Landscapes - People - Global change

Tag: resilience

“You keep using that word…” – a new paper

The 'killer viz' for Soubry and Sherren (2022), showing contrasting discourses around resilience between Maritime farmers and the feds.

The ‘killer viz’ for Soubry and Sherren (2022), showing contrasting discourses around resilience between Maritime farmers and the feds.

The third and final paper from Bernard Soubry’s PhD thesis is finally out in Land Use Policy, “You keep using that word…”: Disjointed definitions of resilience in food systems adaptation. Usually, when people use quotes at the start of a paper title, it comes from something one of the participants said. This time, it comes from The Princess Bride, a favourite movie in our house (in which the word in question is “inconceivable”). The term resilience is one of those panchrestons that can be difficult to grapple with, but Bernard did a great job of deconstructing its use in his interviews with Maritime farmers, and contrasting that with expressions of resilience in the same House and Senate reviews of agriculture and climate change that former postdoc Wes Tourangeau used in his last paper with me. Such secondary data sources provide a rare insight into the world of policy. This is also a great example of a qualitative ‘killer viz’ that draws on rich inductive coding without quantification.

New ResNet paper: Ecosystem services and the resilience of agricultural landscapes

Figures 1 and 3 from the new Bennett et al (2021) paper, contrasting a healthy agricultural landscape with one subject to negative trends discussed in the paper: (A) the influence of global corporations on decision-making, (B) increased use of technological and other inputs, (C) loss of diversity of farm types, (D) loss of nonfood ecosystem services, (E) crops consumed in far-away places, (F) Changes in the amount and mixture of ecosystem services provided to people, (G) local systems that are disconnected from their resource base, and (H) fewer people involved in decision-making.

Figures 1 and 3 from the new Bennett et al (2021) paper, contrasting a healthy agricultural landscape with one subject to negative trends discussed in the paper: (A) the influence of global corporations on decision-making, (B) increased use of technological and other inputs, (C) loss of diversity of farm types, (D) loss of nonfood ecosystem services, (E) crops consumed in far-away places, (F) Changes in the amount and mixture of ecosystem services provided to people, (G) local systems that are disconnected from their resource base, and (H) fewer people involved in decision-making.

The first big synthesis paper from NSERC ResNet is out today in Advances in Ecological ResearchEcosystem services and the resilience of agricultural landscapes. Led by ResNet PI Elena Bennet, with 20 co-authors from the larger team across our agricultural landscape case studies and integrative themes, this paper assesses “how recent changes have interacted with agro-ecosystem features to result in a loss of resilience, and suggest[s] key research directions to help harmonize production and ecosystem function, drawing primarily on Canadian examples”. This also provides us a strong conceptual framework as we initiate our primary and scenario-based work over the next five years, including in the Bay of Fundy agricultural dykelands and tidal wetlands, the ResNet case study I’m co-leading.

Chapter out on resilience and HM

Archtypal land sparing in the Australian southeastern grazing landscape.

Archetypal land sparing in the southeastern Australian grazing landscape.

Back in 2014 colleagues at Leuphana and I had a chapter accepted in a volume of Ecological Reviews on Agricultural Resilience: perspectives from ecology and economics. I’m delighted to be able to report that the volume is finally published, five years later. Our chapter looks at the resilience implications of land sharing and land sparing, using as a case study the southeastern sheep-wheat belt where co-author Joern Fischer and I did our postdocs back at ANU in the late 2000s.  We compared grazing archetypes of land sparing (fencing out dense woodlands for protection while continuously grazing the rest; see above) and land sharing (farmers using HM, who grazed intensively and rotationally pretty much everywhere on their farms, supporting scattered trees and their recruitment but few dense woodlands; see below). The resilience implications of these options are analyzed, integrating ecology, economics and social dimensions, and consistent with where the broader sharing/sparing debate has settled, reached the conclusion that a diversity of approaches is needed for system-wide sustainability.

Archetypal land sharing in the Australian southeastern grazing landscape, thanks to HM

Archetypal land sharing in the southeastern Australian grazing landscape thanks to HM to the left of the fence.

Some of my favourite parts of the chapter are the sample quotes included on the social challenges of adopting HM practices that draw from my 2008 photo-elicitation interviews with graziers across a range of practices. They speak to the mundane yet powerful barriers of change that come from our need for relationships and respect: for instance,  not having anything to talk to conventional farmers about at BBQs (“what will I open with?”), or having people think they’ve “lost the plot” and feeling the pressure after HM training to “go like a sheep and follow the rest” rather than convert. Such pressures align with some of what we’re hearing from HM trainers, too.

Mr Soubry goes to Senate

Mr. Soubry goes to Senate (screen snap from CPAC)

Mr. Soubry goes to Senate (screen snap from CPAC) – Bernard is the happy one.

Amidst lots of marking, which often displeases one if not both people involved, happy to get news Friday of New PhD student Bernard Soubry’s recent appearance at Senate. Bernard skyped from Ottawa to update me on the dissemination in policy circles of research findings from his Masters, which included giving evidence to the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry (televised by CPAC here, forward to hour two; transcript here). Great to have such a skilled political player on the team. Looking forward to having him back in the Maritimes this winter, conducting new interviews for his Oxford PhD which again engages with  small-scale Maritime farmers and climate change.

New paper in rural economic resilience

Penny Slight used Holling's panarchy model as a way to identify rural economic development measures.

Penny Slight used Holling’s panarchy model as a way to identify rural economic development measures.

Great to see Penny Slight’s 2012 SSHRC-funded MES thesis appearing in the literature, via a new paper, Policy support for rural economic development based on Holling’s ecological concept of panarchy. She identified leverage points on the adaptive change cycle where economic development agencies could intervene to improve rural futures, based on interviews with economic development agents in the Canadian Maritimes. Penny has been working since graduation as an Environmental Scientist at Nova Scotia Power. I was on her committee, which was led by my colleague Michelle Adams.

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