Building New Coupled Human-natural Systems for Sustainable Pasture Management in South America

HERMES MORALES; CORONATO FERNANDO; SORAYA CARVALHO; ALEJANDRO SARAVIA; ALEJANDRO FABIAN SCHWEITZER; AMAURY BURLAMAQUI; JEAN FRANCOIS TOURRAND

Building Resilience of Coupled Human-Natural Systems of Pastoralism in the Developing World

Springer International Publishing

Lugar: Basilea; Año: 2016; p. 177 - 208

From the 16th century and during an half-millennium , the human-nature relationship in rangeland management in South America has been based on the mining practices of natural resources such as soil, water, natural vegetation and some cultivated forages. That was the best way found by the European settlers and their descendants to colonize new lands and progressively to develop the hinterlands from the already colonized areas. The weak sustainability of these mining practices have led to a gradual degradation of natural and cultivated pasture, more or less fast according to the ecosystem and the set of practices, especially overgrazing, bad use of burning, no respect of vegetative cycle, etc. Based on the same research developed in three contrasted South-American biomes (Austral Patagonia, Argentina; Central Pampa, Uruguay; and Western Amazon, Brazil), the authors try to better understand the complex sets of reasons which have recently led local societies to adopt more sustainable pasture management. The method uses several tools, including the diachronic analysis since the respective colonization of the three zones, the resilience assessment of the socio-ecosystems and diverse comparative analysis, especially the mental models of local stakeholders about livestock activities. Beside diverse land issues, the need to intensify the livestock production and the great offer of new technologies, the authors have identified relevant human dimension factors such as the demand of the local societies for collective livelihood improvement, the recent national and international environmental policies related to global warming and the stronger awareness of consumers for sustainable development. May be facing the global change, the practices of rangeland management will change in a more sustainable way, going to better society-environment interaction and human-nature integration.