• Oconnell, Deborah
• Abel, Nick
• Walker, Brian

Abstract

The concepts of ‘resilience’, ‘adaptation’, and ‘transformation’ have captured the attention of those who influence the global discourse on sustainability and the future of the planet and its people. The global policy arena has embraced the concepts and language of resilience thinking, planetary boundaries and ‘safe operating zones’, adaptation and adaptive governance and management. This report was commissioned by the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), to underpin their work to support development indicators of agroecosystem resilience. The STAP has identified ecosystem resilience as a common objective across the three Rio Conventions (the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, UNCCD; the Convention on Biological Diversity, CBD; and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC). We present the intended purposes(s) behind the quest for resilience indicator(s) applicable to the UNCCD and potentially to the CBD and UNFCCC, as well as other emerging global policy discourse and instruments such as the Sustainable Development Goals. We provide a brief overview of resilience theory and implementation. This summary is not intended to replace the hundreds of papers and books on the topic. We present and discuss the development, application and utility of complex, compound indicators for concepts such as vulnerability, adaptation and resilience. We also provide a brief review of the literature on ‘resilience indicators’, with a particular emphasis on those indicators or approaches that we employ in our proposed approach. The core of this study is a Resilience, Adaptation and Transformation Assessment Framework (RATA), which could be used as an integrating approach, at a sub-national scale. The initial rapid assessments could be summarized as Summary Action Indicators to provide first estimates of the resilience of the agroecosystem, and its prospects for coping with shocks while continuing to maintain the well-being of humans that depend on it. A basic tenet of the framework is that it is necessarily an iterative process.The initial assessment cannot be considered as a final product. The process is adaptive, reviewing the assessment as initial interventions are made. We apply the suggested approach to two case studies in very different agroecosystems: irrigated rice in Thailand, and an agropastoral system in Niger. The Niger agroecosystem, threatened by land degradation/desertification, is typical of the focus for UNCCD – in the Sahel. Because the ambition of the UNCCD and STAP is that the approach should be applicable across three Rio Conventions and other global policy initiatives, the second case study is of an irrigated tropical lowland rice agroecosystem in Thailand. Such systems feed many millions, but are likely to require major interventions in order to maintain their resilience to climatic change and other global shocks. The case studies are summarized in this report, and explained more fully in an accompanying report. We provide some preliminary conclusions and a brief evaluation of the utility of our proposed approach in terms of the purposes of the study more generally, and the purposes of resilience indicators in particular. This is an early scoping study that invites wider discussion, critique, further development, testing and refinement through piloting. It is clear that the concept of resilience is an inspiration, and a clearly articulated aspiration, in the global discourse about sustainability and the future of the planet and its people. Much progress has been made this decade in understanding resilience theory and practice, but applying them within international and national policy arenas poses new challenges that this report begins to address.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• compound
• theory