Conservation and Development in the Biosphere Reserve of Mapimí: A Transdisciplinary and Participatory Project to Understand Climate Change Adaptation

Abstract

Mexican drylands cover over 50% of its territory. They are important socio-ecological systems (SES), like rangelands that are vital, both for the conservation of multifunctional landscapes and for human development. The UNESCO Biosphere Reserve of Mapimí (BRM) is a dryland SES that harbors an extraordinarily high level of endemism in almost all biotic kingdoms and historically holds evidence of various mobile indigenous groups; later it became an important livestock production center. Thus, the BRM has been affected by land use and climate change for decades. Consequently, the BRM’s management plan by the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP) seeks both the conservation of endangered species like the desert turtle and the implementation of sustainable development programs. In parallel, while long-term ecological research has generated ample knowledge on desert ecosystems, it has remained unavailable to local inhabitants, who hold local ecological knowledge and are, and will be, the key players and decision makers at the local scale. An interdisciplinary research group has responded to the challenge of linking knowledge systems in the context of global environmental change. They formed a transdisciplinary participatory research working-team with multiple stakeholders to develop projects that reflect interests of all actors. In this chapter, we describe the process of co-designing and jointly executing this research and further present the historic and current development challenges in the RBM, alongside a discussion on the adaptive potential of local communities, their production systems, and the dominant ecosystems in response to government help programs, adverse climatic conditions, and a strong tendency of out-migration. Transdisciplinary research brings numerous benefits when tackling sustainable development challenges in complex dryland SES.