Abstract: Intensified climate and market turbulence requires resilience to a multitude of changes. Diversity reduces the sensitivity to disturbance and fosters the capacity to adapt to various future scenarios. What really matters is diversity of responses. Despite appeals to manage resilience, conceptual developments have not yet yielded a break-through in empirical applications. Here, we present an approach to empirically reveal the ‘response diversity’: the factors of change that are critical to a system are identified, and the response diversity is determined based on the documented component responses to these factors. We illustrate this approach and its added value using an example of securing food supply in the face of climate variability and change. This example demonstrates that quantifying response diversity allows for a new perspective: despite continued increase in cultivar diversity of barley, the diversity in responses to weather declined during the last decade in the regions where most of the barley is grown in Finland. This was due to greater homogeneity in responses among new cultivars than among older ones. Such a decline in the response diversity indicates increased vulnerability and reduced resilience. The assessment serves adaptive management in the face of both ecological and socioeconomic drivers. Supplier diversity in the food retail industry in order to secure affordable food in spite of global price volatility could represent another application. The approach is, indeed, applicable to any system for which it is possible to adopt empirical information regarding the response by its components to the critical factors of variability and change. Targeting diversification in response to critical change brings efficiency into diversity. We propose the generic procedure that is demonstrated in this study as a means to efficiently enhance resilience at multiple levels of agrifood systems and beyond. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract: Land use and management intensity can influence provision of ecosystem services (ES). We argue that forest/agroforestry production systems are characterized by relatively higher C:O/C:N and ES value compared to arable production systems. Field investigations on C:N/C:O and 15 ES were determined in three diverse production systems: wheat monoculture (Cwheat), a combined food and energy system (CFE) and a beech forest in Denmark. The C:N/C:O ratios were 194.1/1.68, 94.1/1.57 and 59.5/1.45 for beech forest, CFE and Cwheat, respectively. The economic value of the non-marketed ES was also highest in beech forest (US$ 1089 ha(-1) yr(-1)) followed by CFE (US$ 800 ha(-1) yr(-1)) and Cwheat (US$ 339 ha(-1) yr(-1)). The combined economic value was highest in the CFE (US$ 3143 ha(-1) yr(-1)) as compared to the Cwheat (US$ 2767 ha(-1) yr(-1)) and beech forest (US$ 2365 ha(-1) yr(-1)). We argue that C:N/C:O can be used as a proxy of ES, particularly for the non-marketed ES, such as regulating, supporting and cultural services. These ES play a vital role in the sustainable production of food and energy. Therefore, they should be considered in decision making and developing appropriate policy responses for land use management.

Abstract: Livestock farming is the world’s largest land use sector and utilizes around 60% of the global biomass harvest. Over the coming decades, climate change will affect the natural resource base of livestock production, especially the productivity of rangeland and feed crops. Based on a comprehensive impact modeling chain, we assess implications of different climate projections for agricultural production costs and land use change and explore the effectiveness of livestock system transitions as an adaptation strategy. Simulated climate impacts on crop yields and rangeland productivity generate adaptation costs amounting to 3% of total agricultural production costs in 2045 (i.e. 145 billion US$). Shifts in livestock production towards mixed crop-livestock systems represent a resource-and cost-efficient adaptation option, reducing agricultural adaptation costs to 0.3% of total production costs and simultaneously abating deforestation by about 76 million ha globally. The relatively positive climate impacts on grass yields compared with crop yields favor grazing systems inter alia in South Asia and North America. Incomplete transitions in production systems already have a strong adaptive and cost reducing effect: a 50% shift to mixed systems lowers agricultural adaptation costs to 0.8%. General responses of production costs to system transitions are robust across different global climate and crop models as well as regarding assumptions on CO2 fertilization, but simulated values show a large variation. In the face of these uncertainties, public policy support for transforming livestock production systems provides an important lever to improve agricultural resource management and lower adaptation costs, possibly even contributing to emission reduction.