1. Economic Assessment of Desertification, Sustainable Land Management
And Resilience Of Arid, Semi-arid And Dry Sub-humid Areas
UNCCD 2nd Scientific Conference
Special Session : Towards a Land-Degradation Neutral World: from Science
to Policy - Experts’ Dialogue and Workshop
11 April 2013
RESILIENCE MANAGEMENT
AS A MEANS TOWARDS THE
SUSTAINABILITY GOAL OF ZNLD
Lene.Poulsen@gmail.com
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2. BRIEF RECALL: ZERO NET LAND DEGRADATION
Goal
Sustainable land use for all and by all (in agriculture,
forestry, energy, urbanization – UNCCD Sec., 2012).
Means
Sustainable land management: Planning, organizing,
and monitoring land use activities in a manner that
will ensure positive trends in the value of the linked
social-ecological systems, including the monetary
net present value of longer-term future benefits.
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3. COMPLEX SYSTEMS
• Heterogeneity – multi-scale
• Interconnection – Interdependency - Feedbacks
• Non-linearity of causation
• Dynamic and Adaptive
• Emergence
• Thresholds - Phase transitions
Managing social-ecological systems calls for
Management of complexity
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4. MANAGING COMPLEX SYSTEMS
Management of complexity:
• Uncertainty
• Unpredictability
• How to define boundaries
• How to define thresholds
• How to recognize slow regime shifts
Specific requirements for effective management of complexity
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5. CHARACTERISTICS OF EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT OF
DRYLANDS (COMPLEX SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS)
• Acceptance of uncertainty
• Adaptive with a good learning capacity
• Multidirectional connectedness and diversity
• Coping capacity
• Address critical feedbacks
• Flexible and innovative with redundancy
• Social capital
• Transformative capacity
• Good governance
i.e., managing for resilience
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6. RESILIENCE OF COMPLEX SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
- DRYLANDS -
• Capacities to survive, adapt, and follow a positive trajectory
in the face of external and/or internal changes, even
catastrophic incidents, and rebound strengthened and more
resourceful while retaining essentially the same functions.
– Continuous and dynamic process – all phases from pre-stressor,
during the stress, post-stress, and in between stresses
– Proactive and reactive abilities vis-à-vis change
– Can be fostered through interventions and policies
– Constant monitoring, analyzing, learning, and rolling planning.
i.e. resilience management is a means to achieve ZNLD
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7. ECONOMIC VALUATION AS A
RESILIENCE MANAGEMENT TOOL
• Any economic valuation requires measurements – what is
being valued?
• Can resilience be measured?
• Recent experience: mainly qualitative – quantitative mainly
based on scores –
• Some approaches:
– Focusing on thresholds – theoretical - can thresholds be
identified?
– Specific resilience characteristics
– Cost-benefit analyses focusing on different resilience
strengthening measures (e.g., diversity, redundancy,
responsiveness)
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8. NIGER – RESTORATION – STRENGTHENED RESILIENCE?
PREMISES AND BOUNDARIES
Costs and Benefits
– For Whom?
– Time scale?
– Spatial scale?
– Towards what?
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9. EXAMPLES OF RECENT RESILIENCE ASSESSMENTS
• Pastoral social-economic systems in northern Afghanistan
challenged by overgrazing based on Resilience Alliance
Framework (system dynamic, interactions, governance):
– capture the dynamics of change, uncertainty and the
interrelationships between complex social and ecological
systems
• Goulburn-Broken Catchment in Southeast Australia: resilience
towards salinity defined as the distance between the current
groundwater level and 2 meter under the surface:
– value of the resilience would be the management costs of
maintaining that distance
• Community resilience in Haiti: resilience framework (wealth,
debt and credit, coping behaviors, human capital, protection
and security, community networks, and psychosocial status)
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10. EXAMPLES OF RECENT RESILIENCE ASSESSMENTS, CON’T
• Policies promoting rural resilience in EU: ex-ante evaluation
focusing on funds contributing to diversity, variability, modularity,
acknowledging slow variables, tight feedbacks, social capital,
innovation, overlap in governance, and ecosystem services:
– positive resilience impacts on the following resilience
characteristics “acknowledging slow variables”, “tight
feedback”, and “different levels of governance”
• Support to strengthen resilience among drought-affected
farmers in northern Malawi: cost-benefit analysis of
diversification, capacity development, and introduction of
adapted technologies activities
– Positive results – but limited analyses due to time and budget
constraints
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11. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FOCUS OF FUTURE RESEARCH
• Understanding of complex dryland systems:
– modeling of the dynamic relationship between dryland
system elements,
– feedback loops,
– resilience indicators,
– identification of potential thresholds,
– identification of bottlenecks for resilience assessments of the
dryland systems,
– effective monitoring, organization, and planning of resilience
management
• Harmonize the use of the resilience concept
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12. More Information:
Poulsen, Lene, “Costs and Benefits of
Policies and Practices Addressing Land Degradation
and Drought in the Drylands”
White Paper II. UN CCD 2nd Scientific Conference.
UNCCD Secretariat, Bonn
http://2sc.unccd.int
THANKS!
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