Estimating resilience of annual crop production systems: from theory to practice.
Abstract
Agricultural production systems are sensitive to climate anomalies and extremes as well as to environmental and socio-economic adverse events. An adequate evaluation of the resilience of these systems is essential to estimate food security, internal market stability, and the capacity of society to cope with the effects of climate change.
Here, we address the problem of quantifying resilience in a simplified framework, focusing on the crop production component of the agricultural system. We introduce a simple indicator of annual crop production resilience to external shocks such as climate extremes and environmental and socio-economic stresses, which can be estimated from annual crop production time-series. The proposed indicator is proportional to the return period of the largest shocks that the crop production system can absorb, consistently with the ecological definition of resilience. Through numerical experiments conducted with a conceptual crop production model, we show the sensitivity of the crop resilience indicator to the level of adaptation of the production system to moderate stresses, to the frequency of extreme events, as well as to simplified socio-economical impacts of the production losses. We discuss the limitations of the proposed approach to real agricultural systems and we demonstrate its applicability using historical production data at the national and sub-national levels for France. The analysis points to crop diversity as an efficient measure to enhance the resilience at the different investigated spatial scales.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMPA53C..15Z
- Keywords:
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- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 4327 Resilience;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4332 Disaster resilience;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES