Elsevier

Global Environmental Change

Volume 25, March 2014, Pages 186-193
Global Environmental Change

Cultivating resilience by empirically revealing response diversity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.02.002Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • We demonstrated a generic method to assess response diversity to foster resilience.

  • We exemplified the value-added of the method for food security in climate change.

  • Response diversity of cultivars may decrease, even if cultivar diversity increases.

  • Decreasing resilience was only revealed by directly assessing response diversity.

Abstract

Intensified climate and market turbulence requires resilience to a multitude of changes. Diversity reduces the sensitivity to disturbance and fosters the capacity to adapt to various future scenarios. What really matters is diversity of responses. Despite appeals to manage resilience, conceptual developments have not yet yielded a break-through in empirical applications. Here, we present an approach to empirically reveal the ‘response diversity’: the factors of change that are critical to a system are identified, and the response diversity is determined based on the documented component responses to these factors. We illustrate this approach and its added value using an example of securing food supply in the face of climate variability and change. This example demonstrates that quantifying response diversity allows for a new perspective: despite continued increase in cultivar diversity of barley, the diversity in responses to weather declined during the last decade in the regions where most of the barley is grown in Finland. This was due to greater homogeneity in responses among new cultivars than among older ones. Such a decline in the response diversity indicates increased vulnerability and reduced resilience. The assessment serves adaptive management in the face of both ecological and socio-economic drivers. Supplier diversity in the food retail industry in order to secure affordable food in spite of global price volatility could represent another application. The approach is, indeed, applicable to any system for which it is possible to adopt empirical information regarding the response by its components to the critical factors of variability and change. Targeting diversification in response to critical change brings efficiency into diversity. We propose the generic procedure that is demonstrated in this study as a means to efficiently enhance resilience at multiple levels of agrifood systems and beyond.

Keywords

Generic approach
Climate change
Food security
Agrifood systems
Cultivars
Adaptive capacity

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