The growth of traditional crops could be a primary resource for adapting to climate change and strengthening agrosystems’ resilience. However, these crops tend to be replaced by non-traditional crops with higher productivity, higher market values, and higher short-term income. In this context, smallholders face trade-offs between maximizing short-term income and ensuring resilience to face likely future climate adversities. The economic assessment of such trade-offs has been commonly neglected in the literature.

Summary. Chile has established unique marine resource user rights to reduce resource over-exploitation and expand economic opportunities in coastal areas. These rights sometimes overlap, so that one household might be involved in more than one activity, and also leave out some people who might want to participate.

Background 

Chile has a 6,345 km long coastline with a productive marine ecosystem. Coastal communities depend heavily on fish resources for their livelihood but resource depletion threatens those livelihoods. Local people have deep roots in their communities and lifestyles, which limits their willingness to change their work to non-marine activities. The development of small-scale aquaculture has been proposed as a means to generate new income opportunities. 

Policy lessons 

We are living in a crisis era, with competing land use for finite land and ill-informed myopic urban land-use policies that remain stagnant, in a world with a rapidly changing urban environment, such as the mushrooming urban agriculture. While smallholder farms in and around cities, in sub-Saharan Africa, provide many ecosystem services including boosting household income and nutrition, and access to land constraints these benefits. This paper examines the willingness to pay for urban farm plots, using a random parameter logit model.

Abstract