Assessing the resilience of a real-world social-ecological system: lessons from a multidisciplinary evaluation of a South African pastoral system
Assessing the resilience of a real-world social-ecological system: lessons from a multidisciplinary evaluation of a South African pastoral system
复制标题
DOI：
10.5751/es-08737-210335
复制
发表时间：
2016-09
影响因子：
4.1
通讯作者：
A. Linstädter;A. Kuhn;C. Naumann;S. Rasch;A. Sandhage-Hofmann;W. Amelung;J. Jordaan;C. D. Preez;M. Bollig
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
A. Linstädter;A. Kuhn;C. Naumann;S. Rasch;A. Sandhage-Hofmann;W. Amelung;J. Jordaan;C. D. Preez;M. Bollig
在过去的几十年里，世界范围内的社会生态系统（SES）经历了巨大的转变，常常给生计带来不利的后果。尽管复原力思维为理解社会经济地位转型提供了有前途的概念框架，但对现实世界社会经济地位的实证复原力评估仍然很少，因为社会经济地位的复杂性需要整合来自不同学科的知识、理论和方法。面对这一挑战，我们利用自然科学和社会科学的各种方法，根据经验评估了南非牧区社会经济体系对干旱的恢复能力。在生态子系统中，我们利用土壤和植被指标分析牧场缓冲干旱对饲料供应影响的能力。在社会子系统中，我们应用农艺和制度指标以及传统牧区社会经济体系中的做法和制度为基准，评估家庭和社区减轻干旱影响的能力。我们的研究结果表明，生计与畜牧业产生的收入脱钩是由 20 世纪 30 年代政府干预开始的。在后种族隔离阶段，采用了最低投入的畜群管理策略，由于无意中降低了放养密度，导致牧场植被恢复。由于当前的生计保障主要依靠外部货币资源（养老金、儿童补助金、伤残补助金），家庭对干旱的抵御能力高于历史阶段。我们的研究是最早使用真正的多学科弹性评估的研究之一。部分评估的相互矛盾的结果强调，衡量狭窄的指标集可能会阻碍对社会经济地位转型的更深入理解。结果还表明，当代开放的社会经济体系的弹性不能用内向的方法来解释，因为其他层面的重要联系和驱动因素已经在全球化世界中变得重要。因此，我们的研究有助于识别经验弹性评估中的陷阱，并改进 SES 动态的概念化。
In the past decades, social-ecological systems (SESs) worldwide have undergone dramatic transformations with often detrimental consequences for livelihoods. Although resilience thinking offers promising conceptual frameworks to understand SES transformations, empirical resilience assessments of real-world SESs are still rare because SES complexity requires integrating knowledge, theories, and approaches from different disciplines. Taking up this challenge, we empirically assess the resilience of a South African pastoral SES to drought using various methods from natural and social sciences. In the ecological subsystem, we analyze rangelands’ ability to buffer drought effects on forage provision, using soil and vegetation indicators. In the social subsystem, we assess households’ and communities’ capacities to mitigate drought effects, applying agronomic and institutional indicators and benchmarking against practices and institutions in traditional pastoral SESs. Our results indicate that a decoupling of livelihoods from livestockgenerated income was initiated by government interventions in the 1930s. In the post-apartheid phase, minimum-input strategies of herd management were adopted, leading to a recovery of rangeland vegetation due to unintentionally reduced stocking densities. Because current livelihood security is mainly based on external monetary resources (pensions, child grants, and disability grants), household resilience to drought is higher than in historical phases. Our study is one of the first to use a truly multidisciplinary resilience assessment. Conflicting results from partial assessments underline that measuring narrow indicator sets may impede a deeper understanding of SES transformations. The results also imply that the resilience of contemporary, open SESs cannot be explained by an inward-looking approach because essential connections and drivers at other scales have become relevant in the globalized world. Our study thus has helped to identify pitfalls in empirical resilience assessment and to improve the conceptualization of SES dynamics.