Nachhaltige landwirtschaftliche Anpassung im Kontext des Klimawandels: Einblicke aus Nordostindien und dem brasilianischen Amazonas
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Sustainable agricultural adaptation under climate change: Insights from Northeast India and the Brazilian Amazon
Climate change, increasing global pressure on land resources, and society's ambition to reduce environmental impacts demand a sustainable adaptation of the agricultural sector. This includes the adoption of agricultural practices that efficiently manage natural resources, conserve soils and carbon stocks, and avoid expansion into tropical forest areas while providing sufficient food for a growing world population. This thesis analyzes sustainable agricultural adaptation for two case study regions in tropical forest-agriculture frontiers, where interactions between agricultural production and environmental impacts are evident and severe. The first case study region is Nagaland State in Northeast India, where upland smallholder production by tribal communities dominates the agricultural landscape. The second case study region is Novo Progresso in the Brazilian Amazon, a region dominated by extensive cattle ranching, which has become a hotspot of agricultural expansion and forest loss as a result of increasing integration into global agricultural commodity markets. By focusing on sustainable adaptation at the farm level, this thesis is concerned with two strategies: the adoption of soil and water conservation practices (SWCP) and land intensification (LI). Based on an interdisciplinary study approach, this thesis aims to identify factors that motivate and constrain the adoption of SWCP and LI and to analyze the specific effect of climate change on these adaptation strategies. From a methodological perspective, this thesis aims to identify gaps in model-based land use assessments and potentials for improving agricultural land use projections. Considering agriculture as a complex socioecological system, I combine different methods from the social and natural sciences, namely qualitative and quantitative surveys, behavioral theories, biophysical modeling, and statistics. Key results of this thesis provide empirical evidence that agricultural adaptation in both contexts is often motivated by economic incentives, justifying, at least in part, utility and profit maximization-based land use modeling approaches. However, results also reveal various context-independent and context-specific constraints of adaptation. On the producer level, limited knowledge and poor access to financial resources, labor force, and markets were found to slow down adaptation in both study regions, while context-specific factors are mostly related to farmers’ attitudes. In the Brazilian Amazon, risk-averse attitudes largely restrict pasture-tocropland conversions, while in Northeast India, social and ecological attitudes shape adaptation preferences. Likewise, climate change effects on adaptation are contextdependent, with perceived climatic changes promoting the adoption of SWCP in Northeast India while being largely ignored in the Brazilian Amazon. This thesis also highlights a tradeoff between climate change adaptation and land intensification in Northeast India, as simulation results indicate soil erosion increases from both rising precipitation and cropping intensities. While underlining the role of actor and landscape constraints in agricultural adaptation, results show that these were considered only to a limited extent in existing land use models. In particular, risk aversion and infrastructure variables remain underrepresented in most modeling approaches. Results emphasize a lack of empirical data as a main limitation in land use modeling and the importance of model integration for improving the plausibility of agricultural land use projections.