Exploring ResilienceMay 18, 2016 SSE Swalec,Cardiff, Wales

David J. Abson: abson@Leuphana-uni.de

Sustainable intensification and agro-ecological resilience

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).

Walker, B., Holling, C., et al. 2004. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2):5

Resilience: Of what? For whom? To what?

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

General resilience• Biological diversity intermediate but

contributes to production stability.• Experimentation as a key component of the

management strategy.• 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.

• Biological diversity potentially high. Isolation of biodiversity from production may be both a source of vulnerability (lack of redundancy) and resilience (lower connectivity to shocks).

• 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.).

(

.).

System property Holistic management Diversity

Feedbacks

Modularity redundancies and

connectivity)

Conventional management

••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.

(continued occupation of pastures). • More reliance on imported fodder supplements and

artificial fertilizers – increasing connectivity to markets and price volatility.

Potentially high levels of redundancy in Relatively low level of redundancies in resource use .

• Adaptive management that is sensitive to changes in ecological condition.

• Management approach premised on anticipation of/adaptation to shocks, and

• 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. constant monitoring

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

Farm system boundaries

Social-ecologicalsystem boundariesFarm system

Material, energy and economic flows

Economic system

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.de2. School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada. kate.sherren@dal.ca3. Faculty of Sustainability, Leuphana University Lueneburg, Lueneburg, Germany. joern.fischer@leuphana.de