Evaluation of Ecological Resilience of Agricultural Ecosystems in Razavi Khorasan Province: Comparison of Integrated and Non-Integrated Ecosystems
Journal Title: Journal of Agroecology - Year 2025, Vol 16, Issue 4
Abstract
Introduction Agriculture plays a very important role in the realization of many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). If agriculture is to make a positive contribution to achieving these goals, ensuring the ecological resilience of farmers, i.e. improving the adaptation capacity of the households as well as the whole production system to a wide range of environmental changes and shocks, is crucial. The intensification of climate change caused by global warming and its consequences, including the occurrence of long droughts, floods and other natural disasters, have threatened the food security of subsistence farmers and smallholders in the first place, and the food security of large communities in the long run. Also, recently, the COVID-19 pandemic and the possibility of similar epidemics have created more concerns. Therefore, the issue of resilience has been highly considered by researchers and international organizations, especially the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), so resilience has been defined as one of the 10 elements of agroecology. On the other hand, numerous research evidence have shown that integrated systems (combination of crop cultivation and animal husbandry) in order to increase structural and functional diversity and increase ecological resilience against severe environmental stresses and climate changes. In addition, integrated systems have different resilience and ecological stability depending on the intensity, amount and type of integration. Therefore, in recent years, a large number of researches have been conducted to address the resilience of agricultural systems. Since the ecological dimensions of resilience have not been comprehensively investigated in Iran, the purpose of this research is to evaluate the ecological resilience of rural households in Razavi Khorasan province and compare systems based on agriculture, based on livestock and integrated systems of agriculture and livestock. In this research, the recommended method of FAO has been used to evaluate resilience. Materials and Methods The required information was collected from 87 households from 10 cities within the province by completing a comprehensive questionnaire and face-to-face interviews with households. Data were analyzed using the RIMA II-FAO method. Clustering of 87 households based on their corresponding cultivated area of crops, saffron and the number of livestock units resulted in 4 livelihood groups, including only cropping (G1), the integrated crop-livestock at medium level (G2), only livestock at large level (G3) and integrated crop-livestock both at large level (G4). The resilience of households in each group was evaluated based on 5 components (asset, adaptive capacity, biodiversity, intensification, and use of ecosystem services), each measured by a number of indicators. The scores of 5 components were aggregated after weighting by using factor analysis and normalization to develop a composite resilience index on a 1-5 scale. Results and Discussion The results showed a significant relationship between the resilience of rural households and the 5 mentioned components, where intensification had a negative correlation with resilience, while the impact of assets, adaptation capacity, biodiversity and use of ecosystem services on household resilience was positive with the highest correlation for biodiversity. The households of integrated crop-livestock groups (G2) and (G4) had the highest resilience compared to households in single enterprise groups i.e. only cropping (G1) and only livestock (G3), with the lowest resilience in G3. In general, the high score of the components of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and adaptive capacity, as well as the low level of intensification in small to medium-scale integrated crop-livestock systems, resulted in more resilient households while large-scale single enterprise households had lower resilience despite their higher assets. Conclusion Resilience is a fundamental basis of sustainability, and it refers to the ability of systems to return to their initial state after facing environmental tensions. The main purpose of the present study was to evaluate the ecological resilience of the agriculture ecosystems of Khorason Razavi province. The main findings indicated that the integrated farmlands with other activities, particularly with animal husbandry, are much more resilient than pure and monotype farm production systems. Acknowledgements We are grateful to the Honorable Vice Chancellor of Research and Technology of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad for providing the costs of this research.
Authors and Affiliations
Pegah Naghipour,Alireza Koocheki,Mahdi Nasiri mahalati,Soroor Khorramdel,
Keywords
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