Linking local vulnerability to system sustainability in a resilience framework: two cases from Latin America

Abstract

Collectively, individual adjustments to environmental and economic change can have disproportionate influence on the sustainability of the broader social-environmental system in which exposure takes place. Here we focus on the specific mechanisms by which farm-level responses to globalization and environmental change feedback to affect the sustainability and resilience of the socialenvironment system. We use a proposal by Lambin as an analytical frame for understanding this feedback, illustrating how information, motivation and capacity collectively structure the ways in which the actions of individuals can transform regional economies and landscapes. We draw on two Latin American case studies to illustrate the collective and synergistic implications of farmers' livelihood and land use choices for the sensitivity of the region to future market and environmental shocks, as well as for the role of the landscapes in the global carbon cycle. We argue that the potential disconnect between individual goals of livelihood security and broader aims of system sustainability can be bridged through improved governance and attention to the role of policy, individual and collective experience, and resource constraints in adaptive choice.

Reconnecting to the Biosphere

“…The resilience lens has been applied to understand social-ecological dynamics in different parts of the world (Walker et al 2006;Chapin et al 2009), in developed and developing regions, in traditional societies, among vulnerable peoples or for combating poverty, for example, in shifting from dryland poverty traps into improved livelihoods (Enfors and Gordon 2008), in dealing with disasters among rural communities in developing countries (McSweeney and Coomes 2011), in growing the wealth of the poor (WRI 2008) or in livelihood and land-use choices among farmers in Latin America in relation to the sensitivity to future market and environmental shocks (Eakin and Wehbe 2009). Footnote 3 continued periods of gradual and rapid change, feedbacks and non-linear dynamics, thresholds, tipping points and shifts (transitions) between pathways, and how such dynamics interacts across temporal and spatial scales.…”

Glacier recession and human vulnerability in the Yanamarey watershed of the Cordillera Blanca, Peru

“…These hybrid approaches include the pressure-and-release model, which describes disasters as the product of natural events occurring in specific social, political, and economic environments that generate differential levels of vulnerability (Blaikie 1994;Wisner et al 2004), the analysis of cases of "double exposure" in which human systems are subject to impacts and events linked to climate change as well as to the transformative forces of globalization (Leichenko and O'Brien 2008), and as vulnerability to multiple exposures, or combinations of biophysical, political, economic and institutional conditions (Eakin 2006;Eakin and Wehbe 2009;Liverman 1990). This increasing attention to interacting causal factors highlights vulnerability's multi-faceted and dynamic nature as well as the need for detailed analyses of specific social-ecological systems and their linkages to global change processes across scales (Clark et al 2000;Cutter 2003).…”

Assessing Vulnerability to Climate Change in Dryland Livelihood Systems: Conceptual Challenges and Interdisciplinary Solutions

“…Sub-Saharan African drylands have been highlighted as particularly vulnerable because of their low adaptive capacity and sensitivity to the projected changes (Callaway 2004, IPCC 2007b. However, a similar combination of climate and socioeconomic pressures are being observed in North Africa (Christensen et al 2007, Thomas 2008, Asia (Lioubimtseva et al 2005, Cruz et al 2007, and Latin America (Eakin and Wehbe 2009). Considerable uncertainty, however, remains about how future climatic changes will affect drylands (Sitch et al 2007) and it is imperative that new and interdisciplinary research agendas are developed focusing on livelihood security in these dynamic, complex, and risk-prone environments (Reed et al 2008).…”