How to avoid unsustainable side effects of managing climate risk in drylands — The supplementary feeding controversy

Müller, Birgit; Schulze, Jule; Kreuer, David; Linstädter, Anja; Frank, Karin

doi:10.1016/j.agsy.2015.07.001

Cited by 36 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 67 publications

(94 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Under "Feeding in drought and post-drought", supplementation builds up natural capital and is therefore synergistic. This is in line with Müller et al (2007) and Müller et al (2015) who showed that ensuring resting is crucial for sustainability in pastoral systems and represents an "ecological insurance" which benefits the ecological and economic performance. iv The relevance of supplementation as source of economic and social benefits also depends on the regional context (in this study the biophysical characteristics of the vegetation as well as the livestock population dynamics).…”

Section: Key Factors Determining the Benefits And Threats Of Supplemesupporting

confidence: 78%

“…However, other risk management strategies such as mobility should also be investigated as possible alternatives to supplementary feeding (see Section 4.3 Future research tasks). Müller et al (2015) have assessed the performance of a range of supplementation strategies that have to be privately financed by the pastoral households themselves (in contrast to the government financing assumed in the present paper). Although the two studies differ with regard to the assumed mechanisms of financing, they come to similar conclusions.…”

Section: The Management Of Individual Income Risks and Societal Costsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our model is a modified version of the generic, economicecological simulation model described in Müller et al (2015). Here, we present a short description of the model.…”

Section: The Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Governmental response to climate risk: Model-based assessment of livestock supplementation in drylands

2016

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Key Factors Determining the Benefits And Threats Of Supplemesupporting

confidence: 78%

Section: The Management Of Individual Income Risks and Societal Costsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Governmental response to climate risk: Model-based assessment of livestock supplementation in drylands

2016

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…This observation is somewhat surprising because communal land tenure in South Africa is often associated with high livestock densities and continuous grazing, typically leading to undesirable vegetation changes (Vetter et al 2006). We assume that rangeland vegetation has recently recovered because stocking densities were (unintentionally) reduced and because unsustainable practices of supplementary feeding were abandoned (see Müller et al 2015). In other words, the current low-input management has reestablished a rangeland system in which livestock populations are dynamically coupled to their stochastically fluctuating dryseason forage resources, thus avoiding rangeland degradation (Hempson et al 2015).…”

Section: Coupling Within and Between Subsystemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, climate change projections predict that most drylands will face increased frequency and intensity of drought (IPCC 2013). Spurred by these projections, the effect of drought on livelihoods has been subject to extensive research (Ayantunde et al 2015, Müller et al 2015, Martin et al 2016. Nevertheless, it is still poorly understood under which environmental and social conditions a meteorological drought may be converted into a socioeconomic drought, threatening livelihood security (Thurow andTaylor 1999, Martin et al 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the resilience of a real-world social-ecological system: lessons from a multidisciplinary evaluation of a South African pastoral system

Linstädter¹,

Kuhn²,

Naumann³

et al. 2016

E&S

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

. Assessing the resilience of a real-world social-ecological system: lessons from a multidisciplinary evaluation of a South African pastoral system. Ecology and Society 21(3):35. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08737-210335 SynthesisAssessing the resilience of a real-world social-ecological system: lessons from a multidisciplinary evaluation of a South African pastoral system ABSTRACT. 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.

show abstract

Impact of different destocking strategies on the resilience of dry rangelands

Vignal

Baudena

Mayor

et al. 2023

Ecology and Evolution

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Half of the world's livestock live in (semi-)arid regions, where a large proportion of people rely on animal husbandry for their survival. However, overgrazing can lead to land degradation and subsequent socio-economic crises. Sustainable management of dry rangeland requires suitable stocking strategies and has been the subject of intense debate in the last decades. Our goal is to understand how variations in stocking strategies affect the resilience of dry rangelands. We describe rangeland dynamics through a simple mathematical model consisting of a system of coupled differential equations. In our model, livestock density is limited only by forage availability, which is itself limited by water availability. We model processes typical of dryland vegetation as a strong Allee effect, leading to bistability between a vegetated and a degraded state, even in the absence of herbivores. We study analytically the impact of varying the stocking density and the destocking adaptivity on the resilience of the system to the effects of drought. By using dynamical systems theory, we look at how different measures of resilience are affected by variations in destocking strategies. We find that the following: (1) Increasing stocking density decreases resilience, giving rise to an expected trade-off between productivity and resilience. (2) There exists a maximal sustainable livestock density above which the system can only be degraded. This carrying capacity is common to all strategies. (3) Higher adaptivity of the destocking rate to available forage makes the system more resilient: the more adaptive a system is, the bigger the losses of vegetation it can recover from, without affecting the longterm level of productivity. The first two results emphasize the need for suitable dry rangeland management strategies, to prevent degradation resulting from the conflict between profitability and sustainability. The third point offers a theoretical suggestion for such a strategy.

show abstract

How to avoid unsustainable side effects of managing climate risk in drylands — The supplementary feeding controversy

Cited by 36 publications

References 67 publications

Governmental response to climate risk: Model-based assessment of livestock supplementation in drylands

Governmental response to climate risk: Model-based assessment of livestock supplementation in drylands

Assessing the resilience of a real-world social-ecological system: lessons from a multidisciplinary evaluation of a South African pastoral system

Impact of different destocking strategies on the resilience of dry rangelands

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About