Virtual Issue: Climate Resilience of Agroforestry and Mixed Farming Systems

Climate change comes as a formidable challenge for agriculture. In the upcoming decades, the resilience of agriculture will be challenged by, amongst others, increased temperature variability, more pronounced drought periods, altered conditions for farmland species. In addition, global change will continue to affect the socio-economic and political context of the agricultural sector. The resilience of agricultural systems towards those challenges will thus become increasingly important. It is often hypothesized that more diverse farming systems, such as agroforestry or mixed farming, are more resilient than less diversified monocropping or livestock systems. In this Virtual Issue, we want to explore this hypothesis by bringing together state-of-the-art scientific evidence for the resilience of farming systems. We will include articles on: The conceptual framework of the resilience of agricultural systems, appropriate indicators and evaluation methods Empirical evidence from long-term agroforestry and mixed farming experiments on their resilience against climate change as compared to monocropping and pure livestock systems Modelling the resilience of agricultural systems against climate change: Model development, scenarios, bio-physical and bio-economic evaluations Contributions including inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches are welcome. Contributions will be sought from – but are not exclusive to – the European H2020 research project “Agroforestry and mixed farming systems – Participatory research to drive the transition to a resilient and efficient land use in Europe”.