Extreme weather events, including droughts, heatwaves, intense rainfall and episodic non-seasonal frosts, are increasingly disrupting soil functionality and agricultural production stability. In Mediterranean agricultural landscapes, these pressures interact with long-standing soil degradation processes such as declining organic matter, erosion, salinisation, compaction and reduced biological activity, creating new risks for food security and land management. There is therefore a growing need for integrated, spatially explicit tools that can assess not only the current condition of soils, but also their capacity to buffer climatic stress, recover after disturbance and support stable crop production over time.

The Soil Resilience and Food Security Index (SRFSI) is proposed as a composite framework for evaluating the resilience of agricultural landscapes under climate-extreme conditions. The index integrates four complementary dimensions: Soil Resilience Capacity, representing the ability of soils to sustain carbon storage, water regulation, nutrient cycling, structural stability and biological functioning; Biological and Agroecological Management, capturing the contribution of practices such as compost and manure application, biofertilisers, microbial inoculants, cover crops, crop-residue retention, reduced tillage, diversified rotations and landscape elements that enhance biodiversity and water regulation; Climate-Extreme Resilience, assessing exposure and response to drought, heatwaves, heavy rainfall, erosion risk, salinity stress and crop-relevant non-seasonal frosts; and Food Security Stability, reflecting yield stability, stress-year yield retention, production reliability and post-event recovery.

Through SRFSI, a framework is proposed that can function both as a baseline diagnostic approach and as a scenario-based tool for assessing soil and production resilience. By comparing index scores under current conditions, climate-extreme scenarios and post-intervention conditions, resilience loss and adaptation gain can be quantified across different crops, soil types and management systems. Remote-sensing proxies, open soil and climate datasets, field measurements and farm-management information are combined to support implementation at field, farm, municipal and regional scales. This approach is intended to support the identification of vulnerable agricultural areas, the evaluation of biological and agroecological soil-management interventions, and the design of strategies that help maintain productive, resilient and food-secure agricultural systems under increasing climate uncertainty.