Targeting resilience in Climate Smart Agriculture: A mini review

Resilience is a core concept of the second pillar of the Food and Agriculture Organisation's definition of Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA). However, resilience is a complex concept admitting various definitions that feeds the confusion persisting around the concept of CSA. Given the stakes and the systemic and transformative changes that are needed to face climate change, especially in complex landscapes like Europe where urbanization and intensified agriculture intersect, the clarification of a unifying goal is crucial. In this mini-review, the authors propose to present the history and definitions of resilience to foster resilience in CSA strategies. This work highlights the existence of a network of operationalization attempts in literature, but disconnected from the holistic scale aimed for in CSA. Among all definitions of resilience, ecological resilience is the one adapted to bridge CSA and resilience with adequate governance integration both in urban and rural communities. When targeting resilience, the frameworks and indicators of social sciences have to come together with core disciplines related to agricultural management. In conclusion, this mini-review suggests to step back from the resilience conceptual debate and to invest more efforts towards creating indicators to capture early signals of social-ecological systems trajectories. This will help avoid brutal changes of management which could lead into a lack of societal cohesion within territories marbled by rural-urban gradients and lower their resilience. • Climate change adaptation is complex in emerging rural-urban socio-ecosystems. • Resilience is a common goal to many disciplines including climate-smart agriculture. • Resilience has many applications that could be modelled in climate-smart agriculture. • The shared term “resilience” can bring transdisciplinarity forward.