Historical Legacies and Current Challenges for the Future Resilience of the Farming System in the Altmark

SummaryOne of the aims of the post‐2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is to improve the resilience of Europe's farming systems. The CAP of the budget period 2014–2020, however, has insufficiently supported the resilience of farming systems. The ongoing CAP reform process offers an appropriate opportunity to integrate a broader perspective on resilience in the CAP. We therefore propose a set of policy recommendations on how to improve the capability of the CAP to support more fully the resilience (i.e. robustness, adaptability and transformability) of farming systems in the EU. The policy recommendations are based on a comparative analysis of six national co‐design workshops with stakeholders and a final EU‐level workshop with Brussels‐based experts. We concluded three key lessons about the CAP's influence on resilience: (1) resilience challenges, needs and policy effects are context‐specific; (2) resilience capacities are complementary, but trade‐offs between robustness, adaptability and transformability occur at the level of policies and due to budget competition; (3) there is a need for a coordinated long‐term vision for Europe's agriculture, which is difficult to achieve through the bargaining processes associated with a CAP reform. We propose specific policy recommendations that could contribute to a better balance between policies that support robustness, adaptability and transformability of Europe's farming systems.

History and traditions are important for many civil society organizations (CSOs). However, CSOs have to mediate between their original mission and modern-day realities. This article argues that understanding the concept of decoupling can enrich analyses of how organizations deal with path dependency. Hence, this article discusses cross-fertilization between historical and organizational institutionalism. This is illustrated through a study of Swedish CSOs using survey data, interviews and documents. The Swedish popular movement tradition is argued to be a path that is not easily abandoned, and the results of the surveys and interviews included here show how actors in CSOs find history to be both a resource and a constraint. Furthermore, different decoupling strategies, including both reversed and official decoupling, are used to balance between historical legacies and current challenges.

What exactly is resilience and how can it be enhanced? Farming systems in Europe are rapidly evolving while at the same time being under threat, as seen by the disappearance of dozens of farms every day. Farming systems must become more resilient in response to growing economic, environmental, institutional, and social challenges facing Europe's agriculture. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for enhanced resilience has become even more apparent and continues to be an overarching guiding principle of EU policy making. Resilience challenges and strategies are framed within four main processes affecting decision making in agriculture: risk management, farm demographics, governance and agricultural practices. This empirical focus looks at very diverse contexts, with eleven case studies from Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain and Sweden. This study will help determine the future and sustainability of European farming systems. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The healthcare system is the bearer of treating the wounded and the victims of earthquakes. The functional integrity of the healthcare system is critical to the process of postearthquake medical rescue. Thus, the requirements for seismic resilience of the medical functions of the healthcare systems are increasing. Many studies have applied resilience research to address critical issues in the medical rescue of postearthquake casualties, such as medical diagnosis, emergency surgery, and intensive care. However, systematic construction is still lacking. System resilience is one of the most promising systemic management theories with great potential to address the abovementioned challenges. This article puts forward a scientific concept that system resilience can improve the efficiency of earthquake relief in medical rescue. Firstly, a scientific review of medical demand and medical resilience was conducted, summarizing resilience and resilience of healthcare system concepts. In addition, the postearthquake medical demand was reviewed, and the classification and distribution probability of postearthquake injuries were summarized. Furthermore, by reviewing the postearthquake medical rescue process, the weak points of each medical link were summarized. Combined with the key points in the medical rescue process, the application of resilience studies in the medical system is reviewed, and the progress of medical resilience is illustrated. In summary, combined with medical demand, the article provides some guidance for the deep integration between medical rescue processes and medical resilience and identifies the challenges of system resilience to reduce the waiting time of the injured future medical rescue in the earthquake.

Abstract: The recent wildfires around Los Angeles devastatingly point out the relationship between nutrition security and climate change, aggravated by the Santa Ana winds that dry out the region and increase the likelihood of wildfires at speeds of 60 MPH (96.5 KPH). These fires disrupt the agricultural supply chain alongside ecosystems, limiting access to a variety of food commodities and exacerbating the already existing food insecurity challenge. The wildfire impacts in Los Angeles are not just local, but part of broader phenomena observed during bushfires in Australia and within the Amazon rainforest, where rampant deforestation poses peril to biodiversity and vital activities like carbon sequestration. Wildfires cause long-lasting damage to food production and ecosystems when combined with fires, these put tremendous stress on global food sources, including Los Angeles. The farmer's perspective indicates the heightened dependence on local food systems drives home the reality of resilient food systems that will need to be built in Australia and the Amazon. Addressing sustainability and climate change with anticipatory adaptation frameworks based on effective land management practices are required to deal with the resilient challenges. Constructing sustainable diets and resilient food systems are vital for dealing with the consequences of climate calamities. Strengthening regional partnerships is the answer to ensuring food security, agriculture with climate smart agendas while protecting soil will do the trick.

