Impact Of Covid19 on Farming Systems in Europe Through The Lens of Resilience Thinking

Resilience is the ability to deal with shocks and stresses, including the unknown and previously unimaginable, such as the Covid19 crisis. The aim of this paper is to assess responses of farming systems (FS) to this crisis and to assess them from the perspective of resilience thinking. We build on a resilience framework developed in the SURE-Farm project (Meuwissen et al., 2019*) and on ongoing resilience assessments in 11 FS across Europe through which we have an in-depth understanding of the ‘pre-Covid19 situation’ in each FS. This includes insights whether an FS has an enabling (or constraining) environment, who are the relevant system actors beyond farms, and what are the social, economic and ecological functions to be delivered by the system. The analysis allows us to understand which resilience resources and strategies were mobilised indifferent FS and thereby to explain differences in the ability of FS to cope with and respond to the crisis. Furthermore, the approach enables us to put crisis responses in a broader resilience perspective and to assess whether responses might enhance (orconstrain) future resilience. Thus, our analysis allows to draw policy and industry relevant conclusions how to increase resilience of farming systems