Achieving sustainability by introducing alternative livelihoods

Abstract

The millennium ecosystem assessment report on global assessment of desertification has highlighted its worldwide impacts on the environment-increasing dust storms, floods and global warming-as well as on societies and economies. It links sustainable management of resources, and inter alia well-being of dryland populations, to reducing societal pressures on dryland ecosystems through adoption of alternative livelihoods. This paper, in combination with a companion paper by Safriel and Adeel, presents the conceptual underpinnings of this approach as well as examples of how innovative approaches for creating livelihoods can help reduce the pressure on marginal drylands.

Tracing divergent livelihood pathways in the drylands: A perspective on two spatially proximate locations in Laikipia County, Kenya

“…According to Adeel and Safriel (2008), a common feature of the first livelihood pathway, where there is a high long-term risk of a downward spiral into poverty, is the combination of a low agroecological potential and the absence of enabling policies and effective governance. Thome generally tends towards this pathway in which resource exploitation, conflict and marginalisation reinforce each other.…”

“…This focus encourages scholars to complement the numerous accounts of negative trends, most prominently on desertification, with studies foregrounding how local people harness their endogenous capacities and capitalise on scientific advances to successfully implement viable livelihood options in the dryland regions of the world. Whilst there are few indepth analyses, Adeel and Safriel (2008) provide some general insights on a number of positive case scenarios from the global drylands.…”

Participatory environmental assessment in drylands: Introducing a new approach

“…Enfors and Gordon, 2007). Adeel and Safriel (2008), for example, describe the adaptation of a community at the edge of the Cholistan Desert in Pakistan, who have adapted to a reduction in groundwater availability by switching their predominant income source from cattle grazing to aquaculture (breeding carp), which, through controlled conditions and careful management of surface water, requires less water investment. Similarly, communities in the Boteti district of Botswana maintained their livelihoods by switching from "molapo" flood plain arable agriculture to pastoralism when the Boteti river stopped flowing (Perkins et al, under review).…”

Deliberative assessment in complex socioecological systems: recommendations for environmental assessment in drylands

“…Case studies of adaptation in drylands show how land users or dryland stakeholders substitute the utilisation of certain services, effectively adapting the socioecological system in response to external pressures in order to increase system resilience (e.g. Enfors and Gordon 2007;Adeel and Safriel 2008). Environmental assessments underpinned by the resilience concept seek to identify critical thresholds within the socioecological system, understand the nature of these thresholds and assess the relative strengths of social and ecological drivers that push and pull the system towards, and away from, them (Holling 1973;Folke et al 2004;Walker et al 2006a).…”