Resilience of dairy production system to the effects of climate change in the State of São Paulo

• Grant number: 14/04416-0
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: July 01, 2014
• End date: June 30, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Economics - Agrarian and Natural Resource Economics
• Principal Investigator: Luís Alberto Ambrósio
• Grantee: Luís Alberto Ambrósio
• Host Institution: Instituto de Zootecnia. Agência Paulista de Tecnologia dos Agronegócios (APTA). Secretaria de Agricultura e Abastecimento (São Paulo - Estado). Nova Odessa , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Claudia Rodrigues Pozzi ; Jackson Barros Do Amaral ; Juliana Rodrigues Pozzi Arcaro ; Luciandra Macedo de Toledo

Abstract

In State of São Paulo the livestock sector has decreased the milk production due to economic pressures. On the other hand, there has been an increase in milk demand largely supplied by imports from other states and countries. The use of intensive technologies on milk farms, to increase competitiveness in the market, creates dependence on external inputs affecting their economic sustainability. Climate change projections indicate that milk production systems will be affected by rising temperatures and droughts, among other extreme weather events. Increasing the responsiveness of milk production system to adverse weather events, ie, increasing the resilience of the production system is the biggest challenge that the dairy supply chain will face in the coming years. In this scenario, the following problems arise: to identify the resilient milk production systems; to characterize the structures and processes that make them resilient; to understand the dynamics of their adaptations; and to create public policies to support the resilience of milk production. The research project goal is to solve these problems whereas, milk production systems are complex featuring multiple cause and effect relationships, contain delayed feedback and nonlinearity relationship between climate, economic and internal farm driving forces. The System Dynamics methodology is used to build the model of resilience of milk production systems to climate change and to run simulations of scenarios for to sound public policies that promote adaptability and transformability of these systems. The results will contribute to the formulation of the "State Policy on Climate Change", for strategic planning of dairy cattle research and the methodological development of System Dynamics applied to the problems of resilience. (AU)