Agriculture is a major economic driver in Aotearoa-New Zealand (New Zealand), led by export earnings from dairy farming. Dairying is uniquely exposed to climatic- and nonclimatic socioeconomic ...stressors, which have their greatest effects on production and yield. The growing need to consider these and other changes is accelerating efforts aimed at ensuring greater resilience, adaptability, and flexibility within the industry. To gain insight into these dynamics at the farm-level, a resilience-based assessment framework was piloted with three different types of dairy farming systems, following extensive drought on the east coast of the North Island. Using a participatory and bottom-up approach, the framework was used to qualitatively explore the potential significance of varying social, economic, and agroecological attributes between high-input, low-input, and organic systems, and their implications for resilience. The "lock in trap" of highly intensive systems, although profitable in the near term, may be less resilient to climate shocks because these are likely to occur in conjunction with changing market and financial risks. Low-input systems are less dependent, in particular, on fossil fuels and are associated with higher levels of farmer satisfaction and well-being. Organic farming provides ecological benefits, and the financial premium paid to farmers may act as a short-term buffer. The framework provides insight into the current context at the farm level and can draw out individual perspectives on where to target interventions and build resilience. Results demonstrate the potential of in-depth qualitative assessments of resilience, which can usefully complement quantitative metrics. The framework can be used as the basis for further empirical assessment and inform the design of similar approaches for cross-sector comparative analysis, large-N surveys, or modelling. Furthermore, the preliminary characterization of resilient farm-systems has the potential to contribute to broader sustainability frameworks for agriculture and can inform strategic adaptation planning in the face of climate change.
Abstract
Climate change is already having adverse impacts, with place- and problem-based implications due to higher temperatures, prolonged droughts, and more frequent extremes. Despite uncertainty ...about the full extent of future change, adaptation will be required. Adaptation pathways (APs) planning is increasingly used as a methodological approach to identify, evaluate, and sequence adaptation options over time. Pathways link critical decisions to future conditions, providing a road map to support planning in the face of uncertainty. This systematic review identifies and assesses the rapidly growing APs literature, focusing on its definition, and application in diverse contexts. Using bibliometric and thematic analysis, we highlight scholarly networks driving innovation in this area, characterise theoretical and conceptual differences in framing, and derive insights for best practice. Results show the evolution in interpretation, framing and practice; from an initial focus on managing uncertainty with technological- and engineered-based approaches, through to more participatory, policy- and decision-relevant pathways. Pathways planning has become increasingly collaborative, and is now used to address climate adaptation outcomes, within the broader context of interacting and compounding stressors. Results also highlight challenges in conceptualising and operationalizing APs, including comprehensive accounting for costs, and navigating social dynamics involved in process development. Based on these findings we propose new avenues for research, to develop methodologies to better engage with stakeholders’ social, political, and economic concerns, and enhance learning for climate adapted futures.
•Three governance challenges to implementing the SDGs are identified and discussed.•Collective action across sectors, levels and scales will be required.•Win–wins may not be possible so tradeoffs ...must focus on equity, justice and fairness.•Mechanisms are needed to ensure accountability for reaching targets and outcomes.•Challenges influence each other; implementation must take an integrated approach.
Realising the aspirations of the “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) to reduce inequality, limit ecological damage, and secure resilient livelihoods is a grand challenge for sustainability science, civil society and government. We identify three key governance challenges that are central for implementing the SDGs: (i) cultivating collective action by creating inclusive decision spaces for stakeholder interaction across multiple sectors and scales; (ii) making difficult trade-offs, focusing on equity, justice and fairness; and (iii) ensuring mechanisms exist to hold societal actors to account regarding decision-making, investment, action, and outcomes. The paper explains each of these three governance challenges, identifying possible avenues for addressing them, and highlights the importance of interlinkages between the three challenges.
•Interacting stressors and interdependencies affect decision makers ability to adapt.•Network and systems tools can assist decision makers with adaptation action.•Cascades flow to the financial ...sector affecting private and public policy settings.•Cascades require adaptation of urban water systems to be multi-dimensional.
Climate change is expected to have adverse impacts and implications for a range of human-environment systems. However, our understanding of the extent to which these impacts may propagate as cascades, compounding to form multiple impacts across sectors, is limited. Cascades result from interdependencies between systems and sub-systems of coupled natural and socio-economic systems in response to changes and feedback loops. The combined effects of interacting stressors may affect the ability of individuals, governments, and the private sector to adapt in time, before widespread damage occurs. We discuss the origins of cascading impacts thinking and present the results of an investigation of cascading impacts and implications in New Zealand. A participatory and collaborative approach was used through workshops and semi-structured interviews with sector informants, including engineers, local government staff, and financial risk managers and analysts from the financial services sectors. Qualitative data collection was combined with network and systems analysis to examine increased frequency of high-intensity rainfall events, sea-level rise and drought, across urban water infrastructure and the financial services, and the implications of cascading climate change impacts for governance. Results demonstrate that closer consideration of the combined effects of linked stressors can facilitate a better understanding of the scope and scale of climate change impacts. By using critical systems thinking in characterising and assessing how climate change impacts cascade across domains, we show the implications of cascades for their governance and reveal where climate change adaptation interventions might be focused. The research methods and insights into cascades provide a conceptual and practical basis for further development, which can inform the design of additional studies in other domains and jurisdictions.
Tourists are essential to a destination's social and economic recovery following disaster, reducing future risk and enhancing resilience. Drawing on the results of visitor surveys in Kaikōura, New ...Zealand, we analyse visitors' experiences and their consideration of natural hazard risk and response abilities in relation to a damaging earthquake in the region in 2016. Despite widespread national media and significant disruption, findings suggest the disaster had very little impact on visitors' perceptions and experiences and did not translate into greater preparedness. Instead, tourists reported only limited knowledge about what to do or where to go in the event of a natural hazard event. Results suggest tourists' resilience – and Kaikōura's resilience as a whole – would be enhanced by improving knowledge sharing and awareness building. Furthermore, by considering tourists as part of a linked social-ecological system, targeted interventions to improve understanding of natural hazards can support long-term recovery trajectories and minimize future losses.
•Visitors' experiences are a key component of a resilient tourism system in the post-disaster setting of Kaikōura, NZ.•Kaikōura suffered little reputational damage from the earthquake and the destination experience is not negatively affected.•Domestic (NZ) and Chinese visitors consider the risk of disasters when they travel more than other international visitors.•Tourists demonstrate limited resilience, in terms of preparedness and knowledge about appropriate response to disasters.•Visitors view tourist personnel and local residents as information sources during and after a natural disaster.
Natural hazards continue to have adverse effects on communities and households worldwide, accelerating research on proactively identifying and enhancing characteristics associated with resilience. ...Although resilience is often characterized as a return to normal, recent studies of postdisaster recovery have highlighted the ways in which new opportunities can emerge following disruption, challenging the status quo. Conversely, recovery and reconstruction may serve to reinforce preexisting social, institutional, and development pathways. Our understanding of these dynamics is limited however by the small number of practice examples, particularly for rural communities in developed nations. This study uses a social–ecological inventory to document the drivers, pathways, and mechanisms of resilience following a large-magnitude earthquake in Kaikōura, a coastal community in Aotearoa New Zealand. As part of the planning and implementation phase of a multiyear project, we used the tool as the basis for indepth and contextually sensitive analysis of rural resilience. Moreover, the deliberate application of social–ecological inventory was the first step in the research team reengaging with the community following the event. The inventory process provided an opportunity for research partners to share their stories and experiences and develop a shared understanding of changes that had taken place in the community. Results provide empirical insight into reactions to disruptive change associated with disasters. The inventory also informed the design of targeted research collaborations, established a platform for longer-term community engagement, and provides a baseline for assessing longitudinal changes in key resilience-related characteristics and community capacities. Findings suggest the utility of social–ecological inventory goes beyond natural resource management, and that it may be appropriate in a range of contexts where institutional, social, and economic restructuring have developed out of necessity in response to felt or anticipated external stressors.
