Assessing the sustainability of livestock socio-ecosystems in the drylands through a set of indicators

Véronique Alary, Jacques Lasseur, Aymen Frija and Denis Gautier

Agricultural Systems, 2022, vol. 198, issue C

Abstract: Analyzing the sustainability of grazing livestock farming systems in the drylands at the farm and household or territorial levels (in terms of food security, well-being, value chain performance, feed supply, and maintenance of common grazing resources) constitutes a major challenge in the context of global changes. In particular, social–natural interdependency in an entanglement of spatial and temporal scales complicates the development of a common and systematic framework for assessing the sustainability of these grazing livestock systems. Our objective is to give an overview of some fundamental sets of indicators usually used and elaborate on some principles to guide the sustainable assessment of grazing livestock systems in drylands. To do so, this paper reviews a set of empirical, theoretical, and methodological studies related to the analysis of risk, adaptability, vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability of livestock systems in drylands based on grazing (mostly pastoral systems, but also some integrated crop-livestock systems). More concretely, this review seeks to compile a set of indicators to inform the processes of assessing the sustainability of livestock socio-ecosystems.

Keywords: Agropastoralism; Socio-ecosystem; Multi-scale assessment; Sustainability indicators; Dryland areas; Adaptive capacity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agisys:v:198:y:2022:i:c:s0308521x22000257

DOI: 10.1016/j.agsy.2022.103389

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