Farm resilience to climatic risk. A review

Abstract

Increasing our understanding of farm resilience drivers to climate-related risks is critical for designing innovative farm systems, especially for smallholders that are highly vulnerable to climatic hazards and expected to follow a pathway toward sustainable development. However, the literature is fragmented on the concepts and methods to measure farm resilience. Moreover, quantitative assessments of options to enhance farm resilience to climate risks are scarce. Resilience can be defined as the ability of a system to recover, reorganize and evolve following external stresses and disturbances. Such definition can be applied to farm systems. In this study, we systematically reviewed how changes in resilience-enhancing attributes (reserves, openness, modularity, tightness of feedbacks and diversity) impacted farm performance and resilience to climate-related risks, with a specific attention to smallholder farms. Our analysis showed that reviewed studies assessed farm resilience using the agricultural and economic dimensions of performance, often excluding the socio-environmental dimensions. To assess performance, the average value of indicators was most commonly employed, sometimes combined with variability metrics or the probability of exceeding a critical threshold. Improving one resilience attribute increased one dimension of farm performance for a given metric in most of the studies, but some studies showed the opposite effect. The lack of comprehensive assessments exploring different attributes and their impact on several dimensions of performance using diverse metrics prevents a robust conclusion on how to improve farm resilience to climate-related risks. Therefore, we recommend to pay more attention to quantitative assessments of farm resilience, including a systematic investigation of the temporal variability of performance and the socio-environmental dimensions of performance. Finally, we emphasize the need to focus on the recovery of smallholder farms after a disturbance, with the goal of achieving growth in farm performance rather than simply reverting to their current state of food insecurity and poverty.