1

Resilience & Food Security Concepts, measurement, action

Derek D. Headey

Senior Research Fellow

Poverty Health & Nutrition Division,

The International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC

Outline

1. BACKGROUND: Why resilience?

2. CONCEPTS: What do we mean by resilience in socio-economic contexts? How is it new?

3. MEASUREMENT: What do we need to do to measure, monitor and analyze resilience?

4. ACTION: What sorts of policies and programs can build (or erode) resilience?

Before “resilience” became trendy there was:

vulnerability, poverty dynamics, food and nutrition insecurity, disaster risk reduction, ….

Recent interest stems from several factors:

1. More knowledge of complex links between short-terms shocks & long run economic development

2. Increasing frequency & severity of shocks

3. Emergency & development sectors disconnected

BACKGROUND

Sahel and Horn of Africa encapsulate these concerns

“Permanent crisis” despite decades of relief

Nexus of climate change, population growth, politics

Poverty traps at micro level (e.g. livestock)

But there are also success stories in resilience building

Bangladesh was Kissinger’s “basket case” in early 70s

Famine, floods and perennial dependence on donors

Major investments in many sectors

Huge progress on socioeconomic indicators

BACKGROUND

F1. Permanent and impermanent crises:

Food aid receipts in three vulnerable regions

0

5

10

15

20

25

Horn of Africa Sahel Bangladesh

Foo

d a

id (

kg)

pe

r ru

ral c

apit

a*

1988-91 1992-95 1996-99 2000-03 2004-07 2008-11

Source: Authors’ estimates from the WFP’s Food Aid Information System (FAIS), http://www.wfp.org/fais/

• Resilience is also an issue for the developed world

• IPCC says shocks will be more frequent, more severe

• Last 10 years has seen major droughts in USA, Australia, Russia, Ukraine, Brazil

• Climate shocks cited as a major cause of the 2007-2008 food crisis

• Climate shocks precipitated export restriction by major exporters, panic purchases by major importers

BACKGROUND

F4. Climate change and permanent pasture area in Australia

85%

90%

95%

100%

105%

110%

115%

-0.7-0.6-0.5-0.4-0.3-0.2-0.1

00.10.20.30.40.50.60.7

19

61

19

64

19

67

19

70

19

73

19

76

19

79

19

82

19

85

19

88

19

91

19

94

19

97

20

00

20

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20

06

20

09

Past

ure

are

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dex

(1

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%)

5-y

ear

aver

age

tem

per

atu

re a

no

mal

y (C

) 5 yr ave. temp. anomaly (celsius)

Pasture area index (1961=100%)

Source: Data on 5-year temperature anomalies are from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, and pasture area data refer to “permanent meadows and pasture”

land from the FAO (2014).

• Another linkage across economies is conflict

• Land issues a risk factor in African conflict

• Role of climate, agriculture & water in “Arab spring”

• Regional conflicts now global issues

• In summary:

Lots of reasons to be interested in how individual, communities, economies and polities deal with short run shocks and adverse secular changes

BACKGROUND

• Resilience paradigm a better organizing framework?

• 3 key dimensions to resilience

1. Incorporates fundamentally important dynamics

2. Central role for risk: risk of something bad happening and bad things actually happening

3. Focuses attention on interconnected systems (social, economic and ecological systems)

• These dimensions often neglected

CONCEPTS

• Resilience concepts present in many sciences, most notably ecology: ability to return to original state

• Commonly has a “bounce back” definition

• But in economic development there is more of a “bounce back better” slant (resilience building)

Development resilience is the capacity over time of a person, household or other aggregate unit to avoid poverty in the face of various stressors and in the wake of myriad shocks. If and only if that capacity is and remains high, then the unit is resilient. Barrett & Constas (2013)

CONCEPTS

• Rich concepts, but difficult to measure

• Lots of advances on climate-agriculture front

• Development of early warning systems (FEWSNET)

• Major expansion of (infrequent) household surveys

But none of these allows us to measure:

1) Welfare impacts of shocks and secular changes;

2) Coping/adaptation mechanisms;

