Climate variability -farm vulnerability nexus per se can have severe ramifications over declining agricultural productivity, poverty, food insecurity and sustainability of farming itself. As increased crop output, with the arable land frontier closing in, will have to come from higher yields alone this nexus could only worsen the prevailing scenario. Do we have any research evidence or back-up particularly on this nexus?
A good place to start is to study Chapter 7 in the Volume entitled "Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability" of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). You can read it here:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg2/WGIIAR5-Chap7_FINAL.pdf
Much depends on what farming system you are considering. Looking into the literature on seasonal climate forecasts as risk management tools, there is accumulating evidence that there are so many other prominent drivers of risk management (such as market instability, labor access, policy changes, fuel and input costs, insurance investments, debt load, etc.) that the benefits of SCFs are not yet as great as many proponents had hoped. Industrial and smallholder systems can be surprisingly similar in many of these regards, though globally, smallholders are more like to risks associated with land tenure insecurity.
Vulnerability is too often cast as a linear function to one stressor (climate variability), but if you actually want to understand vulnerability as a nexus in which farmers make decisions and pursue their livelihoods, these other facets of vulnerability need to be taken into account.
If ag production is well below its potential for a given region and production system, then it may be very sensitive to climate variability. However, ag development will help this become more resilient through a variety of means (if the simple equation of higher production - higher income is operative). This essentially becomes an ag development issue and governance issues that either help or hamper farmers is very important.
The irony is that if a system is close to its potential production, climate variability will be close to production variability, because all other factors are accounted for. Managing for seasonal variability then becomes key. Strategies such as diversification are also important.
If a system becomes pushed close to its threshold for viability (the production envelope, essentially), then the activity will change.
So there are differing strategies depending on where a system is at in terms of its production and potential production. Other environmental pressures can also reduce productivity, and rising land prices can change productive areas to non-agricultural land use.
This means there is not a single nexus. However, the notion of peak food is important and understanding how these different system processes interact at the global scale is important. At the local scale, every act that improves productivity, while sustaining the broader environment, is beneficial.
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