Roberta Aretano

Empirical assessment of adaptation to climate change impacts of mountain households: development and application of an Adaptation Capability Index

The present study proposes an index to assess the potential for adaptation to climate change for households in the mountainous regions. The index provides a realistic approach to recognize social and natural factors which contribute to successful adaptation and addresses several household functions, such as social networking, livelihood strategy, adjustment strategies, resource availability and accessibility. The proposed Adaptation Capability Index (ACI) is analytically defined, mathematically formulated and field tested on mountainous households in urban and semi-urban regions of the Uttarakhand Himalaya in India. To gather data on the topic relevant to the ACI, a household scale questionnaire was developed and administered to 120 heads of households through face-to-face interviews. The results highlight higher adaptive capability of urban households and low adaptation capacity of rural households due to poor farm productivity, low accessibility and availability of resources and technological input. Future programs and policies must include and implement regulations to remedy attributive factors responsible for higher adaptation. This paper may be applicable to other mountainous regions and may provide insights for effective adaptation strategies to climate change.

Socio-ecological Vulnerability of Smallholders due to Climate Change in Mountains: Agroforestry as an Adaptation Measure

Abstract The present study aims to assess the socioecological vulnerability of smallholders through an index of Tehri Garhwal Himalaya. The index provides a realistic approach to recognize the contributions of social and ecological factors for household welfare vulnerability to climate change. The approach puts forward various indices for each component of vulnerability to climate change - exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity including two more indices: one for overall impact under the exposure of climate change and another for overall vulnerability. The five indices were proposed to assess the vulnerability status of with and without agroforestry practicing households in Himalayan region. These indices are based on 35 indicators (8 for exposure; 12 for sensitivity, 15 for adaptive capacity), selected through inductive approaches. A questionnaire for households was designed for the above aim and was administered to 121 heads of households through face-toface interviews with 77 households practicing agroforestry and 44 without agroforestry. The questionnaire dealt the general household information, and indicators of the vulnerability including the issues related to agroforestry. The results highlight slightly higher adaptive capacity of agroforestry practicing households due to specific contribution of agroforestry. The low contribution of agroforestry among smallholders was due to small land holding. The study also results that remoteness, specific issues of smallholders’ such as poverty, education and employment are responsible for the present condition. In particular this study clearly shows that poverty is the key driver for vulnerability. All of these issues can be addressed if future programs and policies, include and implement regulations to remedy attributive factors. This paper may be applicable to other mountainous regions providing insights for effective adaptation strategies to climate change.

Agroecology as a Climate Change Adaptation Strategy for Smallholders of Tehri-Garhwal in the Indian Himalayan Region

Climate change is expected to increase temperatures and rainfall in the Himalayan region and place stress on local livelihoods by affecting agro-biodiversity, crop yield, cropping patterns and the species composition of forests. This paper reports findings of a survey of farmers into the role of agroforestry or ‘agroecological intensification’ for reducing climate change vulnerability. The survey was conducted in the Tehri-Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, a Himalayan State of India. Existing traditional agroforestry was found to provide ecosystem services to farmers at various scales ranging from the global to household level, contributing to the livelihoods and resilience of the farmers to climate change. The strategies of farmers for adaptating to climate change include adoption of agroforestry due to its diversified agricultural and forest products and services. The analysis suggests that policies should consider agroforestry as a tool for improving the livelihood and resilience to climate change of farmers.

Sustainable landscape development and value rigidity: the Pirsig‘s monkey trap

New broader, adaptable and accommodating sets of themes have been proposed to help to identify, understand and solve sustainability problems. However, how this knowledge will foster decisions that lead to more desirable outcomes and analyses necessary to transition to sustainability remains a critical theoretical and empirical question for basic and applied research. We argue that we are still underestimating the tendency to lock into certain patterns that come at the cost of the ability to adjust to new situations. This rigidity limits the ability of persons, groups, and companies to respond to new problems, and can make it hard to learn new facts because we pre-select facts as important, or not, in line with our established values. Changing circumstances demand to reappraise values like in the case of Pirsigs monkey and its rice. There is an urgent need to go beyond such local, static and short-term conceptions, where landscape sustainability has been incorrectly envisioned as a durable, stable condition that, once achieved, could persist for generations. We argue that to manage a global transition toward more environmentally efficient and, therefore, more sustainable land-use we have to reappraise societal values at the root of overregulation and rigidity.

Coastal dynamics vs beach users attitudes and perceptions to enhance environmental conservation and management effectiveness

This work carries out a landscape analysis for the last 60years to compare the degree of preservation of two areas on the same Italian coastline characterized by different environmental protection levels: a National designated protected areas and a highly tourist coastal destination. The conversion of natural land-covers into human land uses were detected for protected and unprotected coastal stretches highlighting that the only establishment of a protected area is not enough to stem undesirable land-use outcomes. A survey analysis was also conducted to assess attitudes of beach users and to evaluate their perception of natural habitats, beach and coastal water quality, and coastal dynamic over time. The results of 2071 questionnaires showed that there is similarity between subjective and objective data. However, several beach users perceived a bad quality of coastal water in the legally unprotected coastal area. The implications from a planning and management perspective are discussed.

Emerging Land-Use Cross-Scale Patterns and the Pirsig’s Monkey Trap

We want to draw the attention to some emerging land-use cross-scale patterns resulting from social-economic factors and associated with an historical characteristic sequence of different land-use regimes that could indicate overregulation in social-ecological landscapes (SELs). We postulate that these emerging patterns with clearly defined spatial areas with fixed rules and increasing merging and enlargements of specific functions in some SEL locations are early warning signal of regime shifts and can be typical in many different human-dominated parts of the world. This current overall tendency could make in fact land administration inflexible, and planning may reinforce rigidity, erode resilience, and promote regime shifts and collapse in SELs instead of the adaptability required to counter surprises due, for instance, to climate change. The problem we presently face is how a “static” and “ordered” landscape condition in SELs, provided by the cross-scale intersections of land use, plans, and norms can be made sustainable in face of unpredictable disturbance and change. If we don’t have proper mechanisms to monitor and predict changes and if we are not able to adapt through feedback mechanisms to changes in the environment, we might get stuck in a rigidity trap like the Pirsig’s monkey and we are at high risk for failing. We show that a potential way to address such issues is to look at recent trends of different land-use regimes, along with a simple framework to interpret resulting spatial patterns across scales. We provide examples of this approach and discuss what a cross-scale land-use pattern could mean, what it tells about the condition of SELs, and what the effects could be of changing observed conditions in SELs because of, for instance, climate change. We exercise the approach for the Apulia region in southern Italy taking advantage of recent historical trends observed in main drivers and of the rich information provided by cross-scale pattern analysis in the pattern transition space provided by classic neutral landscape models. We suggest that the degree to which the observed pattern departs from a particular neutral model can indicate whether major constraints or organizing structure has been placed on the landscape and how those landscapes might evolve/react to additional variation due to land use and climate change. The degree of overregulation provided by cross-scale patterns of land use is a warning to planners and managers that the problem is becoming widespread and can no longer be addressed simply with short-term and local-scale solutions. To manage a transition toward more environmentally efficient and, therefore, more sustainable land use, we should design and manage landscape elements and structure to create less contagious and more heterogeneous landscapes. Nevertheless, we have to change societal values at the root of overregulation and rigidity. We have to be aware that we might get stuck in a rigidity trap to appreciate the similarity of our common condition and to start real cooperation.