Robustness of livestock farmers to climate variability: a case study in Uruguay

Increased awareness about climate change has motivated farmers, researchers, and policy makers worldwide to design “climate robust farming systems” that may be at the same time productive and sustainable in face of climatic risks, including climate change (Meinke et al., 2006). The terms stability, resilience, robustness, resistance, among others, are used widely in the literature to refer generally to the capacity to respond to risks, but often with unclear meanings and sometimes conflicting definitions (Grimm and Wissel, 1997). Operational definitions and quantitatively measures for these concepts are urgently needed in order to design climate robust systems and empirically compare systems with different robustness levels. Furthermore, it is relevant to understand how robustness is affected by technological and structural features of farming systems such as farm size, resources, inputs (Reidsma et al., 2007). In this paper we propose operational indicators to quantify robustness dimensions at the farm level and test the hypotheses that structural and technological features of farms impact climate robustness using past data from a group of livestock farms in Uruguay.