Strategic foresight provides insight into the resilience of climate-neutral farming transitions in a volatile world

Abstract Farmers manage almost 5 billion hectares of land globally, deliver food security and underpin cultural and economic life in rural areas. Farming policies typically prioritise stability and incremental change to mitigate risk. Yet scientific evidence points to a need for transformative change across the land sector to effectively tackle the climate and biodiversity crises. Meanwhile, climate and geopolitical volatility underscore the need for resilient farm systems. Reconciling multifaceted objectives within long-term strategic policymaking for farming and land use is a major challenge, requiring multi-dimensional evidence. Using Ireland’s land sector as an example, we employ strategic foresight combined with quantitative back-casting to explore alternative climate-neutral farming pathways under different future contexts. Bioeconomy and protein diversification pathways score better across sustainability, resilience and risk indicators compared with business as usual (BAU) under uncertain futures represented by shared socioeconomic pathways. These findings help to situate the important, tangible risks associated with climate-neutral transitions against multifaceted risks facing farming stakeholders under BAU.