v
Foreword
The world has entered a period of unprecedented change, as conveyed by the Great
Acceleration. Our planetary life support system has the potential to be overwhelmed
by the combined forces of climate change, declining biodiversity, pollution and
social unrest or more positively to chart a course to a sustainable future that pacifies
these forces for coming generations. Equally positively, in 2015, the world came
together to endorse Agenda 2030 with its set of Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs), a remarkable agreement among all nations of the world as to the form of
the future we want.
Nowhere are the challenges and opportunities more evident than in the drylands
of the world. Drylands are the ‘canary in the mine’ for human disruption due to
global change. The dependence of a billion of their inhabitants’ livelihoods on ecosystem services means that dryland peoples are among the first to be affected by
widespread changes such as land degradation, climate change and undermined
water cycles. Not surprisingly, many of the world’s refugee movements can be
linked to resource pressures in drylands. Yet in the past, their challenging environments also made them a source of many social and technical innovations; and this
continues today, with persisting traditional linguistic and cultural diversity. Thus,
there is hope.
But this hope will only be realized through systematic efforts to entrain research
and local knowledge towards an understanding of how to support the drylands better,
as well as the implementation of this understanding. This book is a first major product of a relatively new network, RISZA, focused on collective learning about the
sustainability of the drylands of the Global South. It builds on advances in drylands
thinking over the past two decades, including the evolving Drylands Development
Paradigm, but is the first to frame this effort in conjunction with the SDGs.
The contributors to the book frame the challenges of drylands as guiding complex adaptive social-ecological systems, looking through various sectoral lenses but
with the whole framework of the SDGs in view. Parts of the book emphasize the
potential for alliances at all scales from local transdisciplinary engagement to
regional alliances, like the Agadir Platform, and global networks, like RISZA itself,
as well as alliances across disciplines and technologies and even in to the arts and
Foreword
The world has entered a period of unprecedented change, as conveyed by the Great
Acceleration. Our planetary life support system has the potential to be overwhelmed
by the combined forces of climate change, declining biodiversity, pollution and
social unrest or more positively to chart a course to a sustainable future that pacifies
these forces for coming generations. Equally positively, in 2015, the world came
together to endorse Agenda 2030 with its set of Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs), a remarkable agreement among all nations of the world as to the form of
the future we want.
Nowhere are the challenges and opportunities more evident than in the drylands
of the world. Drylands are the ‘canary in the mine’ for human disruption due to
global change. The dependence of a billion of their inhabitants’ livelihoods on ecosystem services means that dryland peoples are among the first to be affected by
widespread changes such as land degradation, climate change and undermined
water cycles. Not surprisingly, many of the world’s refugee movements can be
linked to resource pressures in drylands. Yet in the past, their challenging environments also made them a source of many social and technical innovations; and this
continues today, with persisting traditional linguistic and cultural diversity. Thus,
there is hope.
But this hope will only be realized through systematic efforts to entrain research
and local knowledge towards an understanding of how to support the drylands better,
as well as the implementation of this understanding. This book is a first major product of a relatively new network, RISZA, focused on collective learning about the
sustainability of the drylands of the Global South. It builds on advances in drylands
thinking over the past two decades, including the evolving Drylands Development
Paradigm, but is the first to frame this effort in conjunction with the SDGs.
The contributors to the book frame the challenges of drylands as guiding complex adaptive social-ecological systems, looking through various sectoral lenses but
with the whole framework of the SDGs in view. Parts of the book emphasize the
potential for alliances at all scales from local transdisciplinary engagement to
regional alliances, like the Agadir Platform, and global networks, like RISZA itself,
as well as alliances across disciplines and technologies and even in to the arts and