The potential of co-designed interventions in mitigating drought impacts on Dutch agriculture – A multi-scale modeling approach

Drought is a major challenge for Dutch agriculture, with increasing frequency and severity due to climate change. Drought affects crop productivity, soil health, and biodiversity, threatening the sustainability of agroecosystems. One of the strategies to mitigate the impacts of drought is to increase the climate-robust capacity of existing farming systems by implementing agronomic measures that can contribute to the storage of excess water and release it in periods of drought, mimicking the functioning of a sponge. However, the effectiveness of such measures and the adaptive capacity of farmers towards them are not well understood. Therefore, this research project will (1) evaluate the effectiveness of agronomic measures in increasing the climate-robust capacity at the field-, and farm-levels using the NDICEA and FarmDESIGN models. It will (2) co-design alternative farm setups together with farmers based on their preferences for agronomic measures and evaluate the climate-robust capacity of the resulting farming systems using FarmDESIGN. Furthermore, (3) using the LandscapeIMAGES modeling framework, will investigate whether the field-, and farm-level agronomic measures can contribute to achieving landscape-level goals set per case study areas and what trade-offs would emerge between productive, economic, and environmental performance indicators. Finally, (4) using LandscapeIMAGES, it will investigate what type of trade-offs would emerge between different farms within case study areas if farmers were to implement the co-designed alternative farm setups. In this study, the field- will be considered part of the farm level and the farm- part of the landscape level emphasizing the multi-scale nature of the research. The combined results of these four chapters intend to give a comprehensive overview of the effectiveness of agronomic measures against the impact of drought on the farm-, field-, and landscape levels, farmers’ preferences for these measures, and the potential farm-, and landscape-level trade-offs if farmers’ were to implement them.