Participatory assessment of sustainability and resilience of three specialized farming systems

There is a need for participatory methods that simultaneously assess agricultural sustainability and resilience at farming system level, as resilience is needed to deal with shocks and stresses on the pathways to more sustainable systems. We present the Framework of Participatory Impact Assessment for Sustainable and Resilient FARMing systems (FoPIA-SURE-Farm). FoPIA-SUREFarm investigates farming system functioning, dynamics of main indicators, and specifies resilience for different resilience capacities, i.e., robustness, adaptability, and transformability. Three case studies with specialized farming systems serve as an example for the used methodology: starch potato production in Veenkoloniën, The Netherlands; dairy production in Flanders, Belgium; and hazelnut production in Lazio, Italy. In all three farming systems, functions that related to food production, economic viability, and maintaining natural resources were perceived as most important. Perceived overall performance of system functions suggest moderate sustainability of the studied farming systems. In the studied systems, robustness was perceived to be stronger than adaptability and transformability. This indicates that finding pathways to higher sustainability, which requires adaptability and transformability, will be a challenging process. General characteristics of farming systems that supposedly convey general resilience, the so-called resilience attributes, were indeed perceived to contribute positively to resilience. Profitability, having production coupled with local and natural resources, heterogeneity of farm types, social self-organization, and infrastructure for innovation were assessed as being important resilience attributes. The relative importance of some resilience attributes in the studied systems differed from case to case, e.g., heterogeneity of farm types. This indicates that the local context in general, and stakeholder perspectives in particular, are important when evaluating general resilience and policy options based on resilience attributes. Overall, FoPIA-SURE-Farm results seem a good starting point for raising awareness, further assessments, and eventually for developing a shared vision and action plan for improving sustainability and resilience of farming systems.

[1]  S. Gliessman.  Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems , 2007 .

[2]  K. Knickel,et al.  Operationalising resilience in farms and rural regions – Findings from fourteen case studies , 2017 .

[3]  V. Dakos,et al.  Toward Principles for Enhancing the Resilience of Ecosystem Services , 2012 .

[4]  M. Ittersum,et al.  Yield gaps in Dutch arable farming systems : Analysis at crop and crop rotation level , 2017 .

[5]  C. Pahl-Wostl,et al.  Participatory Integrated Assessment in local level planning , 2005 .

[6]  Marten Scheffer,et al.  Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability , 2010 .

[7]  A. Kinzig,et al.  Resilience and Regime Shifts: Assessing Cascading Effects , 2006 .

[8]  M. Ittersum,et al.  Genetic progress in Dutch crop yields , 2013 .

[9]  Birgit Kopainsky,et al.  Food system resilience: Defining the concept , 2015 .

[10]  Miranda P.M. Meuwissen,et al.  Why we need resilience thinking to meet societal challenges in bio-based production systems , 2016 .

[11]  E. Ostrom,et al.  Aligning Key Concepts for Global Change Policy: Robustness, Resilience, and Sustainability , 2013 .

[12]  Jon Norberg,et al.  Resilience Management in Social-ecological Systems: a Working Hypothesis for a Participatory Approach , 2002 .

[13]  J. Pretty.  Agricultural sustainability: concepts, principles and evidence , 2008, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[14]  J. Anderies,et al.  From Metaphor to Measurement: Resilience of What to What? , 2001, Ecosystems.

[15]  R. Kemp,et al.  The Management of the Co-Evolution of Technical, Environmental and Social Systems , 2005 .

[16]  Jean-Marc Barbier,et al.  Prospective and participatory integrated assessment of agricultural systems from farm to regional scales: Comparison of three modeling approaches. , 2013, Journal of environmental management.

[17]  Berien Elbersen,et al.  Farm management indicators and farm typologies as a basis for assessments in a changing policy environment. , 2007, Journal of environmental management.

[18]  Arjen Y Hoekstra,et al.  The control versus resilience rationale for managing systems under uncertainty , 2018, Environmental Research Letters.

[19]  Igor Linkov,et al.  Resilience and sustainability: Similarities and differences in environmental management applications. , 2018, The Science of the total environment.

[20]  V. Eviner,et al.  Ways forward for resilience research in agroecosystems , 2018 .

[21]  Laure Hossard,et al.  From stakeholders narratives to modelling plausible future agricultural systems. Integrated assessment of scenarios for Camargue, Southern France , 2017 .

[22]  H. Herrera.  Resilience for Whom? The Problem Structuring Process of the Resilience Analysis , 2017 .

[23]  A. Kinzig,et al.  Assessing Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems : Workbook for Practitioners , 2011 .

[24]  Thomas Allen,et al.  Towards metrics of sustainable food systems: a review of the resilience and vulnerability literature , 2016, Environment Systems and Decisions.

[25]  A. Leone,et al.  Land Use, Climate and Transport of Nutrients: Evidence Emerging from the Lake Vicocase Study , 2013, Environmental Management.

[26]  R. Alkemade,et al.  Impacts of land-use change on biodiversity: An assessment of agricultural biodiversity in the European Union , 2006 .

[27]  Myles Oelofse,et al.  An Indicator Framework for Assessing Agroecosystem Resilience , 2012 .

[28]  G. Norman.  Likert scales, levels of measurement and the “laws” of statistics , 2010, Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice.

[29]  Banny Banerjee,et al.  Tipping Toward Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation , 2011, AMBIO.

[30]  Shah Jamal Alam,et al.  Sustainable agricultural development in a rural area in the Netherlands? Assessing impacts of climate and socio-economic change at farm and landscape level , 2015 .

[31]  L. Zhen,et al.  Regional impact assessment of land use scenarios in developing countries using the FoPIA approach: findings from five case studies. , 2013, Journal of environmental management.

[32]  J. Pretty,et al.  Sustainable intensification in agricultural systems. , 2014, Annals of botany.

[33]  Catrien J.A.M. Termeer,et al.  Transformational change: governance interventions for climate change adaptation from a continuous change perspective , 2017 .

[34]  Frank Ewert,et al.  Using the Concepts of Resilience, Vulnerability and Adaptability for the Assessment and Analysis of Agricultural Systems , 2014 .

[35]  Michael Schoon,et al.  The importance of social drivers in the resilient provision of ecosystem services , 2011 .

[36]  Steven Van Passel,et al.  Multilevel and multi-user sustainability assessment of farming systems , 2012 .

[37]  R. Uhel,et al.  Participatory integrated assessment methods An assessment of their usefulness to the European Environmental Agency , 2022 .

[38]  Jennie Barron,et al.  Monitoring and evaluation of climate resilience for agricultural development: a review of currently available tools , 2017 .

[39]  Garry D. Peterson,et al.  Unifying Research on Social-Ecological Resilience and Collapse. , 2017, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[40]  A. Mayer,et al.  Use of the participatory approach to develop sustainability assessments for natural resource management , 2014 .

[41]  K. Giller.  Can We Define the Term ‘Farming Systems’? A Question of Scale , 2013 .

[42]  S. Severini,et al.  Assessing the Resilience and Sustainability of a Hazelnut Farming System in Central Italy with a Participatory Approach , 2020, Sustainability.

[43]  Frank Ewert,et al.  Regional Farm Diversity Can Reduce Vulnerability of Food Production to Climate Change , 2008 .

[44]  M. Meuwissen,et al.  Guidelines for the Framework of Participatory Impact Assessment of SUstainable and REsilient EU FARMing systems (FOPIA-SureFarm) : D5.2.1 , 2018 .

[45]  Garry D. Peterson,et al.  Measuring and assessing resilience: broadening understanding through multiple disciplinary perspectives , 2016 .

[46]  Alfons Balmann,et al.  On the Dynamics of Structural Change in Agriculture , 2006 .

[47]  C. S. Holling,et al.  Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–ecological Systems , 2004 .

[48]  R Core Team,et al.  R: A language and environment for statistical computing. , 2014 .

[49]  S. Severini,et al.  A framework to assess the resilience of farming systems , 2019, Agricultural Systems.

[50]  T. Morrison,et al.  New Directions for Understanding the Spatial Resilience of Social–Ecological Systems , 2017, Ecosystems.

[51]  Audrey L Mayer,et al.  Strengths and weaknesses of common sustainability indices for multidimensional systems. , 2008, Environment international.

[52]  J. Colding.  Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function , 2014, Ecological Restoration.

[53]  Ika Darnhofer,et al.  Strategies of family farms to strengthen their resilience , 2010 .

[54]  Andrea Luigi Guerra,et al.  TOWARD A COMMON PROCEDURE USING LIKERT AND LIKERT-TYPE SCALES IN SMALL GROUPS COMPARATIVE DESIGN OBSERVATIONS , 2016 .

[55]  I. Darnhofer.  Resilience and why it matters for farm management , 2014 .

[56]  H. Charles J. Godfray.  The debate over sustainable intensification , 2015, Food Security.

[57]  Oludunsin Arodudu,et al.  Towards a more holistic sustainability assessment framework for agro-bioenergy systems — A review , 2017 .

[58]  R. D. Groot,et al.  Research, part of a Special Feature on Landscape Scenarios and Multifunctionality - Making Land Use Assessment Operational A Framework for Participatory Impact Assessment: Involving Stakeholders in European Policy Making, a Case Study of Land Use Change in Malta , 2011 .

[59]  K. Nicholas,et al.  A classification to align social-ecological land systems research with policy in Europe , 2018, Land Use Policy.

[60]  T. S. Amjath-Babu,et al.  Sustainability impact assessment tools for land use policy advice: A comparative analysis of five research approaches , 2018 .

[61]  S. Polasky,et al.  Agricultural sustainability and intensive production practices , 2002, Nature.

[62]  D. Mosse.  Authority, gender and knowledge: theoretical reflections on the practice of participatory rural appraisal , 1994 .

[63]  Christian Huyghe,et al.  Stability, robustness, vulnerability and resilience of agricultural systems. A review , 2016, Agronomy for Sustainable Development.

[64]  Garry D. Peterson,et al.  Ecosystem service bundles for analyzing tradeoffs in diverse landscapes , 2010, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[65]  Garry D. Peterson,et al.  Understanding relationships among multiple ecosystem services. , 2009, Ecology letters.

[66]  Olivier Therond,et al.  The plurality of values in sustainable agriculture models: diverse lock-in and coevolution patterns , 2018 .

[67]  Carl Folke,et al.  Resilience ( Republished ) , 2016 .