Integrated Assessment of the Sustainability and Resilience of Farming Systems
Abstract
European agriculture is coping with economic, environmental, social and institutional challenges that are expected to further accumulate in the future. Identifying strategies to cope with these challenges requires understanding of the mechanisms that make farming systems resilient. Following the definition adopted in SURE-Farm, a resilient farming system continuously provides economic (e.g., assuring economic viability), environmental (e.g., maintenance of natural resources), and social (e.g., ensuring a good quality of life) functions, even in the face of multiple challenges. These functions include ecosystem services, i.e., the goods and services that ecosystems provide to humans (Daily, 1997). The integration of economic, environmental, and social functions resonates with the concept of sustainability (Schader et al., 2016). We hypothesized a reinforcing interaction between sustainability and resilience. We argue that when dimensions of food production, environment, economy, and society are well and equally addressed, a farming system strengthens its ability to cope with challenges (Walker and Salt, 2012)
