Towards SUstainable and REsilient EU FARMing systems

Resilience and sustainability of Europe’s farming systems can no longer be taken for granted, as the sectors’ economic, social and ecological environment becomes more complex and volatile. Using resilience thinking, SURE-Farm develops a comprehensive resilience enabling framework, develops and applies resilience assessment tools and co-creates implementation roadmaps. Its objectives are to: measure the determinants of resilience; improve farmers’ risk-related decisions and management; assess farm demographic changes and their links to labour markets; evaluate the current policy framework and develop resilience enhancing policy options; make integrated long-term projections of farming system resilience; and identify pathways to implement a resilience enhancing environment. These objectives are achieved by developing scenarios of stressors, analysing farmers’ risk perceptions and behaviours, developing improved risk management tools tailored to specific challenges in the range of EU farming systems, creating a farm demography assessment tool informed by agent-based modelling that measures dimensions and dynamics of farm structures, creating a novel policy resilience assessment tool to assess strengths and weaknesses of existing CAP and other policies and their national transpositions, and building an integrated impact assessment model to make projections towards sustainable future delivery of private and public goods by farming systems across the EU. In co-creation with stakeholders, outcomes of these assessments are synthesised to support an enabling environment and to co-design implementation roadmaps. SURE-Farm thereby provides a thorough analysis of the complex challenges to Europe’s agricultural sector and an assessment of relevant policies, building on long-term projections and integrated modelling. By designing novel risk-management tools for farmers, measures to facilitate entry to the sector and validated roadmaps it supports the sector’s resilience.