Diversifying Farming Systems for Adaptive Capacity Essay

Diversifying Farming Systems for Adaptive Capacity

Research proposal in APA 7th edition. This research should be tailored to the Jamaica context, specifically rural development, and agriculture. I have put the background to the topic and the “Research” below, please read for guidance and specification of the research. Please bid only if you are competent in the area- I am willing to guide the writer along the development of the paper to ensure it is within expectation. The research proposal should include:

• Working Title
• Abstract
•Introduction/Background
• Significance of research
• Literature Review
• Research Objectives
• Research Questions
• Methodology
• Anticipated Conclusion
• References

About this Research Topic

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and sustaining equitable
resource production for a growing population present an anthropocene “triple
challenge” for humanity. Climate change impacts agriculture through more
frequent heat waves, droughts, and other extreme weather events, shifting
precipitation patterns, the spread of new diseases and pests, and altered
growing seasons. Agriculturalists also face a global trend toward food system
simplification through market concentration, land consolidation, and crop
homogenization, which together impair farm-level flexibility and innovation,
and expose them to transnational market shocks and stressors. The increasingly
rapid loss of biodiversity, including crop genetic diversity, adds to these
challenges by constraining farmers’ ability to maintain critical ecosystem
functions in the face of climate change.

These interrelated challenges produce farm-level shocks and stressors, to which
agriculturalists must be able to effectively respond and adapt in order to
preserve livelihoods, communities, and food systems. A crucial question in the
context of the triple challenge, therefore, is how the social and ecological structure of farming
systems impact adaptive capacity.

Adaptive capacity generally describes the capacity of a system to respond to
changes, especially climate change. For the purposes of this Research Topic, we
define agricultural adaptive capacity as the extent to which agricultural
systems can respond to the triple challenge in ways that, at a minimum,
preserve core social-ecological functions, and which ideally open pathways
towards enhanced and resilient functioning. An increase in adaptive capacity
reduces vulnerability and increases resilience to stressors and shocks.
Diversity is an important aspect of both proactive and reactive responses to
change, by spreading risks and enhancing flexibility. An important area of inquiry is how social,
ecological, cultural, economic, and policy factors, and their multi-level and
multiscalar interactions, underlie the adaptive capacity of farming systems.
Specifically, how could changes in farming systems increase adaptive capacity
in ways that simultaneously promote multiple dimensions of sustainability?
Industrial agriculture may be able to incrementally and temporarily increase
adaptive capacity to certain stresses produced by the triple challenge, such
as, by developing more stress tolerant genotypes or by promoting commodity crop
insurance policies. However, given that industrial agriculture has been a major
contributor to intensifying the triple challenge in the first place, measures
that move towards further simplification will likely exacerbate stressors and
undermine future agro-ecosystem adaptive capacity while failing to
fundamentally improve sustainability.

Building on the paradigm of agroecology, the diversified farming systems (DFS)
lens emphasizes functional relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem
service provisioning. DFS recognizes a spectrum of socio-ecological practices
that farmers can flexibly employ in different combinations to increase multiple
ecosystem services that provide critical inputs to agriculture. These practices
can help simplified agricultural systems transition toward becoming
agroecological systems. Moreover, DFS tend toward participatory innovation in
collaboration with traditional centers of agricultural research and development
(e.g. universities), as well as localized control over food systems that may
rebuild regional resilience or resistance to global simplification. But to what
extent, and how, can DFS increase the adaptive capacity of agrifood systems?
While the flexibility of DFS may facilitate local adaptation to a variety of
changing conditions, the resulting heterogeneity of management practices
complicates efforts to study or predict how these systems respond to the triple
challenge.

The research should address these topics (examples below) from an
interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary perspective, which may include empirical
field studies, conceptual advances, place-specific case studies, comparisons
across cases (e.g. various regions), and meta-analyses. Specific interest is in
the research addressing the adaptive capacity and DFS from diverse geographic
perspectives and that compares adaptive capacity across a spectrum of
diversified and simplified farming systems.

Examples of work that could feature in this Research Topic include how
diversifying farming systems impacts responses to different types of stressors
in any agricultural system (including non-food systems, e.g. forestry); how
adaptive capacity emerges, develops, and is shared; and other topics,

Examples of types of stressors:

-Drought and heat waves

– Novel pests, diseases, or invasive species

– Natural disasters

– Farming marginal lands

– Farm labor and migration

– Farmland financialization

– Mechanization and automation

– Market volatility

– Supply chain management and vertical integration

How adaptive capacity emerges:

– Transitions in intensive agricultural landscapes

– Supporting and learning from indigenous practices

– Building soil health

– Open-source or participatory breeding

– Novel institutions

– Multi-level coordination

– Climate change mitigation promoting climate change adaptation

Evaluating outcomes of adaptation:

– Food security

– Nutrition

– Rural livelihoods

– Climate change readiness/preparedness

– Food sovereignty

– Biodiversity preservation

The Research

This research aims to develop how Diversified Farming
Systems (DFS) may contribute to adaptive capacity in order to confer resilience
to agricultural systems. In this perspective research, it is argued that a
framework for DFS and adaptive capacity must adequately contend with the role
of farmland tenure on the shape of food systems to be both internally coherent
and socially redistributive. Yet, both DFS and adaptive capacity scholarship
deemphasize or mischaracterize the role of farmland tenure in favor of
ecosystem dynamics. This research paper, should bring together lessons from the
agrarian change literature and established critiques of resilience thinking to
demonstrate core problems with a framework aimed at linking DFS to adaptive
capacity without adequately addressing the role of farmland tenure. Namely,
applying resilience thinking as a framework to understand food systems change
prioritizes concern over final “states” or processes of farming systems and may
ignore who has the power to adapt or who derives benefits from adaptation. The
critiques of resilience thinking inform that the result of this apolitical
elision is (1) entrenchment of neoliberal logics that place responsibility to
cultivate adaptation on individual farmers and (2) provisioning of legitimacy
for land tenure systems that can most readily adopt DFS, without understanding
how well these systems distribute public benefits. Resilience reformers call
for ways to include more power aware analysis when applying resilience thinking
to complex socio-technical systems. The research is to suggest that centering
the role of land tenure into the frameworks of DFS and adaptive capacity
provides a lens to observe the power relations that mediate any benefits of
agricultural diversification. Integrating analysis of the social and legal
structures of the food system into the DFS for adaptive capacity formulation is
a crucial step to transforming resilience thinking from an apolitical tool to
transformative and power-aware applied science.

Keywords: Adaptive
capacity, Diversified farming systems, Biodiversity loss, Livelihoods, Climate
change, Ecosystem services, Food system simplification, Anthropocene

Diversifying Farming Systems for Adaptive Capacity Essay

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