The survival strategies of desert people,
animals and plants could help governments
plan for an uncertain future.
Image: iStockphoto
The next generation of business leaders may gather their strategic insights from the Australian desert rather than from management manuals or Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’.
“In the desert, resources vary widely in both space and time. This makes life extremely uncertain and risky – but desert plants, animals and people alike have all evolved strategies to cope with it,” explains Dr Ryan McAllister of Desert Knowledge CRC and CSIRO.
In a world beset by economic, climate and resource uncertainties, the deserts offer models for successful adaptation and management which apply equally to business, government and community leadership, according to new research published in the Journal of Arid Environments.
“Desert environments go through booms and busts, just like economies or the mining sector. Desert plants, animals and people have developed many clever strategies for dealing with these. Often these involve remaining mobile and adaptable,” Dr McAllister says.
“This explains why policies developed for stable environments – like the coastal areas of Australia – don’t work so well when people try to apply them in the deserts. Or why the rules of business that worked in good times don’t seem to apply in hard times. It is because both conflict with the rules of success for living with variability.”
However the global recession, rapid climate change and emerging shortages of resources like water or energy mean that even the relatively stable world of the coast or city is liable to become more uncertain as the 21st century advances – and businesses, government policies and communities will need to find ways to adapt.
“One of the big lessons from our study of how governance works in desert regions is that big one-size-fits-all approaches tend to be less successful than those which allow you to roll with the punches and adapt your strategy to local resources and circumstances,” he says.
Desert paper daisies, for example, bloom only when it rains and invest in millions of seeds which remain dormant until the next wet. Desert acacias invest in vast networks of roots allowing them to draw resources from a wide area to support them through the hard times. Desert marsupial mice store fat in their tails for the lean times. Different lizard species share their food resource by foraging at different times of the day. Aboriginal trade and cultural networks exchange knowledge and share resources over vast distances. Pastoralists restock and destock their properties at the bidding of the season. Miners mine, then move on when the resource runs out.
“These are all ways of coping with resources which are here one day and gone the next. They include strategies which quite a few businesses and governments round the world are probably wishing they’d adopted before the crash came along – and can still adopt in time for the next boom.
“Desert life contains many examples of what we will all need to do to adapt to climate change,” Ryan adds.
The paper in the Journal of Arid Environments Patterns of accessing variable resources across time and space: desert plants, animals and people, proposes a conceptual model, based on modern portfolio theory, which explores how variability is managed by diversifying access to resources across space and time. Its authors are Dr McAllister, Dr Mark Stafford-Smith, Dr Chris Stokes and Dr Fiona Walsh.
Their model is developed using ecological ideas and Australian case knowledge but demonstrates general principles of how optimal investment in strategies changes with resource distribution.
“All entities need to buffer their resource consumption across time and space,” it says. “The ability to do this involves some costs and some benefits. The tradeoffs between the costs and benefits are determined by the distribution of resources, and the physical properties of the resource (water, money, food, etc.), and the entity (plant, animal, organisation etc.).”
The paper argues that variability also underpins most sectors of human endeavour in arid zones and – increasingly – in all human enterprise and activity, in the social, commercial and political spheres. The answer may lie in mimicking how nature copes with variability – by being flexible and mobile, sharing resources, building networks, planning ahead for scarcity, being persistent as well as opportunistic.
“If one compares this with what is happening local government throughout Australia, for example – shires are being merged into larger and larger entities which may appear to make economic sense but it often means they deliver services that are less appropriate to local needs. A more flexible approach would involve smaller local government areas that are better networked, share more resources between them, act together when needed on big issues while meeting local needs better.”
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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