Climate resilience

Resistance to drought, frost, disease, resistant varieties. Equipment (frost, hail), water management

Climate resilienceResistance to drought, frost, disease, resistant varieties. Equipment (frost, hail), water management

1. Themes
2. Climate resilience

The resilience of a given system can be defined as its capacity to re-establish a reference operating capacity following one or more disturbances.

In agriculture, this concept is often used to guarantee optimum production in the global context of climate change. In a report published in 2016, the FAO highlights the increasing frequency of climatic disasters over the last 30 years (drought, heatwave, frost, rainfall, floods, salinisation of groundwater, diseases, hail, etc.): 149 disasters per year on average worldwide between 1980 and 1990, compared with 332 per year between 2004 and 2014.

This portal therefore presents the major challenges of climate resilience in agriculture, as well as the main specificities of each sector on this issue.

Advanced definition

On a theoretical level, the resilience of an agricultural system can be increased by activating three categories of levers :

• The system's buffering capacity: its ability to tolerate disturbances without deviating from its routine regime. For example, a dairy farm suffering a drought can tolerate this hazard if its forage stocks are sufficient.
• The system's adaptability: its capacity to adopt technical, organisational or commercial adaptations to cope with hazards and quickly return to a routine regime. For example, to cope with repeated droughts, diversifying crop rotation would enable the climatic risks to be spread over different crops, thereby increasing the stability of production.
• The system's capacity for transformation: its tolerance of in-depth transformation in order to survive. For example, faced with a drastic fall in the price of milk, an intensive dairy farm can evolve towards a thrifty, self-sufficient system, which may involve changing the breed of herd, setting up a new production workshop, changing the way it is marketed, and so on.

Whether climatic, economic or biological, resilience is therefore the result of a set of characteristics that can be mobilised collectively or independently, and adapted to the local context of the farm and its issues.

Economic resilience

At farm level, a disruption systematically has economic consequences, regardless of its nature (disease, drought, price fluctuations, etc.). Resilience can therefore be studied mainly from this angle, and mobilised through a combination of different levers such as crop insurance, diversification of production or activities, storage of raw materials, etc.

Diversification and practices

Technical and economic diversification are powerful levers of resilience, acting both on the buffer capacity of the system and on its adaptability. A more diversified crop rotation means that average production is more stable and less sensitive to climatic, biotic or financial hazards, while at the same time providing a known solution for lowering input levels and hence costs.

Regardless of the type of production, crop rotation diversification can be orchestrated at farm level or even at regional level.

Agroforestry

A number of practices can also help mitigate the impact of climate change. This is particularly the case withagroforestry, and its arrangements such as hedges or rows of trees, which generate a local microclimate through their shading, windbreak effect, moisture retention and pumping of deep water.

Soil conservation

Similarly, the many practices involved in soil conservation agriculture also contribute to mitigating climate change, but on a broader scale. Permanent soil cover and reduced mechanical tillage not only help to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also store carbon in the soil's surface horizons, thereby prolonging the carbon cycle.

Equipment and measures to protect against climatic hazards

Depending on the type of production, there are also a number of more specific measures to reduce the impact of climatic hazards. Apart from investment in better weather forecasting systems and their optimum use, the following are just a few examples:

Viticulture

• Practices to protect vines against frost (choice of plant material, soil cover, ridging, sprinkling, stirring, candles, etc.), which can be used individually or in combination.
• Postponing pruning or harvesting dates according to the weather forecast.
• The best practices to adopt after an episode of spring frost (estimating the damage, applying plant extracts, adapting green interventions, etc.) or after an episode of hail.

Perennial crops

• Installing protective equipment, such as anti-rain tarpaulins or anti-hail nets.
• Techniques to protect against frost, such as overhead spraying.

Arable crops

• Drainage or maintenance of embankments and gullies in plots prone to hydromorphy.
• The introduction into the rotation of varieties that are not very sensitive to certain problems such as lodging or autumn elongation.
  

Managing water resources

Water resource management is obviously an essential aspect of any study of the climatic resilience of a farming system. Whether we are talking about the configuration of an irrigated system, the controversy surrounding devices for extracting water from the natural environment (wells, basins, hill reservoirs, etc.) or the problem of salinisation of the water table in coastal areas, this issue is set to become key in the years to come.