Rare and extreme climate events may result in wide power outages or blackouts. The concept of power system resilience has been introduced for focusing on high-impact and low-probability (HILP) events such as a hurricane, heavy snow, and floods. Power system resilience is the ability of a system to reduce the likelihood of blackout or wide power outages due to HILP events. Indeed, in a resilient power system, as the severity of HILP events increases, the rate (but not the amount) of unserved loads diminishes. Suitable measures for managing power system resilience can be classified into three categories in terms of time, known as “resilience-based planning,” “resilience-based response,” and “resilience-based restoration.” The most widely used approaches, methods, and techniques in each of these categories, as well as the future trends for improving the power system resilience are reviewed in this article. The challenges of resilience in power systems with high penetration of renewable energy sources are also discussed in each of these categories.

Reviewed by: The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges ed. by Thomas Banchoff and José Casanova Frederik Vermote The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges. Edited by thomas banchoff and josé casanova. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2016. 299pp. $64.95 (hardcover); $32.95 (paper). This edited volume investigates the dialectic relationship between the Jesuits and globalization from the early modern period to the present. The authors, seven Jesuits and seven lay persons, intend to avoid portraying the process of globalization as “continuous” or “unidirectional” (p. 3) and emphasize the subjective and objective dimensions of it. They also aim to deepen our understanding of both Jesuit and global history through the lens of global mission, education, and justice. Part One, entitled “Historical Perspectives,” consists of seven chapters examining, for the most part, the connections between Jesuit missions and education during the early modern period. Part two, “Contemporary Challenges,” contains six chapters with a focus on Jesuit education and social justice, predominantly viewed from the contemporary period. The concept and processes linked to globalization are contested both within the field of history and across different fields—an anthropologist, political scientist, and historian all examine globalization yet they do not agree upon its definition. The editors acknowledge that within the field of history the debate, unsurprisingly, begins with placing globalization in a specific time period. Due to their focus on the Jesuits, they argue in favor of locating the dawn of globalization in the early modern period. However, this volume is not yet another study in which the Jesuits are typecast as the heralds of early modern globalization. In examining the topics of globalization and the Jesuits concurrently, the first four chapters focus on how the realization of a global ‘otherness’ opened up a unique mentality of Jesuit accommodation: Jesuit missionaries engaged the non-European ‘others’ they encountered in regions outside of Europe “as cultures and not as competing religious systems” (p. 10). The authors unfailingly point out [End Page 290] that this “pragmatic and interactional” (p. 8) approach was limited by regional or even local responses to cultural, political, and economic realities of encounters between European and Asian (or African and American) parties. Ucerler’s, Clooney’s, and Madigan’s chapters investigate Jesuit accommodation—or lack thereof—in the Eurasian continent, whereas Maldavsky’s chapter highlights Jesuit interactions with both native American people and the rapidly expanding colonial societies in Ibero-America. Unlike the first three chapters, Maldavsky focuses less on the viability of Jesuit accommodation; before the eighteenth century, more so than in Africa or Asia, Jesuits were not free of “Western colonial baggage” (p. 11) in the Americas, thus exemplifying the editors’ warning that there was no such thing as a globally uniform Jesuit accommodation. As a comparison of Jesuit missions in Asia and the Americas is still an underused path of research in the field of Jesuit history, it is great that this edited volume does commit to pairing Maldavsky’s research with that of the first three authors. Of those three, Madigan’s contribution most clearly stresses that the Jesuit encounter with the global ‘other’ was not always ‘global’ enough to result in accommodation: for example, the relationship between Muslims and Jesuits never transformed along the lines of an accommodative stance. Part One contains three more chapters besides the aforementioned four. Pavone examines the different types of Anti-Jesuitism and how each of these movements waxed, waned, and was reshaped throughout the three periods of globalization. It is interesting to learn that the Jesuits’ conservative stance toward modernity during the nineteenth century, the modern period, attracted the opposite type of critics as during the post Second Vatican Council’s period (or what the book considers the contemporary period). During this last phase, it was precisely the Church conservatives who were critical of the Jesuits’ tight “embrace of a strong social justice agenda” (p. 112). McGreevy’s and O’Malley’s contributions provide a transition away from the focus on accommodation to one on Jesuit education, and they take the reader from the early modern period to the modern period. In the last chapter of Part One, O’Malley’s chapter, the theme of justice...

