Agricultural Sector Resilience Progress Indicator (I.9)

The Agricultural Sector Resilience Dashboard (Indicator I.9 / C.45) combines harmonised data from the CAP Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (PMEF), Eurostat, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the European Environment Agency (EEA), the dashboard consolidates heterogeneous information into a policy relevant, but easily interpretable, resilience score of how well EU-27 farming systems can withstand and adapt to climate-related shocks. Two complementary pillars are reported for every Member State and for the EU-27 as a whole:
- Status shows the sector's resilience capacity at a given point in time, capturing both its strengths and vulnerabilities, benchmarked against the EU-27 median in a 15-year reference period
- Progress tracks changes or improvements in resilience from the reference period to the evaluation period, both evaluated over rolling 15 year period, thereby revealing how far the sector has adapted to emerging climatic and economic pressures
In the present release the reference period is 2001-2015 and the evaluation period 2007-2021.

Future updates of the I.09 indicator will adopt a moving time window approach, maintaining the 15-year interval for both reference and evaluation periods to ensure continuity and consistency in resilience assessment. This design keeps the indicator scientifically robust and policy relevant, allowing regular updates that reflect evolving environmental and socio economic conditions across the Union.
Resilience is operationalised through one financial and three bio-physical sub indicators, each reflecting a different dimension of resilience related to climate change:
- The financial component is covered by the Agricultural Factor Income Resilience index (AFIRi) quantifies the economic stability and income resilience of real factor income per annual work unit (AWU), derived from the PMEF C.25/I.3 indicator, indicating the sector’s ability to absorb revenue shocks and sustain livelihoods.
- The Agriculture Production Resilience index (APRi) measures the stability in cereal output, indicating the reliability of production under intensifying weather variability.
- The Water Resilience index (WRi) applied the Water Exploitation Index Plus (PMEF C.38/I.17) to measure regional aspects of seasonal pressure on renewable water resources, indicating irrigation driven hydrological stress. And,
- The Soil Resilience index (SRi) tracks trends in soil organic carbon stocks, a key determinant of the soil’s capacity to buffer environmental stressors and support agro ecosystem services.

Each sub-indicator is scored 0 (below median), 0.5 (within median bandwidth) or 1 (above median) for both Status and Progress. The four scores are summed to give composite values from 0 (lowest resilience) to 4 (highest resilience). This transparent scale lets policymakers and stakeholders quickly see where resilience is strong, where it is stagnating, and where targeted action is most urgently needed. By integrating consistent, openly available data across economic and environmental dimensions, I.9 provides the EU with a single, comparable metric for tracking agricultural resilience over time and guiding evidence-based adaptation strategies.
Publisher name: Joint Research Centre
Publisher URL: https://commission.europa.eu/about/departments-and-executive-agencies/joint-research-centre
Last updated: 2026-03-11T16:43:21Z