Agricultural Productivity under Climate Change and the Dynamics of Rural Economic Resilience: Adaptation Pathways from Farms to Households and Territories

This paper examines the relationship between climate change, agricultural productivity, and rural economic resilience by integrating evidence on climatic pressures, farm-level adaptation, and broader rural transformation. Climate change affects agricultural production through rising temperatures, heat stress, rainfall variability, drought, water scarcity, soil degradation, pests, and other interacting environmental pressures. These effects are transmitted beyond crop yields through farm income, employment, food security, agricultural value chains, and the economic stability of rural territories. The paper shows that agricultural resilience depends on farmers’ capacity to adopt complementary adaptation strategies, including crop diversification, improved soil management, climate-smart agriculture, water-management technologies, climate information, agricultural insurance, and other risk-management mechanisms. At the household level, livelihood diversification, migration, entrepreneurship, access to productive assets, and institutional support can reduce dependence on climate-sensitive agricultural activities. At the territorial level, resilient agricultural value chains, market access, infrastructure, local product valorization, and non-farm employment contribute to absorbing and adapting to climatic disturbances. The analysis therefore approaches resilience as a multidimensional process connecting agricultural productivity, household adaptive capacity, food security, and rural economic transformation. The findings suggest that effective climate adaptation requires coordinated interventions combining productive, financial, institutional, social, and territorial mechanisms rather than isolated technological responses