Building Resilience to Climate Change in Agriculture: Integrated Natural Resource Management and Institutional Measures

Abstract

Available evidences from natural resource management suggest that building resilience into ecological ecosystems is the ideal way to deal with future shocks as well as emerging climate risks especially in drylands. However, there are diverse views on how these evidences have implications for policies and strategies for responding to climate change. We attempt to address this gap by using different case studies on natural resource management (NRM) interventions in drylands. Drylands are characterized by water scarcity, land degradation, and poor crop and livestock productivity. Increasing uncertainty in rainfall behavior/ other meteorological parameters increases the challenges of the region further. Despite such challenges, large scope exists for bridging yield gaps through various land, water, nutrient, and crop management interventions. This chapter shows how these NRM interventions have helped different stakeholders in different agroecological regions for building system resilience through positive impact on land- and water-use efficiency. Moreover, the chapter also describes different institutional approaches for achieving the system-level outcomes.