Agricultural producers are already experiencing the adverse effects of climate change, highlighting the urgent need for adaptation. While incremental changes to cope with interannual variability are ...widely applied, there is limited understanding of the social contexts that inform, enable, or constrain more transformational adaptations in response to anticipated or actual climate change and other stressors. Systematic review methods are used to identify 31 empirical examples of land management change as an adaptation response by agricultural producers in developed countries. We then applied the values-rules-knowledge (vrk) framework to analyse interactions between societal values, institutional rules, and scientific and experiential knowledge. The vrk is a heuristic to help decision makers analyze how the social system shapes their decision context. Three propositions highlighting the relative influence of different values–rules, values–knowledge, and rules–knowledge relationships on agri-food and forestry land-management decisions are presented and discussed. We suggest that further testing of these propositions will provide evidence for decision makers about how decision contexts can be shifted to enable anticipatory transformative adaptation in the primary industries and support sustainable transitions towards more resilient futures.
The magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck North Canterbury, on the east coast of New Zealand's South Island on 14 November 2016 had significant impacts and implications for the community of Kaikōura ...and surrounding settlements. The magnitude and scope of this event has resulted in extensive and ongoing geological and geophysical research into the event. The current paper complements this research by providing a review of existing social science research and offering new analysis of the impact of the earthquake and its aftermath on community resilience in Kaikōura over the past five years. Results demonstrate the significant economic implications for tourism, and primary industries. Recovery has been slow, and largely dependent on restoring transportation networks, which helped catalyse cooperation among local hospitality providers. Challenges remain, however, and not all sectors or households have benefited equally from post-quake opportunities, and long-term recovery trajectories continue to be hampered by COVID-19 pandemic. The multiple ongoing and future stressors faced by Kaikōura require integrated and equitable approaches in order to build capability and capacity for locally based development pathways to ensure long-term community resilience.
Public participation in freshwater management has been widely advocated as an effective way to resolve the tensions between contested values and objectives while maintaining ecological integrity. ...However, questions remain regarding which processes and factors contribute to successful processes and outcomes for freshwater. Using a comparative case-study methodology, we unravel the “noise of participation” to assess the factors that influence the success of participatory decision making in collaborative processes currently underway in Hawke’s Bay and Northland, Aotearoa, New Zealand. In Hawke’s Bay, participants have been periodically surveyed to solicit their perceptions of how the process is working and the likelihood of achieving desirable outcomes. In Northland, five identical processes are currently underway, one per catchment, providing the basis for an intraregional assessment of collaboration. Our results suggest that participants’ perceptions change within the process, and that those changes may involve complex, dynamic, and reciprocal interactions within the collaborative group. Results also show the strong influence of external conditions. The choice of stakeholder participants is also critical to ensuring the viability of collaboration. Key factors include participants’ previous interactions and relationships, which may help to prime them for collaboration. These factors are dynamic and evolve through different cycles. Although both collaborative processes are still underway, these insights may help focus greater attention to process design and stakeholder selection from the outset to ensure successful outcomes. Ultimately, a successful collaborative process is one that is able to incorporate feedback and adapt to changing the dynamic and often complex external environment.
Resilience is increasingly used to inform natural hazard risk management. From global to national to local levels of governance and decision making, resilience concepts are becoming institutionalized ...and operationalized in both public and private domains. However, as these ideas have shifted from their origins in ecology and been adopted by other disciplines, policy makers, and practitioners, key insights from the initial ecological conceptualization have been left behind. The resulting gap between resilience as originally theorized and its current implementation gives rise to several interconnected challenges: (i) loss of nuance in the meaning of the concept due to rapid adoption, which leads to: (ii) an inability to adequately account for normative or qualitative aspects of social theory, and: (iii) the problem of measurement. Key factors associated with resilience are intangible (difficult to objectively measure) and public bureaucracies are reliant upon objective measurement, i.e., targets and indicators, to operationalize policies. Multi-capital frameworks have been advanced as a potential solution to the problem of measurement in the literature. In this paper, we critically analyze how the concepts of social and human capital can be used to address these challenges and account for intangible sources of value. Drawing on a case study of complex multi-hazards in rural Aotearoa-New Zealand (NZ), as well as the NZ government's Living Standards Framework (a multi-capital framework) we highlight the importance of addressing these challenges to adequately realize the benefits of resilience and identify the successes and limitations of this approach. Results provide insight into the interlinked nature of the challenges and the importance of reconciling resilience theory and praxis. Findings also demonstrate the potential ways in which a combination of resilience thinking and multi-capital frameworks can add value to decision-making structures within public bureaucracies, the private sector, and academia.
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