Kirsten Abernethy

Climate change impacts and adaptive strategies: lessons from the grapevine

The cultivation of grapevines for winemaking, known as viticulture, is widely cited as a climate-sensitive agricultural system that has been used as an indicator of both historic and contemporary climate change. Numerous studies have questioned the viability of major viticulture regions under future climate projections. We review the methods used to study the impacts of climate change on viticulture in the light of what is known about the effects of climate and weather on the yields and quality of vineyard harvests. Many potential impacts of climate change on viticulture, particularly those associated with a change in climate variability or seasonal weather patterns, are rarely captured. Key biophysical characteristics of viticulture are often unaccounted for, including the variability of grapevine phenology and the exploitation of microclimatic niches that permit successful cultivation under suboptimal macroclimatic conditions. We consider how these same biophysical characteristics permit a variety of strategies by which viticulture can adapt to changing climatic conditions. The ability to realize these strategies, however, is affected by uneven exposure to risks across the winemaking sector, and the evolving capacity for decision-making within and across organizational boundaries. The role grape provenance plays in shaping perceptions of wine value and quality illustrates how conflicts of interest influence decisions about adaptive strategies within the industry. We conclude by considering what lessons can be taken from viticulture for studies of climate change impacts and the capacity for adaptation in other agricultural and natural systems.

Can Perceptions of Environmental and Climate Change in Island Communities Assist in Adaptation Planning Locally

Abstract Local perceptions of environmental and climate change, as well as associated adaptations made by local populations, are fundamental for designing comprehensive and inclusive mitigation and adaptation plans both locally and nationally. In this paper, we analyze people’s perceptions of environmental and climate-related transformations in communities across the Western Solomon Islands through ethnographic and geospatial methods. Specifically, we documented people’s observed changes over the past decades across various environmental domains, and for each change, we asked respondents to identify the causes, timing, and people’s adaptive responses. We also incorporated this information into a geographical information system database to produce broad-scale base maps of local perceptions of environmental change. Results suggest that people detected changes that tended to be acute (e.g., water clarity, logging intensity, and agricultural diseases). We inferred from these results that most local observations of and adaptations to change were related to parts of environment/ecosystem that are most directly or indirectly related to harvesting strategies. On the other hand, people were less aware of slower insidious/chronic changes identified by scientific studies. For the Solomon Islands and similar contexts in the insular tropics, a broader anticipatory adaptation planning strategy to climate change should include a mix of local scientific studies and local observations of ongoing ecological changes.

Addressing uncertainty in marine resource management; combining community engagement and tracking technology to characterise human behavior

Small-scale fisheries provide an essential source of food and employment for coastal communities, yet the availability of detailed information on the spatiotemporal distribution of fishing effort to support resource management at a country level is scarce. Here, using a national-scale study in the Republic of Congo, we engaged with fishers from 23 of 28 small-scale fisheries landing sites along the coast to demonstrate how combining community engagement and relatively low cost Global Positioning System (GPS) trackers can rapidly provide fine-scale information on: (1) the behavioural dynamics of the fishers and fleets that operate within this sector; and (2) the location, size and attributes of important fishing grounds upon which communities are dependent. This multi-disciplinary approach should be considered within a global context where uncertainty over the behaviour of marine and terrestrial resource-users can lead to management decisions that potentially compromise local livelihoods, conservation, and resource sustainability goals. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

Community Perceptions of the Crop-Feeding Buton Macaque ( Macaca ochreata brunnescens ): an Ethnoprimatological Study on Buton Island, Sulawesi

Human–wildlife overlap is increasing worldwide as a result of agricultural expansion. This can reduce human tolerance of wildlife, especially if wildlife threatens human food sources. The greatest threat to the declining populations of the endemic Buton macaque (Macaca ochreata brunnescens) is habitat destruction, but as a common crop-feeding species, there is also an additional risk of retaliation killings from farmers. Finding means of reducing this risk will thus help secure the long-term future of this range-restricted subspecies. Here, we investigate variability in farmers’ perceptions of primate crop-feeding and mitigation techniques in three farming communities on Buton Island, Indonesia, which differ in wealth and agricultural resources. We employ a mixed methodology, collecting qualitative social data from focus groups and quantitative observational data to measure macaque crop-feeding occurrences. Our findings indicate that the least wealthy community used lethal control methods more frequently than the comparatively wealthier communities, even when the crop-feeding problem was less severe. The least wealthy community also expressed high levels of fear of macaques, and had the most negative perceptions of them. This community also had no knowledge of the macaques’ conservation status or their ecological roles. We recommend that efforts to protect Buton macaques focus on education and the use of effective nonlethal mitigation techniques, such as electric fencing. We also suggest that initiatives to support such measures may be most effectively directed toward communities with relatively low economic wealth and high reliance on subsistence agriculture, especially where crop-feeding wildlife is feared, even when such communities do not experience the highest losses from crop-feeding wildlife.