3) Impacts of resilience programs & policies

MEASUREMENT, MONITORING & ANALYSIS

• Headey & Barrett (2015) propose a network of multi-purpose, high frequency, long term sentinel sites:

High frequency to capture dynamics of expected shocks & unexpected shocks (disasters);

Sustained because resilience requires long term transformation and commitment (decades)

Systemic to capture interactions between economic, social, political and agroecological spheres

Sentinel sites to strategically reduce costs

• Objectives: monitoring, analysis, evaluation, warning

• Users: governments, development agencies, researchers

MEASUREMENT, MONITORING & ANALYSIS

Several precedents here

• Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network created by National Science Foundation in 1980

• Surveillance of 26 sentinel sites in different ecologies

• Network of researchers from different sub-disciplines to monitor/analyze long term environmental change

• Massive amounts of data and research

• Major success story: raised awareness, policy-relevant analysis & research, overcame coordination costs and achieved economies of scale

MEASUREMENT, MONITORING & ANALYSIS

Location of

26 LTER

sentinel sites

• Need to develop an analogous system to understand the welfare impacts of climate change, natural disasters, macroeconomic shocks, policies, programs

• Not enough to do this in countries that can afford it

• Likely that developing countries in Africa and South Asia will be worst affected by climate change

• Substantial benefits to a coordinated international systems of sites

MEASUREMENT, MONITORING & ANALYSIS

MEASUREMENT, MONITORING & ANALYSIS

Extremely vulnerable (N=11) Highly vulnerable (N=16)

Burundi Angola

Chad Central African Republic Bangladesh

Democratic Republic of Congo Kenya

Djibouti Liberia Cambodia

Eritrea Madagascar

Ethiopia Mali Haiti

Malawi Mozambique

Mauritania Nigeria Sri Lanka

Niger Sierra Leone

Somalia Uganda Yemen

Sudan Zambia

Table 1. The most vulnerable countries according to five indicators: child stunting, wasting

and infant mortality, exposure to natural disasters, and dependence on emergency

assistance.

Not enough to do this in countries that can afford it

At what cost? What challenges?

• Surveillance 3 times/year in 50 villages in Ethiopia would run at $500K/year (World Bank)

• Other challenges with capacity and management, especially in unstable and ultra-poor regions

• But in many of these regions World Food Programme & others have a permanent presence

• Capturing benefits requires effective coordination & dissemination of data

MEASUREMENT, MONITORING & ANALYSIS

At what benefit?

• Gauge welfare effects of climate change, macroeconomic shocks, natural disasters, etc

• Track trends in resilience: movements into & out of poverty, food & nutrition insecurity

• Crowd in long term evaluations of resilience-building programs and policies

• Add human welfare dimensions to climate-oriented early warning systems

MEASUREMENT, MONITORING & ANALYSIS

• “Measurement drives diagnosis and response”

• Sentinel sites can shape design of resilience programs

• e.g. drought-tolerant crop varieties, ag insurance, safety nets, infrastructure, health, education, etc

• Also important for understanding local institutions and how they influence policies & programs

• Widely perceived that community characteristics play a vital role in shaping resilience

ACTIONS

• Need to review food systems through a resilience lens

• Plenty to learn across countries:

R&D for shock-tolerant crops/livestock varieties

Early warning systems, including outreach

Cost-effective insurance instruments

Conditional transfer programs (safety nets)

Dual development/relief programs (triggers)

Diversification of livelihoods (tradeoffs!)

ACTIONS

• Scope to improve analysis of risks to food systems

• Wide range of forecasting models, but none were able to predict food crisis of 2007-2008

• Models are strong on “fundamentals” but not adept at handling speculation, hoarding, panic trade behaviors

• Also need more stochastic analysis of future scenarios, including stress-testing models

• e.g. how would food system cope with prolonged droughts in several major food-producing regions?

ACTIONS

TAKE HOME MESSAGES

1. Resilience forces us to think various risks; the dynamics of impacts of and responses to shocks; systemic linkages across ecology, economy, society

2. Long-term, high-frequency sentinel site system need to monitory, measure & analyze resilience

3. Review policies/programs in a resilience lens: How do development policies influence resilience? How we make food systems more resilient to shocks? Develop analytical tools for stress-testing food systems.