Climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves (MHWs) and mass mortality events (MMEs) of marine organisms are one of their main ecological impacts. Here, we show that during the 2015–2019 period, the Mediterranean Sea has experienced exceptional thermal conditions resulting in the onset of five consecutive years of widespread MMEs across the basin. These MMEs affected thousands of kilometers of coastline from the surface to 45 m, across a range of marine habitats and taxa (50 taxa across 8 phyla). Significant relationships were found between the incidence of MMEs and the heat exposure associated with MHWs observed both at the surface and across depths. Our findings reveal that the Mediterranean Sea is experiencing an acceleration of the ecological impacts of MHWs which poses an unprecedented threat to its ecosystems' health and functioning. Overall, we show that increasing the resolution of empirical observation is critical to enhancing our ability to more effectively understand and manage the consequences of climate change.

The Atlantic crab Callinectes sapidus was recently recorded in Tunisia and presents an invasive behavior. This study aims to evaluate its socio-economic impacts on small-scale fisheries and to analyze variations in chemical composition, fatty acids profile, and nutritive value according to sex and edible tissues. Socio-economic surveys via face-to-face revealed a decline in fishermen’s income from 15% to even 70% (damages on fishing nets and catches). Muscles yield of Callinectes sapidus ranged between 36.07±2.84% and 42.83±6.53% respectively for females and males. All the analyzed tissues contained high protein contents (> 23%) and particularly cephalothorax muscles reaching 27.05±0.16%. This new exotic food can be recommended in low fat diets since it contained less than 5% of total fats. The fatty acid profile was dominated by the polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) for both sexes and all the analyzed tissues. Eicosapentaenoic acid, docosahexaenoic acid and arachidonic acid were the most abundant PUFA in all tissues ranging respectively from 9.31% to 15.64%, from 8.74% to 13.78% and between 6.81% and 9.21%. All the nutritional indexes of lipids indicated that this crab could be beneficial for human health. In addition, it constitutes a new marine resource with high economic opportunity.

Sustainable agri-food value chains increasingly depend on smallholders' capacity to participate in markets in stable, remunerative and upgrade-oriented ways. Yet in conflict-affected and politically constrained settings, market integration is weakened by mobility restrictions, insecure logistics, payment disruptions, volatile input systems, thin market information and uncertain enforcement. This integrative review synthesizes peer-reviewed evidence on how these constraints reshape smallholder integration across agricultural value chains and how governance and institutional arrangements can reduce, or sometimes reproduce, market exclusion. A structured narrative search of Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar was organized around smallholders, market integration, agricultural value chains and conflict or political constraint. Evidence was coded across seven diagnostic dimensions: inputs and supplies, production capacity and technology, end-markets and trade, value chain governance, sustainable production and energy use, value chain finance, and the enabling business and socio-political environment. The synthesis shows that governance and institutions operate as a conditional bridge: cooperatives, contracting, trader coordination, market-support institutions and public enabling arrangements can lower transaction costs and stabilize exchange, but only where transparency, credible enforcement, fair risk-sharing and protection against opportunism are present. The review concludes with a measurement-focused research agenda for resilient and sustainable value-chain integration under constraint.

The sustainability of date palm cultivation is a critical research focus due to its vital role in food security and the resilience of agricultural systems in arid regions. This study evaluates the sustainability of date palm farms by examining how distinct oasis typologies, traditional and modern, influence three core dimensions: agro-ecological, socio-territorial, and economic. Employing the IDEA framework (Indicateurs de Durabilité des Exploitations Agricoles) and statistical analyses, field data from 60 farms in Tunisia’s Tozeur and Kebili regions were assessed. The results revealed marked heterogeneity in sustainability performance, strongly structured by oasis type. Traditional oases exhibited higher agro-ecological sustainability but greater economic vulnerability, while modern oases proved more economically robust yet less environmentally sustainable. These findings highlight a clear trade-off between environmental integrity and economic performance, highlighting the need for differentiated strategies to enhance the overall sustainability of oasis agricultural systems.

Time preferences play a critical role in the agri‐food value chains of low‐income countries, impacting the choices of local operators, including innovation uptake. This paper assesses the association between smallholder farmers' individual characteristics, their exposure to diverse adverse events, and their intertemporal choices using in‐the‐field experiments conducted across five African countries. By jointly estimating time and risk preferences, we find that farmers who have experienced social setbacks during the previous year are more likely to be patient. This suggests that time preferences may vary over time, particularly when farmers are exposed to social distress (e.g., food shortage, health issues, violence, or crime). Moreover, we find gender to be a prominent factor associated with farmers' time preferences, with female farmers showing greater patience. These findings hold direct implications for both research and public policy initiatives aimed at influencing agricultural choices in the aftermath of social distress. By understanding the factors influencing time preferences, policy practitioners can develop more targeted and effective strategies to support smallholder farmers, thereby enhancing the resilience of agri‐food value chains in low‐income countries.

Sustainable agri-food value chains depend on the capacity of smallholders to participate in markets in stable, remunerative and upgrade-oriented ways, yet in conflict-affected and politically constrained settings this capacity is weakened by mobility restrictions, insecure logistics, payment disruption, volatile inputs, thin market information and uncertain enforcement. This study aims to explain how such constraints reshape smallholder market integration and under what conditions governance and institutional arrangements stabilize, rather than reproduce, market exclusion. An integrative review was conducted following established methodological guidance. A structured search of Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar, extended by citation tracing, returned 821 records; after de-duplication and two-stage screening against explicit eligibility criteria, 44 studies were retained, of which 35 empirical studies form the evidence corpus. Each study was coded with a five-field extraction matrix across seven diagnostic dimensions—inputs and supplies, production capacity and technology, end-markets and trade, value-chain governance, sustainable production and energy use, value-chain finance, and the business and socio-political environment—and appraised for methodological quality with the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool, so that heterogeneous designs were weighted rather than treated as equivalent. The synthesis shows that the most binding constraints are transactional and institutional rather than purely technical, and that governance operates as a conditional bridge: cooperatives, contracting, trader coordination, market-support institutions and public enabling arrangements lower transaction costs and stabilize exchange only where transparency, credible enforcement, fair risk-sharing and protection against opportunism are present; where these are absent, the same arrangements shift risk onto farmers. The review derives a measurement-focused, equity-sensitive research agenda for resilient and sustainable value-chain integration under constraints.