Sustainability and resilience against climate change provided by a territorial crop-livestock system

Abstract

The development of territorial crop-livestock systems where exchanges between crops and livestock farms are managed in a synergistic way is seen as an opportunity to increase the sustainability and resilience of specialized agricultural systems against climatic disturbances. This study presents an innovative integrated assessment and modelling approach, based on the MAELIA platform, to assess the socio-economic and environmental sustainability and resilience of a territorial crop-livestock system. It is applied to a case study in the Vendée region (west France) where arable farms grow pulses to provide livestock farms with rich-protein feeds to achieve protein self-sufficiency, under two contrasting future climate pathways (RCP2.6 and RCP8.5) until 2050. Sustainability and resilience of this new organization are evaluated through 12 performances levels, including ecosystem services, and 3 criteria of dynamics for these 12 performances: variability, trend and resistance. Results show that the synergetic organization between farms can be sufficient to achieve protein self-sufficiency and to increase sustainability through the socio-economic performances of farmers and climate mitigation. Conversely, the degradation of some of the environmental performances points for a need to identify improved management practices. Regarding resilience, the new organization showed an overall increase in variability and degraded trends, while demonstrating greater resistance to shocks. We further discuss routes for the improvement of the MAELIA platform to help stakeholder identify the potential impacts and trade-offs of different scenarios in order to make informed decisions, minimize unintended consequences and increase resilience of agricultural systems.