Drylands support over two billion people as major providers of critical ecosystem goods and services. However, these ecosystems also represent places where human population is growing most rapidly, biological productivity is least and poverty is highest. Drylands are therefore particularly fragile and vulnerable to shifting into an alternate degraded, or desert state. This change in the structure and function of a dryland ecosystem can be seen as a regime shift impacting on the provisioning of vital ecosystem services as well as human wellbeing. In this study, we analyze dryland degradation in sub-Saharan Africa as a social-ecological regime shift. The analysis is based on information captured in the Regime Shifts Database (www.regimeshifts.org), an online, open-access database that synthesizes a diverse set of social-ecological regime shifts. Focusing on the main drivers responsible for this regime shift and how this impacts on ecosystem services and human wellbeing, we identified leverage points, places to intervene to increase the resilience of dryland ecosystems
Results/Conclusions
Our results indicate that agriculture, erosion, ranching and rainfall variability are the most common causes of regime shifts which may threaten biodiversity, wild animal and plant products, and impact on livestock, and food crop production. This not only affects human wellbeing in terms of food nutrition, and livelihood and economic activities but may also compromise achieving key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly Zero hunger; Responsible consumption and production; and Life on land. Maintaining the structure and function of dryland ecosystems and increasing their resilience against disturbance relies on a better understanding of the social and well as ecological drivers of this complex adaptive system. Using a complexity lens will help us to understand these underlying patterns and provide us the tools to help inform the development of managerial strategies to reduce the risk of these regime shifts and prevent further dryland degradation.