Agronomy for Sustainable Development - Call for Papers: Virtual Issue on “Climate resilience of agroforestry and mixed farming systems”

Climate change comes as a formidable challenge for agriculture. In the upcoming decades, the resilience of agriculture will be challenged by, amongst others, increased temperature variability, more pronounced drought periods, altered conditions for farmland species. In addition, global change will continue to affect the socio-economic and political context of the agricultural sector. The resilience of agricultural systems towards those challenges will thus become increasingly important. It is often hypothesized that more diverse farming systems, such as agroforestry or mixed farming, are more resilient than less diversified monocropping or livestock systems. In this Virtual Issue, we want to explore this hypothesis by bringing together state-of-the-art scientific evidence for the resilience of farming systems. We will include articles on:

• The conceptual framework of the resilience of agricultural systems, appropriate indicators and evaluation methods
• Empirical evidence from long-term agroforestry and mixed farming experiments on their resilience against climate change as compared to monocropping and pure livestock systems
• Modelling the resilience of agricultural systems against climate change: Model development, scenarios, bio-physical and bio-economic evaluations

Contributions including inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches are welcome.

Contributions will be sought from – but are not exclusive to – the European H2020 research project “Agroforestry and mixed farming systems – Participatory research to drive the transition to a resilient and efficient land use in Europe”.

Important dates

First call for manuscripts: 31 May 2023

Submission closure: After the peer-reviewing process, manuscripts accepted for publication before December 2024 may be included in the virtual issue. Therefore, we strongly advise you to submit your articles no later than June 2024.

Submission process

Manuscripts within the scope of ASD (this opens in a new tab) should be submitted online as regular articles (review and research articles) and should follow the journal submission guidelines. The cover letter submitted with the manuscript should have the following heading: “submission to the OFE Virtual Issue.” Manuscripts will be handled by guest associate editors and peer-reviewed as regular articles. If accepted, they will be published in the journal before being gathered in the virtual issue.

Guest Editors
Klaus Jarosch, Agroscope, 8046 Zurich, Switzerland
Jonathan Eden, Coventry University, Warwickshire, CV8 3LG, UK
Felix Herzog, Agroscope, 8046 Zurich, Switzerland

Agronomy for Sustainable Development (ASD) is an international peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes original experimental, empirical and theoretical research articles, review articles and meta-analyses leading to enhanced sustainability for agricultural and food systems. See the full aims and scope of ASD here.