Illustrations of urban scenes naturally describe the physical characteristics of the places depicted. These representations also express implicitly broader beliefs which tie the spatial order of the surrounding world to local systems, institutions, and human actions. Images of a city embody, therefore, an ‘urban cosmography’, a concept inspired by early modern artisans' attempts to chart the contours of the world, both known and unknown. Seen from this perspective, historical graphics such as maps, posters, and birds-eye views document a city's position within a continually evolving universal order. This paper will review graphics drawn from the history of one city in particular: Baltimore, Maryland. Like other cities on the eastern seaboard of the US, Baltimore has been represented by diverse visual arts for more than two centuries. With the advent of digital and social media, Baltimore's development will depend even more upon the city's local and global interrelationships. ‘Urban cosmography’ is, therefore, a useful conceptual prism through which one may perceive the link between the city's historical legacy and contemporary urban challenges. One consequence is that visual tropes for traditional urban polarities – ‘growth’ versus ‘decay’, for instance – may be superseded by new symbols that incorporate both.

Book Review: The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges. Edited by Thomas Banchoff and José Casanova

For improving the sustainability and resilience of EU farming systems, it is important to assess their likely responses to future challenges under future scenarios. In the SURE-Farm project, a five-steps framework was developed to assess the resilience of farming systems. The steps are the following: 1) characterizing the farming system (resilience of what?), 2) identifying the challenges (resilience to what?), 3) identifying the desired functions (resilience for which purpose?), 4) assessing resilience capacities, and 5) assessing resilience attributes. For assessing the resilience of future farming systems, we took the same approach as for current farming systems, with the addition that future challenges were placed in the context of a set of possible future scenarios, (i.e., Eur-Agri-SSP scenarios). We evaluated future resilience in 11 case studies across the EU, using a soft coupling of different qualitative and quantitative approaches. The qualitative approach was FoPIA-SUREFarm 2, a participatory approach in which stakeholders identified critical thresholds for current systems, evaluated expected system performance when these thresholds would be exceeded, envisaged alternative future states of the systems (and their impact on indicators and resilience attributes), as well as strategies to get there. Quantitative approaches included models simulating the behavior of the systems under some specific challenges and scenarios. The models differed in assumptions and aspects of the farming systems described: Ecosystem Service modelling focused on the biophysical level (considering land cover and nitrogen fluxes), AgriPoliS considered, with an agent-based approach, socio-economic processes and interactions within the farming system, and System Dynamics, taking a holistic approach, explored some of the feedback loops mechanisms influencing the systems resilience from both a qualitative and quantitative approach. Each method highlighted different aspects of the farming systems. For each case study, results coming from different methods were discussed and compared. The FoPIA-SURE-Farm 2 assessment highlighted that most farming systems are close to critical thresholds, primarily for system challenges, but also for system indicators and resilience attributes. System indicators related to food production and economic viability were often considered to be close to critical thresholds. The alternative systems proposed by stakeholders are mostly adaptations of the current system and not transformations. In most case studies, both the current and alternative systems are moderately compatible with 'Eur-Agri-SSP1 – Agriculture on sustainable paths’, but little with other Eur-Agri-SSPs’. From the point of view of ecosystem services and nitrogen fluxes, the more resilient case studies are those able to provide multiple services at the same time (e.g., hazelnut cultivations in Italy and vegetable and fruit cultivation in Poland, able to provide good levels of both food production and carbon storage) and those well connected with other neighbouring farming systems (e.g., the Dutch case study receiving manure by the livestock sectors). The System Dynamic simulation (applied quantitatively for the Dutch and French case study) highlighted the need to develop resources that can increase farmers’ flexibility (e.g., access to cheap credit, local research and development, and local market). It also showed that innovation, networks, and cooperation contribute to building resilience against economic disturbances while highlighting the challenges for building resilience to environmental threats. From the application of AgriPoliS to the German case study it was concluded that changes in direct payment schemes not only affect the farm size structure, but also the functions of the farming system itself and therefore its resilience. The report showed complementarity between different methods and, above all, between quantitative and qualitative approaches. Qualitative approaches are needed for interaction with stakeholders, understand perceptions of stakeholders, consider available knowledge on all aspects of the farming system, including social dimensions, and perform a good basis for developing and parameterizing quantitative models. Quantitative methods allow quantifying the consequences of mental models, operationalizing the impact of stresses and strategies to tackle them and help to unveil unintended consequences, but are limited in their reach. Both are needed to assess resilience of farming systems and suggest strategies for improvement and to help stakeholders to wider their views regarding potential challenges and ways to tackle them.

