CNH: Does Community-Based Rangeland Ecosystem Management Increase the Resilience of Coupled Systems to Climate Change in Mongolia?

自然资源的可持续利用和管理对人类社会和自然界的长期持续存在至关重要。了解社会和自然系统的相互依赖行为，以及影响这些相互联系的系统如何应对突发的自然或政治经济冲击或持续压力的因素，是科学的主要挑战。弹性是系统在不改变其基本部分和功能的情况下吸收或适应变化的能力。因此，一个重要的研究方向是调查人类-自然耦合系统在面临重大压力时的复原力，并了解环境治理（包括正式政策和非正式制度）如何影响复原力。先前发展的理论表明，地方资源管理机构可能有助于恢复力，使社区能够更成功地适应气候变化。蒙古是检验这一理论的理想地点，因为它在过去40年里经历了地球上最显著的变暖趋势之一。此外，自1999年以来，蒙古成立了2000多个以社区为基础的牧场管理组织，这是一项前所未有的社会实验，为严格的政策学习创造了机会。该跨学科研究项目将评估蒙古牧区社会生态系统对气候变化的脆弱性，评估基于社区的牧场管理对蒙古牧区系统恢复力的影响，加强蒙古科学与政策制定之间的联系，并建立参与研究的蒙古和美国研究人员和学生分析复杂耦合自然-人类系统动态的能力。研究人员将在这个项目中使用一系列方法，包括遥感、气候和水文建模，以评估气候和土地利用随时间的变化以及这些变化对牧场水文和生产力的影响。他们将采用访谈、家庭调查和植物和牲畜实地抽样等观察方法，比较有社区管理和没有社区管理的地区的生态、社会和恢复力指标，并将进行有针对性的放牧去除实验，以提高对天气和放牧在决定不同生态区牧场条件中的相对重要性的理解。数据将使用统计学、统计和过程建模以及地理空间三维可视化技术的组合来分析和集成。该项目将对美国和蒙古的研究生和中学教师进行教育和培训，并通过参与式系统建模和情景规划研讨会，让利益相关者和决策者直接参与。通过采用考虑生态和区域背景变化的大样本病例对照设计，考察牧场社区机构的绩效和成果，该项目将大大有助于对蒙古和其他地区社区牧场管理机构的基本了解。该项目将在方法学上作出贡献，评估跨多个尺度以社区为基础的管理的效果，并在每个尺度上综合物理、生态和社会取样和数据分析，从而促进对复杂系统跨尺度动态的理解。该项目的成果将对蒙古和其他地区的环境政策产生重大影响，并将使牧民等利益相关者和政策制定者通过参与参与式建模和情景规划研讨会而受益。该项目将与全球范围广泛的干旱和半干旱牧场相关，牧民和决策者正在这些牧场寻求应对气候变化的方法，并建立管理机构，以建立抗灾能力和促进旱地系统的可持续性。本项目由美国国家科学基金会自然与人类系统耦合动力学（CNH）计划和美国国家科学基金会国际科学与工程办公室支持。

Sustainable use and stewardship of natural resources is essential to the long-term persistence of human societies and the natural world. Understanding the interdependent behavior of social and natural systems and the factors that affect how these linked systems respond to sudden natural or political-economic shocks or ongoing stresses is a major challenge for science. Resilience is the ability of a system to absorb or adapt to change without altering its basic parts and functions. An important line of research therefore is to investigate the resilience of coupled human-natural systems in the face of major stresses and to understand how environmental governance, including both formal policies and informal institutions, affects resilience. Previously developed theories suggest that local resource-management institutions may contribute to resilience and enable communities to adapt more successfully to climate change. Mongolia is an ideal place to test this theory because it has experienced one of the most significant warming trends on Earth over the past 40 years. Furthermore, more than 2,000 community-based rangeland management organizations have formed in Mongolia since 1999, an unprecedented social experiment that creates an opportunity for rigorous policy learning. This interdisciplinary research project will assess the vulnerability of Mongolian pastoral social-ecological systems to climate change, evaluate the effects of community-based rangeland management on the resilience of Mongolian pastoral systems, strengthen linkages between science and policy making in Mongolia, and build the capacity of participating Mongolian and U.S. researchers and students to analyze the dynamics of complex coupled natural-human systems. The investigators will use a range of methods in this project, include remote sensing and climate and hydrological modeling to assess changes in climate and land use over time and the effects of those changes on rangeland hydrology and productivity. They will use observational approaches like interviews, household surveys, and plant and livestock field sampling to compare ecological, social, and resilience indicators in districts with community-based management and those without, and they will conduct targeted grazing removal experiments to improve understanding of the relative importance of weather and grazing in determining pasture conditions in different ecological zones. Data will be analyzed and integrated using a combination of statistics, statistical and process modeling, and geospatial 3-D visualization techniques. The project will educate and train graduate students and secondary school teachers in the U.S. and Mongolia and will directly involve stakeholders and policy makers through participatory system modeling and scenario planning workshops.By examining the performance and outcomes of community-based institutions in rangelands using a large-sample, case-control design that accounts for variation in ecological and regional contexts, this project will contribute significantly to basic understanding of community-based rangeland management institutions in Mongolia and elsewhere. The project will make methodological contributions by evaluating the effects of community-based management across multiple scales and by integrating physical, ecological and social sampling and data analysis at each scale, thereby advancing understanding of cross-scale dynamics in complex systems. The results of this project will have significant implications for environmental policy in Mongolia and elsewhere, and they will benefit stakeholders like herders, and policy makers through their engagement in participatory-modeling and scenario-planning workshops. The project will have relevance for a broad range of arid and semiarid rangelands around the globe where pastoralists and policy makers are seeking ways to cope with a changing climate and develop management institutions that build resilience and promote sustainability in dryland systems. This project is supported by the NSF Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) Program and by the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering.