Climate Change and Natural Resource Scarcity: A Literature Review on Dry Farming

Abstract

The agricultural sector is facing the challenge of climate change, which is increasing difficulties to the activity and the economic sustainability of the primary sector, also affecting farmers’ revenues. There is a growing need to support policy makers’ decisions and help them develop cross-sectional strategies to support farmers. To this aim and to collect useful information for policy makers and stakeholders for the development of efficient strategies for the management of dryland farming, the paper examines how this issue has been analysed in the literature. A mixed method, based on a systematic literature review and a bibliometric analysis of 79 Scopus documents using VOSviewer software, was applied. Major results highlight the need to implement participatory policy interventions so as to include farmers. It was possible to summarise the main adaptive and technical interventions implemented by farmers. The results indicated the importance of the concept of the resilience of territories and the need to analyse agricultural systems by considering their multifunctionality. The innovativeness of this study relies on its relationships with several policy aspects and not only with purely technical and agronomical features, analysing thus the issue from the under-investigated perspective of the global challenge, contributing to filling this literature gap.