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Farmers’ resilience using a food system approach: towards robust metrics
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Past activities:
I have been invited to take part in the session "Food System Resilience in a Changing Climate" at the Fragile Lives conference in Berlin, held on 30 Sept - 1 October 2026.
Together with Michael Carter (UC Davis) and Donato Romano (University of Florence), I organized a session at the 2025 EAAE on Resilience Metrics.
As part of the Resilience Working Group, we organized a World Café on Resilient Food Systems during the Sustainable Food System Symposium, held in Göttingen in September 2024.
Resilience Working Group
Since 2023 I lead the Resilience Working Group within the RTG Sustainable Food Systems. The group is composed of doctoral researchers, student assistants, postdoctoral researchers, and a PI.
The main output of the group is the paper Squarcina et al. (2026) published in World Development. In this paper, we propose a new index of farm household resilience that combines three dimensions: economic, environmental, and nutritional outcomes. We use different techniques, including machine learning, structural equation models, and principal component analysis, and we test the index over different shocks.
Link to the paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X26000318
What´s next?
On October 20 I am organizing an International Workshop on “Measuring Resilience in Agri-Food Systems: metrics, methods, and policy relevance”, funded by the Eva-Mayr-Stihl Stiftung through the Competence Centre Landscape Resilience (CLaRe) in Göttingen.
This workshop brings together researchers from geography, social sciences, and applied economics to advance the measurement of food system resilience and its policy relevance.
The programme features three sessions on (i) resilience and sustainability; (ii) methodological approaches to capturing agri-food system complexity; and (iii) the development of metrics to inform policy design. It will conclude with an interactive World Café.
The workshop aims to foster interdisciplinary exchange and build a network of scholars to advance research on agri-food system resilience with a specific focus on resilient landscapes and develop robust, policy-relevant metrics.
The workshop will be followed by a Special Lecture on “Resilience of Farming Systems in the EU - Methods and Future Directions” by Miranda Meuwissen the day after.
More information about the workshop is available here: https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/707146.html
Information about the special lecture can be found here: https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/711424.html