Resilience - NRN-LCEE

Sustainable intensification and
agro-ecological resilience
Exploring Resilience
May 18, 2016 SSE Swalec,Cardiff, Wales
David J. Abson: abson@Leuphana-uni.de
Key question
How do farmers seek to build, intensive, biodiverse, resilient farms in
the face of ecological and socio-economic perturbations?
Sustainable intensification
Sustainability: Balancing human well-being and environmental
integrity including the maintenance of resources over time (Kuhlman
and Farrington 2010).
Sustainable Intensification: seeks to achieve food security through
increases agricultural production, while minimizing negative
environmental impacts (Godfray et al. 2010).
Kuhlman T & Farrington J. 2010. What is sustainability? Sustainability 2: 3436–48.
Godfray H., Beddington J. et al. 2010. Food security: the challenge of feeding 9 billion people. Science 327: 812–18.
Resilience
Intensive, specialized agriculture potentially lacks resilience (e.g.
Döös,1994) and is volatile (e.g. Abson, et al. 2013).
Abson, D., Fraser, E. and Benton, T. 2013. Landscape diversity and the resilience of agricultural returns: a portfolio analysis of landuse patterns and economic
returns from lowland agriculture, Agriculture & food Security, 2:2.
Döös B 1994. Environmental degradation, global food-production, and risk for large-scale migrations. Ambio 23:124–130.
Lagi, M. et al. 2011. The food crises and political instability in North Africa and the Middle East. Available at SSRN 1910031
Resilience
Resilience: the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances and
reorganize while retaining essentially the same function, structure
and identity (Walker et al. 2004).
Resilience: Of what? For whom? To what?
Walker, B., Holling, C., et al. 2004. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2):5
Resilience
Environmental and socio-economic perturbations are common in
agro-ecological systems
Short term variability is crucial in relation to both food security and
farmer livelihoods.
Long term changes in resource availability/use many also have
serious consequences for sustainable agricultural intensification.
General resilience
Diversity: the range of different components (structures, functions,
organisms or institutions) in the system.
Tightness of feedbacks: how quickly and strongly the changes in one
part of the system are felt and responded to in other parts of the system.
Modularity: the manner in which the components that make up the
system are linked.
Levin, S. A. 1998. Ecosystems and the biosphere as complex adaptive systems. Ecosystems, 1, 431-436.
Walker, B. & Salt, D. 2006. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World, Washington, D.C., Island Press.
Case Study
Comparing two sheep grazing systems in the Upper Lachlan River
Catchment, New South Wales
Two sheep farming systems
Conventional management: Livestock kept in paddocks for extended periods,
high external inputs used to bolster farms’ carrying capacities Biodiversity is
conserved via (subsidized) land ‘spared’ from agricultural production.
Holistic management: Intense bursts of grazing, followed by extended
recovery time based on careful observation of native vegetation, with little or no
use of external inputs. Biodiversity is conserved across the farmed landscape.
Two sheep farming systems
Conventional management
Holistic management
System perturbations
System property
Conventional management
General resilience
Biological diversity potentially high. Isolation of
Diversity
•
.).
Feedbacks
biodiversity from production may be both a source of
vulnerability (lack of redundancy) and resilience (lower
connectivity to shocks).
Holistic management
•
Biological diversity intermediate but
contributes to production stability.
•
Experimentation as a key component of the
management strategy.
•
Uniformity and control of the environment as key
management strategies.
•
•
Income diversity often off-farm through secondary
employment, or spousal incomes, increases resilience to
on farm natural shocks (i.e. flood, fire, etc.).
Income diversity can be on-farm (e.g.
tourism; native plant sales), less resilient to
some natural shocks (i.e. flood, fire, etc
•
Less able to convert between/build buffing
capital stocks.
Adaptive management that is sensitive to
changes in ecological condition.
•
•
•
Modularity
(redundancies and
•
connectivity)
Compensatory/buffering management that seeks to
•
“dampen” shocks by importing resources from outside the
physical boundaries of the social-ecological system.
•
Typically ‘post event’ adaptation, often reliant on external
institutional support.
Relatively low level of redundancies in resource use
•
(continued occupation of pastures).
More reliance on imported fodder supplements and
artificial fertilizers – increasing connectivity to markets
and price volatility.
•
Management approach premised on
anticipation of/adaptation to shocks, and
constant monitoring.
Potentially high levels of redundancy in
resource use (i.e. rested pastures and the
use of diverse native grasses).
Less reliance on imported fodder
supplements and artificial fertilizers –
reducing connectivity to markets.
General resilience
Conventional management: externalized resilience, stabilizing buffers
via accumulation of financial capital (on and off farm) with reliance on
external inputs and institutional support.
Holistic management: internalized resilience, dynamic adaptation, via
working with natural capital and experimentation (little off farm buffers),
biodiversity as both a ‘social good’ and source of resilience.
System boundaries and scale
Economic system
Farm system boundaries
Farm system
Social-ecological
system boundaries
Material, energy and economic flows
Where you draw the boundaries of the system (in both space and time)
influences assessments of resilience.
Conclusions
Diversity: Biodiversity as integral to farm resilience (holistic), or as a
separate entity to be protected (conventional).
Tightness of feedbacks: Conventional farming lengthens (and potentially
weakens) feedbacks between resource use and environmental impacts.
Modularity/connectivity: High connectivity is potentially beneficial at fine
scales and over the short-term, may be problematic at broader scales
and in the long-term.
Scale and system boundaries
Thank you
The research presented here is based on:
Abson, D.J.,1 Sherren, K.2 and Fischer, J.3 (in press) The resilience of agricultural landscapes
characterized by land sparing versus land sharing, IN: Gardner, S. Hails, R. and Ramsden S.
(eds), Agriculture Resilience: perspectives from ecology and economics, CUP.
1. Faculty of Sustianabity Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany. abson@uni-leuphana.de
2. School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada. kate.sherren@dal.ca
3. Faculty of Sustainability, Leuphana University Lueneburg, Lueneburg, Germany. joern.fischer@leuphana.de