Promoting resilience of subsistence farming to El Niño events in Papua New Guinea: an integrated social-ecological approach

全球人口的四分之一以上依靠小规模自给农业维持生计。由于这些农民依赖于小面积耕地的作物，他们非常容易受到极端天气事件的影响。其中一个事件是厄尔尼诺现象，这是太平洋洋流的周期性逆转，对天气产生明显的全球影响。巴布亚新几内亚（PNG）是西太平洋地区的一个中低收入国家，受厄尔尼诺事件的影响尤为严重。由于85%的人口依靠家庭"粮食园"中的自给农业，厄尔尼诺现象可直接通过干旱和霜冻对作物和生计造成广泛损害;并间接通过作物病虫害造成损害。农民可以通过改变他们种植的作物和种植地点，或者从周围的森林中收集替代食物来部分应对。当厄尔尼诺等极端事件发生时，它们会在生态和社会系统中引发一系列相关影响。例如，遭受干旱的作物可能更容易受到害虫的影响，从而遭受更大的损害，导致产量降低和粮食减少。反过来，人们可能会使用森林产品来补充食物，这可能会使森林退化，降低其对村庄未来干旱的缓冲能力。我们的项目将开发一种综合方法来调查2015年厄尔尼诺现象对巴布亚新几内亚自给农业的生态和社会经济影响之间的联系。我们将专注于威廉山海拔200米至2700米的食品园。我们将比较厄尔尼诺现象在不同海拔的村庄造成的生态和社会变化，以及应对干旱能力不同的人（例如拥有较大/较小花园的人）是否受到不同的影响。我们将收集有关当前厄尔尼诺现象如何通过干旱和霜冻影响作物的数据，以及改变虫害数量和作物病害严重程度的数据。我们将评估厄尔尼诺现象如何可能导致农民对从周围森林收集的食物的依赖增加，这如何影响森林生物多样性，以及森林通过提供虫害控制来支持有弹性的食物园的能力。我们将收集村民对厄尔尼诺现象对其生计和福祉的影响以及他们如何应对的看法。例如，我们将询问是否有他们想做的事情来应对，但无法做到（例如改变抗旱作物品种），并发现采用这些应对策略的障碍。我们将与当地村民和我们的巴布亚新几内亚合作者一起，制定方案，在未来厄尔尼诺事件期间帮助支持村民和周围生态系统。我们将询问村民他们更喜欢哪种选择，以及在不同的未来情景下他们将如何改变自己的行为。例如，如果厄尔尼诺现象变得更加频繁，它们会永久地改变作物吗？如果森林因砍伐而减少，这会改变他们对厄尔尼诺的反应吗？利用我们的研究结果，我们将建立一个森林、菜园和人们生计如何相互作用的模型，并利用它与村民和政府讨论支持村民的不同干预措施可能产生的影响。我们的项目建立在与新几内亚Binatang研究中心的长期合作基础上，该中心培训当地研究助理收集生态数据。该项目扩展了我们的研究，包括社会层面。我们将培训助理收集有关人类和昆虫的信息，建立一个长期项目，支持村庄提高对未来气候变化的适应能力，并在巴布亚新几内亚建立科学能力。它还将帮助全球研究人员更好地了解厄尔尼诺事件如何影响社会生态系统以及如何使这些系统更具弹性

More than a quarter of the global human population depends on small-scale subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods. As these farmers rely on crops from a small cultivated area, they are highly vulnerable to extreme weather events. One such event is El Niño, a periodic reversal of ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean with pronounced global impacts on weather. Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a lower middle income country in the western Pacific, which is particularly hard hit by El Niño events. Since 85% of the population depend on subsistence farming in family "food gardens", El Niño can cause widespread damage to crops and livelihoods, directly through drought and frost; and indirectly through crop pests and diseases. Farmers can respond partially, by changing the crops they grow and where they grow them, or by collecting alternative foods from surrounding forest. When extreme events like El Niño occur they set off a series of related effects across ecological and social systems. For example, crops subjected to drought may be more susceptible to pests and thus suffer greater damage, leading to lower yields and reduced food. In turn, people may use forest products to supplement their food, which could degrade the forest, reducing its ability to buffer the village against future drought.Our project will develop an integrated approach to investigating linkages between ecological and socioeconomic impacts of the 2015 El Niño on subsistence farming in PNG. We will focus on food gardens from 200m to 2700m elevation on Mount Wilhelm. We will compare ecological and social changes caused by the El Niño in villages at different elevations, and whether people with different abilities to cope with droughts (e.g. those with larger/smaller gardens) were affected differently. We will collect data on how the current El Niño is affecting crops through drought and frost, and by altering the number of insect pests and the severity of crop diseases. We will assess how El Niño might cause increased reliance of farmers on food collected from surrounding forests, how this affects forest biodiversity, and the ability of the forest to support resilient food gardens by providing pest control. We will gather villagers' perceptions of the impacts of El Niño on their livelihoods and wellbeing, and on how they coped. For example, we will ask whether there are things they would like to have done to cope, but were unable to do (e.g. changing to drought-resistant crop varieties), and discover the barriers to employing these coping strategies. Together with local villagers and our PNG collaborators, we will develop options to help support villagers and surrounding ecosystems during future El Niño events. We will ask villagers which option they prefer, and how they would change their behaviour under different future scenarios. For example, if El Niño events became more frequent, would they change their crops permanently? If the forest was reduced due to logging, would this change their response to El Niño? Using our results we will build a model of how the forest, food gardens and people's livelihoods interact, and use it to talk to villagers and the government about the likely impact of different interventions to support villagers. We will then propose ways to make their livelihoods more sustainable and resilient, for future El Niño events.Our project builds on a long-term collaboration with the New Guinea Binatang Research Center, in which local research assistants are trained to collect ecological data. The project extends our research to include social dimensions. We will train the assistants to collect information about people as well as insects, to build a long-term project that can support villages to become more resilient to future climate change and build scientific capacity within PNG. It will also help researchers globally to understand better how El Niño events affect social-ecological systems and how to make these systems more resilient