 |
| Plants and animals have a wide array
of strategies for coping with variability in their environment
(rain, food supply etc.). These strategies provide examples of how
people, businesses and economies may function effectively in desert
situations. |
The Science of Desert Living1 project is about
understanding the common factors that affect life in the
world’s desert regions. Its research describes the low and
variable productivity, sparse and mobile human population, and the
great distances from markets and political centres as ‘desert
drivers’—factors that affecteverything from natural
resource management to service delivery, enterprise development,
governance systems and many other aspects of desert living. The
synthesis of ideas in the Science of Desert Living project informs
thinking in the solution-focused core research projects and
contributes to the DKCRC’s outcomes. Deserts are places where
resources are thin and patchy. They are subject to extremes of
climate, and the animals and plants that live in them have
developed special ways of life that enable them to survive this
variability. Desert people are also sparsely distributed, resilient
and adaptable. Yet while more than half a million Australians live
in our deserts they have no parliament in the area, no main
university campus or large company headquarters. They are remote
from markets and the centres of power, learning and decision
making. As a result, much of the wealth they generate flows out of
the deserts.
The features described above are causally linked to act in a
consistent ‘desert syndrome’2. As a result,
desert people must learn to put more time into planning and
managing their treatment by the environment and bureaucracy and
less time railing against it, as it will not go away. Similarly,
coast-based governments, businesses and policy-makers must learn to
understand desert syndrome and learn to work with it, not against
it.
Research themes
While desert dwellers know how to cope with these unpredictable
desert drivers, the people who impose government structures, prices
and policies from the outside do not. The solutions that outsiders
develop are often inappropriate or imposed without
consultation.
Desert people compensate by building up their local knowledge. They
work with desert drivers to create solutions that are distinct from
the systems that work in urban Australia.
This is the Science of Desert Living, and the DKCRC’s
research in this area is describing and articulating the key
elements of desert living to the world. Desert Australia is
characterised by features that are not individually unique, but
together cause it to function in ways that are different to other
physical and social environments. SDL research groups these
features into several key areas:
- climate variability at various scales in space and time
- scarce resources resulting from widespread low and patchy
- primary productivity
- sparse population because the few people live in irregular
- clusters
- remoteness, characterised by distant markets and
decisionmaking
- centres
- social variability created by unpredictability in markets,
- labour and policy
- local knowledge, important because of limited research
- knowledge and persistent traditional but local knowledge
- cultural differences due to particular types of people,
- culture and institutions.
Outcomes
The DKCRC’s key partners are working on this
intersectoral,
multi-disciplinary project to generate outcomes critical to the
ongoing livelihood and wellbeing of desert people:
- Governments, residents of desert Australia and researchers
- able to analyse the key elements of successful and
- sustainable habitation of the desert, both in Australia
and
- overseas.
- Improved livelihoods and wellbeing for desert dwellers in
- which coastal-centric decision makers work with desert
- drivers, not against them.
Participants
Mark Stafford Smith and Ryan McAllister are both
scientists in CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems. The project
participants are:
Notes
1. Stafford Smith, M et al. 2008. Building a science of desert
living. Guest editorial in The
Rangeland Journal, 30 (1): 1–2.
2. Stafford Smith, M. 2008. The ‘desert syndrome’:
causally linked factors that characterise
outback Australia. The Rangeland Journal, 30 (1):
3–14.
