative (À1), no trend (0), moderately positive (+1), and strongly positive developments (+2).…”

“…For BE-Dairy the relationships of challenges with critical thresholds were not assessed, for FR-Beef they were assessed with a desk study (i.e., without stakeholder involvement). Source:Reidsma et al (2019);Accatino et al (2020);Paas et al (2021c) and elaboration from chapter authors.…”