Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change: Building and Testing Concepts, Methods, and Tools for Understanding and Supporting Autonomous Adaptation

生物多样性的变化直接威胁着发展中国家农村家庭的生计、粮食安全以及文化和生态的完整性。人们将被迫以减轻生物多样性和生态系统服务损失或加剧损失的方式应对气候变化。一场前所未有的物种灭绝正在发生，气候变化正在影响物种的分布范围和物候，导致新的物种配置以不可预测的方式影响生态系统服务。随着气候变化和人类人口增长带来的持续栖息地改变，“新”生态系统将变得更加普遍。在联合国国际生物多样性年，科学家和政策制定者必须认识到，人类、生物多样性和生态系统必须共同进化和共同适应。然而，人类对生物多样性变化的适应并没有被任何国际、区域或国家科学或政策论坛视为主题。由于缺乏关于有害生物成本法的科学研究，科学家和决策者缺乏任务、概念框架、知识和工具来预测或预测人类的反应及其实际或潜在的结果、协同作用和反馈。事实上，“需要进行新的重大研究努力，以鼓励决策者将生物多样性、气候变化和人类生计放在一起考虑”（皇家学会，2007年）。与此同时，人们呼吁适应性思维从自上而下的规划转向支持地方适应。当地的适应努力得不到外界的注意、协调和帮助，除非政策制定者意识到自主适应进程的重要性和程度，并了解影响其结果的因素，否则适应和减缓政策可能无效或适得其反。该项目的目的是启动制定适当的概念框架、方法和综合模型，以了解人类对生物多样性和相关生态系统服务变化的适应，最终可用于预测高度依赖生物多样性的社会中生物多样性、生态系统服务和人类福祉的结果，并为研究人员和政策制定者的新网络提供这些产出的效用的证据。发展概念、方法、工具和模式的基础是：a）当地信息或知识系统和监测能力; B）当地生物多样性和相关生态系统服务的评价; c）将生物资源和生态系统服务纳入对生计过程的理解，d）评估看法、风险、需求和应对能力，以及e）了解生物和福利结果和反馈。该项目与来自牛津、肯特和SOAS的人类学、经济学和生态学/生物学合作伙伴以及来自南非和印度的合作伙伴一起开展。合作伙伴将在第一次密集研讨会上使用情景构建协议共同制定概念框架。然后，团队逐步开发和评估研究原型和方法，并在西高止山脉的实地研究地点收集原始数据，并对结果进行初步建模。第二个讲习班修订设想方案，并筹备第二个实地数据收集阶段。这种迭代允许进一步的概念框架和方法的基础，并开发和测试一个更强大，更少的聚合模型的基础上更好地决定不同的变量如何相互作用。在第二个实地研究阶段之后，对scenar-ios进行了修订，对数据进行了综合分析和建模，并确定了有助于监测生物多样性、生态系统服务和人类福祉与生物多样性/生态系统变化的变量、变量集或系统状态指标。启动了一个科学政策网络（见影响计划）。

Biodiversity change directly threatens the livelihoods, food security, and cultural and ecological in-tegrity of rural subsistence-oriented households across the developing world. People will be forced to respond to it in ways that either mitigate loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services or that ex-acerbate losses. An unprecedented extinction of species is underway, and climate change is af-fecting species' range and phenology, leading to new species configurations that affect ecosystem services in unpredictable ways. With climate change and continued habitat alteration entailed in human population growth, 'novel' ecosystems will become even more prevalent. In the UN Interna-tional Year of Biodiversity, scientists and policy makers must recognise that humans, biodiversity, and ecosystems must co-evolve and co-adapt. However, Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change is not considered as theme in any international, regional, or national science or policy for-ums. There is a dearth of scientific research about HABC, so scientists and policy makers lack mandates, conceptual frameworks, knowledge, and tools to project or predict human responses and their actual or potential outcomes, synergies, and feedbacks. Indeed, 'A significant new re-search effort is required to encourage decision makers to consider biodiversity, climate change and human livelihoods together' (Royal Society 2007). At the same time, there is a call for a 'para-digm shift' in adaptation thinking away from top-down planning and toward supporting local adapta-tion. Local adaptation efforts go unnoticed, uncoordinated, and unaided by outsiders and, unless policy makers become aware of the importance and extent of autonomous adaptation processes and understand what influences their outcomes, adaptation and mitigation policies may be ineffec-tive or counter-productive. This project's aim is to kickstart the development of appropriate conceptual frameworks, methods and integrated models for understanding human adaptation to change in biodiversity and related ecosystem services that can eventually be used to predict outcomes for biodiversity, eco-system services and human well-being in highly biodiversity dependent societies, and provide evi-dence for the utility of these outputs to a new network of researchers and policy makers. The build-ing blocks for development of concepts, methods, tools and models are a) local information or knowledge systems and monitoring capacity, b) local valuation of biodiversity and related ecosys-tem services; c) integrating biological resources and ecosystem services into an understanding of livelihood processes, d) assessing perceptions, risks, needs, and ability to respond, and e) under-standing biological and welfare outcomes and feedbacks. The project joins partners from anthro-pology, economics and ecology/biology at Oxford, Kent and SOAS, with partners from South Africa and India. Partners will jointly elaborate the conceptual framework in a first intensive workshop us-ing a scenario building protocol. Then, teams incrementally develop and evaluate research proto-cols and methods and collect primary data in a field research site in the Western Ghats, and re-sults are initially modeled. A second workshop revises the scenarios and prepares a second field data collection phase. This iteration permits further grounding of the conceptual framework and methods, and development and testing of a stronger, less aggregative model based on much bet-ter decisions about how different variables interact. After the second field research phase, scenar-ios are revised and integrated analysis and modelling of the data is done, and variables, variable sets, or system state indicators that are useful for monitoring biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being with biodiversity/ecosystem change are identified. A science-policy network is kickstarted (see impact plan).