Building upon Traditional Knowledge to Enhance Resilience of Soils in Sub-Saharan Africa - Principles of Sustainable Soil Management in Agroecosystems - page 125

of protection, may promote recovery but not necessarily bolster resistance. (2) The
frequency of extreme climatic events (e.g., increasing temperatures, rainfall, floods)
is expected to increase under most climate change scenarios; thus, the window avail-
able between climate disturbances may be less than the time needed for soils to
recover. Besides, not all climate disturbances will be acute (Hoegh-Guldberg et al.
2007). Thus, enhancing soil resistance to climatic stress may be a better long-term
goal.

5.4.2 c onventIonal v IeW oF r esIlIence
Under the conventional approach to managing for resilience are two management
strategies: (1) protection of fragile and/or undegraded lands [e.g., conservation agri-
culture (CA)] and (2) exposed conventional system (Table 5.3).
According to Pasteur (2011), the conventional school of thought postulates that
conserved or protected undegraded soils are highly resilient to human-induced deg-
radation and that climate change effects undermine the ability of soils to resist the
impacts of degradative forces, tipping degraded soils into alternative, less desirable
states sooner than protected ones (conceptual model shown in Figures 5.4a and 5.4b).
CA is perhaps the most popular form of land conservation widely thought to have the
potential to increase soil resilience. But does it really?
First, the frequency of resilience is the process by which the soil system tends to
cope with stress and adversity (Seybold et al. 1999). This coping may result in the
system “bouncing back” to a previous state of normal functioning or using the expe-
rience of exposure to adversity to produce a “steeling effect” and function better than
expected. Resilience refers to the capacity to resist a sharp decline in functioning
even though a soil system temporarily appears to get worse. Resilience is the result
of a soil system being able to interact with its environment and the processes that are
either degradative or constructive that protect it against the overwhelming influence

TABLE 5.3
Management Strategy as Is Informed by Sensitivity to External Forces

Increasing Level of Stress Plus Climate Change
Low Level of Stressors

Management
Strategy High Level of Stressors

Protection
(e.g., CA)

Bouncing back—good. Not all disturbances
will be acute. When impact seems to be
reaching the threshold, management response
can be to alter human behavior to result in less
adverse impact to the ecosystem

Stability—constant competence
under stress

Exposed (e.g.,
conventional
agriculture)

Alleviation of local stressor's original state
following disturbance vis-à-vis an
unconserved or more degraded state.
Protected or less degraded land returns more
quickly to original state

On severely degraded land,
resistance is lost. Recovery is
limited under persistent stressors
Beyond a certain threshold,
recovery is no longer possible