Resilience of traditional rice-dominated agricultural communities to precipitation variability in the North China Plain

This study used the concept of resilience as a framework to explore the response of a traditional rice-dominated agricultural society to past climatic variability in the Hai River Basin, North China Plain. In agriculture-based communities, the performance of resilience refers to the functions of cropping and water systems and the flexibility to respond to an uncertain climate. With limited water inflow, the responses to the recent historical precipitation variability in this case study demonstrated that the local people were adjusting to both interannual variability and extreme drought through their collective and individual actions. In the short term, the local people coped by adjusting the planting area and individually switching from planting paddy rice to less water-intensive crops in order to adapt to a severe, continuing drought. However, because of poor management of the water system by community leaders and the lack of an adequate budget for the collective action of rice cropping, the shift in land use to rice cropping as an adaptation to the recent increased precipitation was not usually reversible. In the long term, the agricultural production of most villages became less resilient to current precipitation variability, despite the intention of most villagers to change the current cropping system to improve their low household staple food selfsufficiency. This study indicated that over the long term the social resilience and adaptive capacity of agricultural communities and their associated stakeholders must be built on and enhanced to better cope with the constraints and opportunities of current climate variability. New institutional arrangements, including collective irrigation regimes and community leadership capabilities, are required to build social resilience and to enhance adaptive capacity for future uncertainties.