Economic Resilience and Land use: The Cocoa Crisis in the Rio Cachoeira Catchment, Brazil

In this paper, the concept of resilience is extended to the socio-economic domain in order to analyse the relationships between diversity in land use and ability to react to unexpected events. By considering the cocoa crisis of the 1990s, the impacts on economy, migration and land use diversification have been investigated for seven municipalities of the south-east of Bahia (Brazil). Correlation analyses between gross domestic product (GDP) and landscape indices have been performed to analyse the relationships between land use diversification and incidence of the crisis. Variations in the distribution of urban and rural population and in land use diversification have also been considered to analyse the reactions of the different municipalities. Results show that low land use diversification make the system low resilience. Being based on monoculture production, the seven administrative units considered in this paper turned out to be particularly vulnerable to the economic and environmental perturbation. The findings of this paper largely support policies promoting land use diversification as an instrument oriented to promote both economic productivity and environmental protection. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment