The Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS) are responsible for the flow of information, knowledge, and innovation between the actors of the agricultural and food sector, as well as between those engaged in education, research, and extension. Strengthening cooperation and interaction between actors has become a cross-cutting objective of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The CAP Strategic Plans in the Member States aim to develop agriculture through two interventions (support of EIP operational groups and the provision of knowledge exchange and dissemination actions). However, the AKIS goes beyond the CAP support, as several additional actions and incentives under national competence are needed for a modern, knowledge-based agricultural economy and well-functioning AKIS. Each EU Member State has developed its own AKIS, according to its specific conditions and needs. Previous studies on the comparison of AKIS across Member States have attempted to collect and analyse the specificities of each Member State, mainly through primary data collection. These studies are less capable of providing an objective comparison of AKIS systems in the Member States based on a common methodology. Although there are several indicator systems available to measure innovation performance, these indicator systems address the national/regional innovation performance but do not...

The agricultural sector and how it relates to climate change is today emerging as a central subject of debate and critique, because it is heavily impacted by, and at the same time, a primary contributor to, climate change. The intertwined, complex relationship between the sector and climate change is among the unprecedented challenges now facing the European Union (EU). The complexity of the relationship calls for the establishment of a sustainable, future climate-proof, adapted and resilient sector with strong adaptive capacity. This paper argues that over the past decades, strong emphasis has been placed on how to mitigate the negative effects of climate change across the sector, causing it to fall behind in terms of adaptation. Although adaptation is now part of the sector’s development agenda, sectoral adaptation performance across member states remains low. In order to justify an accelerated adaptation process across the sector, the paper develops a Relative Climate Change Adaption Index (RCCAI) for the sector based on Eurostat data. The analysis shows that there is no single member state across the EU whose agricultural sector can be considered as fully climate-adapted (resilient), and thus validates the hypothesis that adaption efforts must be stepped up across the sector....