Transformational adaptation: agriculture and climate change

By Lauren Rickards, S. Mark Howden. Crop and Pasture Science, 2012

402 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. Climate change presents the need and opportunity for what the Stern report called ‘major, non-marginal change’. Such transformational adaptation is rapidly emerging as a serious topic in agriculture. This paper provides an overview of the topic as it applies to agriculture, focusing on the Australian situation. It does so by first defining transformational adaptation, distinguishing it from other more incremental but overlapping modes of climate change adaptation and positing its emergence in agriculture as a response to both drivers and opportunities. The multiple dimensions of transformational adaptation are highlighted before two types or cases are focussed upon in order to tease out issues and highlight two major examples of transformation in agriculture in the past. Four key issues about climate change adaptation in agriculture particularly pertinent for transformational adaptation are then reviewed: the identification, level, distribution and management of the costs of adaptation; the definition, potential for and need to avoid maladaptation; the capacity demands that this level of adaptation presents; and the role of government in adaptation. Overall, transformational adaptation poses potential great gains but also great risks. It reinforces the realisation that agricultural research can no longer remain insulated from off-farm, non-science or non-agricultural knowledge or processes. Support and guidance of transformational adaptation requires that we understand how Australian agriculture is currently, and could be, positioned within the landscape, rural communities, and broader social, political and cultural environment.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fbd019e2dbc5d3ced885e1173a37f5fac1857f82

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Citations in the corpus

Transformational capacity and the influence of place and identity (2012, background): “Factors such as place attachment and occupational identity, which are effectively unaccounted for in climate policy to date [8, 59], and are important potential barriers to climate adaptations which involve changing place or identity, are important considerations.”
Linking agricultural adaptation strategies, food security and vulnerability: evidence from West Africa (2016, neutral): “…is progressive and that transformational adaptation happens when incremental adaptation is not sufﬁcient (Jarvis et al. 2011; Kates et al. 2012; Rickards and Howden 2012), our study shows that these types of adaptations happen simultaneously at household level as they try to improve various…”
Transformational change: governance interventions for climate change adaptation from a continuous change perspective (2017, background): “Rickards and Howden (2012) state that transformational change in adaptation should be understood against the backdrop of co-evolutionary (continuous) change in which transformational change is a recognisable shift in the scope of change.”
Crop modelling for integrated assessment of risk to food production from climate change (2015, background): “…as possible adaptations range from incremental adjustments of current management to changes at the farm or even regional scale through adapting land use and income sources (Rickards and Howden, 2012) depending on perceived risks (Dow et al., 2013) or timeframes considered (Vermeulen et al., 2013).”
Climate change adaptation and mitigation in smallholder crop–livestock systems in sub-Saharan Africa: a call for integrated impact assessments (2016, background): “…recent overviews (e.g. Niang et al. 2014; Lipper et al. 2014) call for a better understanding of specific barriers, as part of multi-scale and widely variable contexts, in order to inform a sustainable transformation of African farming systems (Moser and Ekstrom 2010; Rickards and Howden 2012).”