查看文章

Farming systems in Europe are experiencing multiple stresses and shocks that may push systems beyond critical thresholds after which system change is expected to occur. These critical thresholds may lie in the economic, environmental, social and institutional domain. In this paper we take a participatory approach with involvement of farming system stakeholders to assess the presence of critical thresholds in 11 European farming systems, and the potential consequence of surpassing those with regard to system sustainability and resilience. First, critical thresholds of the main challenges, key system variables and their interactions in the studied farming systems were assessed. Second, participants assessed the potential developments of the key system variables in case critical thresholds for main system challenges would be exceeded. All studied systems were perceived to be close, at or beyond at least one …