How can biodiversity serve a role in agricultural resilience to climate change, both in supporting ecosystem services, and for adaptability of livelihoods?

Biodiversity has formed the basis for human food production systems and human livelihoods for millennia. Due to agricultural intensification, land use change, and global warming, agricultural biodiversity is at high risk. The in situ genetic resources of crops and livestock are threatened, and also, many stress-adapted landraces are being replaced by modern high-input varieties. These losses create important problems for generating the genetics and breeding programs to adapt to climate change. Resilience can also be potentially accomplished with greater reliance on complex multispecies systems, including microbes, soil fauna, and beneficial insects. To increase adaptive capacity, appropriate social, cultural and economic contexts are needed for research programs that involve the participation of those who are intended to benefit from research. This will require adaptive management and long-term alliances between diverse stakeholders that increase the coping ability during unpredictable periods of resource limitation, e.g., drought. In a wider context, at the landscape scale, biodiversity serves important functions that enhance the environmental resource base upon which agriculture depends, e.g., water purification in nearby wildland waterways, and regional effects on microclimate and water availability due to forest cover. There is still much to be learned about how decision-makers at various scales can work together to support research and coping strategies to manage the mosaic of ecosystems in a landscape in ways that support sustainability and high productivity as the climate changes, and to enhance diversification that will permit adaptive responses in response to extreme events.

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