Detecting critical patterns of change in social-ecological systems based on agroforestry in Equatorial America – D-Critical

More than 300 million ha in Latin America are devoted to agroforestry (mixtures of productive and shade trees) where the impacts of cyclical events of El Niño droughts, background climate change, institutional turmoil and stochastic price variation of agroforestry goods is very strong.
For more than 30 years, agroforestry areas in Latin America have been abandoned for other uses like cattle ranching or simply left alone because of rural exodus to cities. In this regard, agroforestry abandonment can be considered a critical transition of a social-ecological system.
We chose here to examine the said combined effects in two pilot zones: the Central Andes of Colombia where institutional presence is strong but incomplete and the highland Amazonia in Ecuador populated mostly indigenous people where risk management is highly conditioned by cultural aspects and where women play the leading role in the management of the agricultural systems.
The work is divided in 5 complementary work-packages that will collect time series of land productivity of the target areas from both remote sensing and local data, that in turn will be correlated to variation in the El Niño indices and used to fit predictive models.
In parallel, an institutional analysis will be conducted to understand how knowledge about climatic and economical risk is acquired and used (or not) by the selected actors in Colombia and Ecuador. A special focus will be given to the dynamics of a pioneer program by FAO that channels meteorological information to growers, including El Niño conditions, that has been deployed in various parts of Colombia.
Through workshops, the project will co-construct scenarios of the potential different combined effects of climatic, economic and institutional risks to lay the bases of an early warning system of unfavorable conditions that may lead to land abandonment in the target countries.