Indicators Review to Assess the Resilience and Sustainability of Livestock Systems in Rainfed and Irrigated Areas

Abstract

Understanding and assessing the exposure of the population and ecosystems to global changes, especially to climatic changes, and their capacity/ability of adaptation is become a major challenge of social and natural sciences over the last two decades. Two concepts have been widely mobilized: the vulnerability to address the risk management to shocks at short and medium term and the resilience to assess the adaptive capacity of the whole socio-ecological system at medium and long term. However, the heuristic quest to develop a unique approach to vulnerability or resilience that can be activated in the field seems illusory as situations are diverse; interdependencies at multiple scales are expressed differently in each case, and risk management fits into the objective and subjective perceptions of the actors.