The role of shifting baseline syndrome in food security and resource management

Natural resources and functional ecosystems provide services such as water, pest regulation and pollination that are crucial to agriculture and food security. Decisions about the use and management of these natural resources are often underpinned by monitoring information to ensure that use is sustainable. One example of this is in fisheries sciences, where information on current and historical catches and effort are used to set quotas for future extraction. Where historic information about the abundance and / or potential productivity of natural resources is not available, decisions have to be based on expert opinion and predictions. Shifting baseline syndrome describes how a lack of information about past environmental conditions can change the decisions made in environmental management (Pauly, 1995). Decision-makers can’t rely on experience if they either forget, or were too young to have experienced, past environmental conditions (Papworth et al, 2009). This potentially leads to decisions which deplete natural resources, reducing their current productivity and future potential.

Since the concept originated, research on shifting baselines has largely focused on either quantifying changing environmental conditions over time, or on identifying whether local communities are aware of changes in environmental conditions. Yet as originally proposed, the shifting baseline syndrome was a particular issue if resource managers and decision makers could not identify environmental changes due to lack of past information or lack of experience of past conditions, and thus did not address them. It remains unclear whether there are mechanisms within professional decision-making environments which allow environmental changes to be identified, thus preventing the negative consequences of over-exploitation which are believed to emerge from shifting baseline syndrome. This question is crucial to sustainable use of our existing resources and food security. For example, if there is no data soil productivity, are decision-makers (in this example, famers and other land managers) able to identify signs of reductions in soil productivity when it happens (even if they have no prior experience of it) and mitigate its effects before crop productivity is significantly impacted?

This project will combine social science methods investigating the decision-making process and existing monitoring data of environmental processes. The project aims to establish whether shifting baseline syndrome can, or does, occur in professional decision making environments about the use of natural resources, quantify the possible effects of the syndromes presence on sustainability / food security, and identify mechanisms which may ameliorate the impacts of shifting baseline syndrome. Please contact me for further information.