Stability and resilience in farm systems (#journal)

Stability, robustness, vulnerability and resilience of agricultural systems. A review

This article reviews four concepts: stability, robustness, vulnerability and resilience, commonly used but sometimes difficult to distinguish. Main findings are: (1) agricultural systems face different types of perturbations, from small to extreme; (2) stability, robustness, vulnerability and resilience are increasingly applied to predict the system response under changing conditions; (3) the four concepts are distinguished by the nature of the system components and by the type of perturbation studied; (4) assessment methods must be tested under contrasting situations; and (5) the major options allowing system adaptation under extreme changes are the increase of diversity and the increase of  adaptive capacity.