Resilience and equity: Quantifying the distributional effects of resilience-enhancing strategies in a smallholder agricultural system

Strategies aiming to increase the climate resilience of smallholder agricultural systems may not equally benefit all groups of the smallholder population. To reduce the potential for aggravating existing vulnerabilities, quantitative resilience analyses therefore need to acknowledge the possibility for inequities in the effects of proposed resilience-enhancing strategies (RESs). In this study, we develop, validate, and apply a household-level agent-based model to explore the equity of climate RESs in an Ethiopian smallholder farming system. Specifically, we study the potential effects of two RESs, involving access to seasonal climate forecasts and increases in non-farm job availability, on household food security under climate variability. We measure these effects in two distinct ways: “poverty-reduction,” which describes food security improvements relative to existing conditions; and “shock-absorption,” which isolates the strategies' effects on food security during and following a drought. Our results reveal that the different measures of resilience lead to divergent assessments of equity in policy effects. Relative to baseline levels of food security (poverty-reduction), both strategies disproportionately favor the most vulnerable households—i.e., they are equity-enhancing. Under this assessment, increases in job availability provide slightly stronger benefits to the most vulnerable households than climate forecasts. However, when isolating the effect of a drought (shock-absorption), both RESs benefit the moderately vulnerable households at the expense of the more vulnerable households—i.e., they are inequitable. These results demonstrate that a pure focus on poverty reduction may be insufficient to promote equitable development. Given the prevalence of climate shocks in smallholder systems, future studies of resilience should therefore jointly consider both poverty reduction and shock recovery, as well as the potential for inequity in the effects of RESs.