The resilience of social-ecological systems (SES) has become a major concern in environmental policy. The ongoing transition towards a bio-based economy essentially aims to address resilience challenges of the fossil-based economy. Its success depends on the resilience of the SES and bio-based production systems (BBPS) on which the bioeconomy rests. This paper introduces the Resilience Policy Design (RPD) framework to analyse and assess how bioeconomy policies address the resilience challenges of SES/BBPS. It combines resilience thinking and the ‘new’ policy design perspective, aiming at comparative research across countries, sectors and policy levels. It comprises five steps: determining relevant context conditions and the policy design space, characterizing bioeconomy policy mixes, identifying affected SES/BBPS and their resilience challenges, assessing the orientation of the policy mix towards different resilience capabilities (robustness, adaptability or transformability) and its resilience-enabling or -constraining elements, and overall assessment. An exemplary application focusing on energy maize in Germany finds a layered policy mix, addressing different resilience concerns over time. It demonstrates the inherently political nature of SES/BBPS resilience that requires inclusive, deliberative policy-making, the importance of policy feedback for adaptive and transformative governance with a long-term perspective, and the need for inter-/transdisciplinary collaboration to develop and assess resilience policies.

An urgent transformation towards sustainability is needed in socio-ecological-technical systems. Cities play a major role in leveraging change to inform local and global sustainability and resilience challenges. Urban sustainability transformation calls for more emphasis on the agency’s role in decision-making processes for urban governance. An integrative literature review was conducted to identify and explore agency features in the decision-making processes of plans, policies, and programs aiming for a shift toward sustainability and resilience in urban systems. The main findings are 10 ‘agency features’ and two ‘conditions for change’ synthesized into a concept map to support urban decision-making processes.

In this work we discuss the concepts of power system reliability and resilience and examine the modern trends affecting them, including renewable energy resources, digitalization, global warming and microgrids. We analyze how modern approaches can both decrease and enhance system reliability and resilience. In the course of our research, we found that the considered innovations inherently bring new challenges and potential issues into the system, but if integrated and utilized properly, they can enhance the systems’ reliability and resilience instead of damaging it.

System resilience is the ability of organizational, hardware and software systems to mitigate the severity and likelihood of failures or losses, to adapt to changing conditions, and to respond appropriately after the fact. Challenger, Columbia, Chernobyl and Bhopal are examples of such failures. System resilience goes beyond traditional disciplines, such as reliability and system safety to achieve its goal. System resilience requires that technical and managerial processes be executed as a unified whole. System resilience employs the systems approach at product and infrastructure levels. The infrastructure system includes such nodes as the developer, the customer, the user, the maintainer, and the operator. System resilience requires that systems engineering principles be practiced across organizational boundaries and to a greater level of detail than is common in today's world. System resilience incorporates the principles of organizational psychology to develop beneficial paradigms within all nodes of the infrastructure. The combination of capabilities, culture and infrastructure forms the basic framework of system resilience. A key aspect of catastrophes is emergence, that is, characteristics of a system that cannot be predicted from the characteristics of the components. Sometimes emergence results from the negative interaction among two or more elements of the system, which, when acting alone, perform benignly. While positive, or desirable, emergence is widely studied, negative, or undesirable, emergence is of interest in the study of resilience. Prediction of emergence and design of adaptive systems that will survive emergent events is a major challenge of resilience. Adaptability, agility and robustness are the characteristics of a system that allow it to survive a disruption. Although the principles of adaptability, agility and robustness have been formulated and shown to reflect the characteristics of systems that have survived disruption, the actual implementation of them lie largely in the heuristics of systems architecting.

The optimization of urban multi-source water supply systems is essential for addressing the growing challenges of water allocation, cost management, and system resilience in modern cities. This study introduces a graph-theory-based optimization model to analyze the structural and operational dynamics of urban water supply systems, incorporating constraints such as water quality, pressure, and system connectivity. Using Lishui City as a case study, the model evaluates three water allocation plans to meet the projected 2030 water demand. Advanced algorithms, including Floyd’s shortest path algorithm and the GA-COA-SA hybrid optimization algorithm, were employed to address constraints such as pipeline pressure, water quality attenuation, and nonlinear flow dynamics. Results indicate a 1.4% improvement in cost-effectiveness compared to the current allocation strategy, highlighting the model’s capability to enhance efficiency. Among the evaluated options, Plan 2 emerges as the most cost-effective solution, achieving a supply capacity of 4.5920 × 105 m3/d with the lowest annual cost of 5.7015 × 107 yuan, highlighting the model’s capability to improve both efficiency and resilience. This study prioritizes cost-efficiency tailored to regional challenges, distinguishing itself from prior research that emphasized redundancy and water quality analysis. The findings demonstrate the potential of graph-theoretic approaches combined with advanced optimization techniques to enhance decision-making for sustainable urban water management.