A Longitudinal Approach to Examining the Socio-Economic Resilience of the Alento District (Italy) to Land Degradation—1950 to Present | Land Portal

Resource information

Date of publication: 
January 2019
Resource Language: 
ISBN / Resource ID: 
LP-midp001021
Copyright details: 
© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article

Land degradation is a multifaceted phenomenon. In many mountainous and hilly areas that are marginal in terms of their economic and social sustainability, degradation is closely linked to population decline through ageing and outmigration, and to the abandonment of land, leading to a loss of community resilience. These processes acting together can produce positive feedback loops, with the consequential loss of socio-economic resilience at larger spatial scales that can ultimately lead to the disintegration of entire territories. Drawing on recent advances in defining, integrating, and operationalizing the measurement of resilience, this paper took a new approach by exploring changing resilience over an extended period in a rural region of southern Italy. The paper used both quantitative and qualitative methods to test the complex and shifting relationships between multiple domains, as an expression of spatial and temporal patterns of resilience, and examined the impact of shifting resilience on continuing degradation processes. The results suggest that the capacity of socio-ecological systems to respond sustainably to land degradation over an extended period of time is highly dependent on two critical processes: the availability and mobilization of critical factors within the five key domains noted above, and the strength of the temporal and spatial cross-scale relationships between those factors.

Authors and Publishers

Author(s), editor(s), contributor(s): 

Salvia, RosannaKelly, Claire L.Wilson, Geoff A.Quaranta, Giovanni

Corporate Author(s): 
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    MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.

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