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How can biodiversity serve a role in agricultural resilience to climate change, both in supporting ecosystem services, and for adaptability of livelihoods?
Posted on August 7th, 2009Categorized as Biodiversity Tagged as agriculture, Biodiversity, livelihoods, resilience
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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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In terms of livelihood risks and planning challenges, is rainfall variability more significant than climate change?
Posted on August 8th, 2009Categorized as Climate Tagged as climate change, livelihoods, rain, water
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Rainfall patterns typically vary in a basin. This variability presents major risks to farmers’ livelihoods and challenges to planners to create proper structures for water storage and conveyance. With climate change, the frequency of extreme events is expected to increase and make the impacts of variability more pronounced. It is therefore important to clarify the significance of rainfall variability and suggest approaches to document and deal with the challenges involved.
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What are the most effective and cost-efficient ways to influence local land use decision-making in order to achieve sustainable outcomes?
Posted on July 24th, 2009Categorized as Interdisciplinary, Social-Ecological Systems Tagged as land-use, livelihoods, natural resources
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A better understanding of the factors driving local land use decision-making is crucial to formulate well-targeted policies and interventions that provide the right incentives for land users to achieve socially desired outcomes. Such interventions should have long-term time horizons and concurrently maintain or increase the natural resource base, safeguard or improve local livelihoods, and attain the necessary benefits for man and nature at minimum costs.
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How will the growing human population change the land cover (albedo), water and atmosphere composition in the next 20-50 years and what feedbacks will occur as symptoms of our planet resilience?
Posted on August 29th, 2009Categorized as Earth System, Social-Ecological Systems Tagged as atmosphere, creative strategies, feedbacks, land, livelihoods, population, resilience, water
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Feedbacks will create new conditions for our species that will have to evolve to adapt to polluted air, polluted water and a changed climate. The sooner we start paying attention to these feedbacks that will cause diseases, migrations, wars, famines, the sooner we can invest in creative strategies to improve or maintain human’s livelihoods and stop wasting time and energy on useless pursuits.