Cost-Effective Methods for Accurate Determination of Sea Level Rise Vulnerability: A Solomon Islands Example

AbstractFor millions of people living along the coastal fringe, sea level rise is perhaps the greatest threat to livelihoods over the coming century. With the refinement and downscaling of global climate models and increasing availability of airborne-lidar-based inundation models, it is possible to predict and quantify these threats with reasonable accuracy where such information is available. For less developed countries, especially small island states, access to high-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) derived from lidar is limited. The only freely available DEMs that could be used for inundation modeling by these nations are those based on data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). These data, with a horizontal resolution of ≈90 m and a vertical accuracy of ±5–10 m, are generally unsuitable for local-scale planning and adaption projects. To address this disparity, low-cost ground-based techniques were tested and applied to accurately determine coastal topography in the Solomon Island...

Navigating the transformation to community-based resource management

Discourses of unprecedented and accelerated human impacts on the earth’s ecosystems underpin increasing scholarship on deliberate and desirable transformations towards sustainability (ISSC and UNESCO, 2013). While transformations in dynamic social-ecological systems are inherently difficult to define and identify, they broadly describe a profound change when existing systems become untenable; a change that recombines existing elements of social-ecological systems in fundamentally novel ways (Walker et al., 2004). Transformations in ecological systems can include changing stability landscapes or fundamental alterations in species composition and biomass (Biggs et al., 2009; McClanahan et al., 2011; Scheffer et al., 2012). In social systems, transformations can lead to restructuring of social institutions, changes in human agency, or new ways of making a living (Chapin et al., 2010). An emerging literature on transformational pathways aims to characterise transformative change and identify its key drivers (e.g. Biggs et al., 2010; Leach et al., 2012; Olsson et al., 2006; Westley et al., 2011). Understanding how to deliberately trigger and navigate such transformations is an important frontier of sustainability science (Brown et al., 2013). In this chapter, we use the case of community-based resource management (CBRM) in the Solomon Islands to contribute a critical social science perspective on navigating social transformations towards sustainability.

Exploring ‘islandness’ and the impacts of nature conservation through the lens of wellbeing

Motivated by growing concern as to the many threats that islands face, subsequent calls for more extensive island nature conservation and recent discussion in the conservation literature about the potential for wellbeing as a useful approach to understanding how conservation affects peoples lives, this paper reviews the literature in order to explore how islands and wellbeing relate and how conservation might impact that relationship. We apply a three-dimensional concept of social wellbeing to structure the discussion and illustrate the importance of understanding island–wellbeing interactions in the context of material, relational and subjective dimensions, using examples from the literature. We posit that islands and their shared characteristics of ‘islandness’ provide a useful setting in which to apply social wellbeing as a generalizable framework, which is particularly adept at illuminating the relevance of social relationships and subjective perceptions in island life – aspects that are often marginalized in more economically focused conservation impact assessments. The paper then explores in more depth the influences of island nature conservation on social wellbeing and sustainability outcomes using two case studies from the global north (UK islands) and global south (the Solomon Islands). We conclude that conservation approaches that engage with all three dimensions of wellbeing seem to be associated with success.

Variation in perception of environmental change in nine Solomon Islands communities: implications for securing fairness in community-based adaptation

Community-based approaches are pursued in recognition of the need for place-based responses to environmental change that integrate local understandings of risk and vulnerability. Yet the potential for fair adaptation is intimately linked to how variations in perceptions of environmental change and risk are treated. There is, however, little empirical evidence of the extent and nature of variations in risk perception in and between multiple community settings. Here, we rely on data from 231 semi-structured interviews conducted in nine communities in Western Province, Solomon Islands, to statistically model different perceptions of risk and change within and between communities. Overall, people were found to be less likely to perceive environmental changes in the marine environment than they were for terrestrial systems. The distance to the nearest market town (which may be a proxy for exposure to commercial logging and degree of involvement with the market economy), and gender had the greatest overall statistical effects on perceptions of risk. Yet, we also find that significant environmental change is underreported in communities, while variations in perception are not always easily related to commonly assumed fault lines of vulnerability. The findings suggest that there is an urgent need for methods that engage with the drivers of perceptions as part of community-based approaches. In particular, it is important to explicitly account for place, complexity and diversity of environmental risk perceptions, and we reinforce calls to engage seriously with underlying questions of power, culture, identity and practice that influence adaptive capacity and risk perception.