Climate Resilience Assessment for Central and Eastern European Local Food Systems

Resilience of food systems is one of the most important challenges of climate change. If we are not able to transform our food production and distribution systems into new, adaptive structures, we may experience hardship in Europe not seen for centuries on our continent. Yet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the most likely level of global warming will be 3°C by the end of the century. It is clear, therefore, that climate adaptation and resilience are a crucial matter.

Many initiatives address food system sustainability in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, and several explicitly incorporate climate adaptation into their actions. The initiatives are local, often highly sophisticated and democratic. While many of them are theoretically scalable, we have to admit that in their wider context, they still seem to be outliers who will not change the unfolding climate scenarios fundamentally.

In resilience theory, every localised system is part of a larger regional and even larger global context. This Panarchy of systems will define together the social and ecological outcomes in any specific place. The concept of Panarchy may give both hope and despair. It is indeed possible (and there are documented cases) that localised initiatives with initially limited scope change their wider context with transformative power — while it is also true that it is challenging to maintain pockets of resilience in a shifting landscape.

In 2027, the European Union will start its new Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) and with this, a new cycle will start in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). These instruments would have the access and power to scale up examples of resilience food systems to a continental level. The localised initiatives could provide crucial knowledge and experience for such a step and, perhaps even more importantly, they would provide a narrative, a vision for a different food system.