Professor Sandra Ricart delivered a timely and insightful lecture on the intersection of climate change, agriculture, and populism in Europe. She explored how structural and demographic challenges, including a declining farming population and economic precarity, have fueled widespread farmer protests across the continent. Prof. Ricart emphasized how these grievances, while rooted in genuine hardship, have increasingly been exploited by far-right populist movements eager to position themselves as defenders of rural interests against European institutions. Her analysis highlighted the pressures created by climate change, policy reforms, and global market dynamics, and she called for more inclusive, responsive, and sustainable agricultural policies. Prof. Ricart’s lecture provided participants with a critical understanding of rural Europe’s evolving political and environmental landscape.
Reported by ECPS Staff
The ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, held online from July 7–11, 2025, brought together scholars and participants under the theme “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders.” On Tuesday, July 8, 2025, the third lecture of the program featured Professor Sandra Ricart, who delivered an insightful presentation titled “Climate Change, Food, Farmers, and Populism.”
The session was moderated by Dr. Vlad Surdea-Hernea, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Forest, Environmental and Natural Resource Policy at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. Dr. Surdea-Hernea’s research on the intersection of populism, climate, and democracy provided a fitting context for introducing Prof. Ricart’s work.
Prof. Sandra Ricart is Professor at the Environmental Intelligence for Global Change Lab within the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. A geographer by training, she holds a PhD in Geography – Experimental Sciences and Sustainability from the University of Girona (2014) and has held research positions in Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States. Her research focuses on climate change narratives, farmers’ perceptions, adaptive capacity, and participatory environmental governance. She is also Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Water Resources Development and PLOS One, and serves as an expert evaluator for the European Commission.
At the outset of her lecture, Prof. Ricart emphasized that her presentation was grounded in a collective, collaborative research tradition—a reflection of shared knowledge developed through interdisciplinary and cross-national scholarly networks. Acknowledging the diversity of her audience’s expertise, she framed her lecture as both a conceptual overview and an empirical analysis, blending theory with practical illustrations drawn from recent European developments.
Her talk was organized around several key themes: an overview of the structural and demographic features of European agriculture, public and farmer perceptions of climate change and agricultural policy, the socioeconomic challenges farmers face, and the role of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as Europe’s primary agricultural governance framework. She explained how these structural factors intersect with climate change impacts, shaping both agricultural livelihoods and political discourses.
A central theme of Prof. Ricart’s lecture was how recent farmer protests across Europe reflect not only deep-seated socioeconomic grievances but also how these grievances have been increasingly co-opted by far-right populist movements. She raised the critical question of whether this emerging nexus between agricultural discontent and populism represents a transient political episode or the early stages of a deeper realignment in European rural politics.
Throughout the session, Prof. Ricart’s analysis provided participants with a nuanced, multi-scalar understanding of how climate change, policy pressures, and populist narratives are converging on European farming communities, offering a timely foundation for further reflection and debate on rural Europe’s evolving political landscape.
