Open Collections

De Grandpré, Ayla

University of British Columbia

Global food and wine production are increasingly exposed to the impacts of climate change, and other interrelated disturbances, such as political instability, changing consumer preferences, pollution, market disruptions, pandemics, and more. These disturbances test the resilience of agro-ecological systems and require systems to adapt. However, the accelerating rate of change in the Anthropocene and deepening uncertainties have made adaptation increasingly complex. Food and wine producers require tools to help them plan for change and uncertainty, with the goal of increasing their resilience. This research applies an Adaptation Pathways approach to explore if and how food and wine producers in the Okanagan Bioregion, an important agricultural region in Canada, can adapt over time and build their resilience to multiple, dynamic disturbances. Using a mixed-methods approach, including a literature review, desktop analysis, mapping survey, and semi-structured interviews, this research explores the following research questions: What is resilient food and wine production? Which disturbances are affecting the food and wine production landscape in the Okanagan Bioregion? And how and when can local food producers adapt to these disturbances? The results indicate that resilience is the ability for producers to prepare, adjust, innovate or transform for disturbance, and can be translated into practice using a socio-ecological systems model. The results of the desktop analysis and mapping survey highlight complex interactions between social and ecological driven disturbances, but emphasise the risks of changing environmental conditions, chiefly linked to climate change. Using the semi-structured interviews, this research also found that building adaptation pathways that address the multiple disturbances is possible but requires a different approach. Interview participants stressed the need to build general adaptive capacity, rather than responding to specific disturbances. This research contributes to the literature, by building Adaptation Pathways that aim to improve the decision-making capacity of Okanagan producers, and to increase their resilience, or their ability to prepare, adapt, innovate, or transform, in the face of change and uncertainty.

Text

2022-04-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/81228

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/