Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
for economic growth in some parts of the world, drives ecological resource exploita-
tion in others.
There are, according to Adger et al. (2009), potentially three mechanisms of
interdependence linking vulnerabilities and resilience of socio-environmental systems
around the world. First, there are the linked physical, biological and social processes
that constitute global environmental change. Due to the accelerating and increas-
ingly global nature of environmental change processes, the impacts of environmental
change in one locality are connected to regional and global systems through human
action and response. Some environmental changes involve changes to global systems
such as the carbon and nitrogen cycles involving oceans, atmospheres and land.
Other issues become global concerns, according to Turner et al. (1990), due to the
local effects of trends observed everywhere on the planet, such as local water scar-
city, local habitat fragmentation or degradation or local air pollutants. Of course
these physical and biological processes are themselves interrelated at various scales,
many with crucial thresholds (Scheffer et al., 2001; Steffen et al., 2004). Hence,
global environmental change is a collection of processes that are manifest in locali-
ties, but with causes and consequences at multiple spatial, temporal and socio-
political scales.
Second, economic market linkages are not only tied up with global environmental
change, but can also themselves be a driver of interdependent vulnerabilities. The
processes of global environmental change are indeed amplifi ed by the social, politi-
cal and economic trends of globalisation. Economic policies such as trade liberalisa-
tion and the integration of economies into world markets can make the incomes of
the poor insecure, open to vagaries and price fl uctuations, and ultimately more
vulnerable when other shocks and stresses come along. Such places are 'doubly
exposed' to social and environmental change (Leichenko and O'Brien, 2008). In
India, for example, both climate change and market liberalisation for agricultural
commodities are changing the context for agricultural production. Some farmers
may be able to adapt to these changing conditions, including discrete events such
as drought and rapid changes in commodity prices, while other farmers may experi-
ence predominately negative outcomes. O'Brien and colleagues (2004) argue that a
combination of biophysical, socio-economic and technological conditions infl uence
the resilience of places and populations. These factors range from groundwater
availability to literacy, gender equity and the distribution of the proceeds of farming
to landowners and waged labour. Together, these factors suggest which districts are
most and least able to adapt to drier conditions and variability in the Indian mon-
soons and to import competition resulting from liberalised agricultural trade. Inland
areas exposed to high-potential temperature increases and water stress and where
there is an increasing dependency on internationally traded agricultural commodi-
ties are relatively more vulnerable than those where diversity of agricultural produc-
tion is higher. The reduction of landscape scale diversity in crop variety in India
also reduces the resilience of rural communities.
A further important trend is the observed widening disparity in income and access
to resources in many regions of the world including China and the former Soviet
republics. The reasons why inequality is important in terms of environmental deg-
radation and management have been examined by Boyce (2002) who demonstrates
theoretically that in resource-allocation decisions, the unequal power relationships
that are inherent in unequal distributions of wealth lead to undesirable outcomes.
If it is, in general, the powerful who gain most from environmentally damaging
