Background and Research Approach

Today’s climatic extremes – those rare and often severe deviations from the historical, normal weather of a given climate – are expected to increase in frequency, magnitude, and duration due to the onset of global climate change over the coming decades, according to the most recent, 6th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report (2021). The implications of worsening climatic extremes on the agricultural sector, such as droughts, waterlogging, and heatwaves, are generally well understood. Nevertheless, there remains a great deal of uncertainty concerning the vulnerability of European agricultural production to an array of future extreme climate events and scenarios.

However, recent and relevant literature on the impacts of climatic extremes on European crop farms performance have generally only considered specific countries; very few others have a pan-European outlook. Moreover, these have tended to focus exclusively on the impacts of extremes on single outcome measures of performance, namely crop yields – and less so on other, important productivity or monetary measures. Thirdly, most research has estimated the historical impact of climatic extremes in terms of only the expected impact and variance, thereby insufficiently examining the shape of outcome distributions through higher-order moments – with the consequence that a comparative assessment of outcome distributions between a historical baseline and future climate scenarios has not been done. Lastly, there are a lack of sensitivities between modelling approaches for assessing the impacts of climate extremes.

Thus, this STSM project was conceived with the overarching aim of addressing the above issues by drawing on collaboration with and the expertise of the Department of Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University, USA. The department is highly competent in weather risk management, climate change economics, and agricultural insurance. In particular, this STSM project sought after methodological advances in estimating outcome density distributions from historical weather data and recovering mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis parameters for several farm-level performance indicators (yields of key European crops; farm revenues; and farm productivity). This is then extended, according to climate models, to simulate climate-shifted outcome distributions. Moreover, this project is also able to make use of preeminent European data sources: the EU Farm Accountancy Data Network for farm economic data; and ERA5 weather data from the Copernicus Weather Service.

Role of the Short-Term Scientific Mission

While immediate results are still in the process of being produced, the contributions of this research are manifold. It is amongst the few to comprehensively evaluate the economic risk posed by past, present, and future climate regimes across Europe at the farm-level; and at a finer scale hitherto unutilised. Uniquely, since it recovers the higher-moments of the outcome distributions, the research sheds greater light on the economic impact of tail-events (i.e., those most negatively extreme). These results will be presented at the Agricultural Economic Society (AES) conference in March 2026, and is leading towards a scientific manuscript aimed to be submitted at a relevant Q1 journal this year. In the longer-term, a pipeline of papers is envisioned that will extend the current findings. Foremost amongst these is planned research to expand on the mechanisms of farm resilience to climate extremes; what enhances farm resilience to climate change, be it economic or environmental policy interventions, diversification, or landscape composition.

Scientific Exchange & Integration

This STSM has offered a unique opportunity for intercontinental collaboration, and the establishment of mutually beneficial academic and scientific links. Besides the methodological collaboration, embedding with Kansas State University also fostered scientific exchange – several seminars were organised during the month, including a short lecture that I had given to the department. It also animated both academic and cultural discussions around work and social culture, the state of academia for younger researchers, and opportunities for future employment and of collaboration.

Organization, Framework Conditions & Outlook

The STSM was, overall, an excellent experience that was well-organised by the Competence Centre Landscape Resilience. The application process was smooth and transparent, and the funding provided for the specified aims was sufficient (and the costs were overestimated). The aims set out by the proposal are well on their way to being reached.

• Seminars: I was pleased to be invited to present both my past work on mixed farming and agroforestry systems in Europe as well as my proposed research collaboration with the Department of Agricultural Economics at KSU. It was also a pleasure to participate in other seminars involving several other academics across the USA and their work.
• Collaboration: I enjoyed the many opportunities to exchange research ideas and issues with many individuals from the Department of Agricultural Economics, from Master students, PhDs, post-docs, and professors.
• Culture: Visiting the agricultural heartland of the USA, partaking in several American college traditions such as tailgating at a football game, homecoming parades, and joining several fraternity and sorority events, and being hosted for the month by a KSU old-timer.