Towards an assessment of adaptive capacity of the European agricultural sector to droughts

Abstract

Analyses of climate change vulnerability and risk have been steadily evolving, and have moved from an impact-focused towards a more risk-based approach. In the risk and vulnerability communities, the relevance of resilience and adaptive capacity (AC) are increasingly emphasized. Another emerging analytical framework is the idea of assessing AC and resilience in terms of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA), which studies welfare as a function of multiple forms of assets (‘capital’) that systems and agents may utilize to both recover as well as increase resilience in the future. We assess a new method for assessing AC at a sectoral level and operationalize AC measurement based on an SLA to assess the ability of the European agricultural sector to adapt to extreme droughts. We create a set of indicators which highlight areas of high or low AC, forecast to estimated times the world will reach 2° of warming using Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) and Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios to drive AC indicator projections based on a fixed effects model. We find that based on this approach, Central and Northern Europe rank higher in overall capacity than countries on the periphery, and projections to 2 °C do not change results to a large degree. We critically reflect on the use of this approach and suggest possible use cases for results in larger studies of sectoral vulnerability, and highlight key data gaps and the need for a stronger empirical basis for selection of indicators, which constrain our ability to assess AC.