Resilience management at the landscape level: An approach to tackling social-ecological vulnerability of agroforestry systems

Abstract

The sustainable management of agroforestry landscapes is complex because they are socio-ecosystems that integrate biological and socio-productive diversity with spatial-temporal dynamical interactions. Furthermore, agroforestry landscapes provide a variety of ecosystem goods and services at both the farm and global levels, and host thousands of rural people whose livelihoods depend on the forest. Strong dependence on the forest for subsistence strengthens theneed to promote their sustainable management. In this chapter, we propose that management practices of Social-Ecological Systems (SES) should be addressed at the landscape scale using a resilience approach to reduce the vulnerability of agroforestry systems to environmental and/or anthropogenic drivers. We examine key properties of farm-level SES components; we demonstrate how they collectively interconnect at the landscape scale and analyze the benefits ofresolving social-ecological conflicts at the landscape scale. We highlight a case study in which social-environmental conflicts are increasingly frequent and demonstrate that a resilience management approach at the landscape level should be used as a tool for resolving conflicts. Finally, we conclude that as the search for solutions through decision-making at the farm scale may have indirect and unexpected effects on other SES at the landscape level, replacing a farmscale perspective with a landscape-scale perspective could increase SES-resilience, reducing its vulnerability to different drivers.