| The issue of climate change has become the focal topic of international community and attracted widely concern, especially given the fact that extreme climatic events with increasing intensity and frequency have caused devastating losses to agricultural production throughout the world, therefore, to develop mechanisms for climate adaptation and mitigation in coping with the impacts posed by climate change has become one of the most pressing challenges of human society. Hani rice terraces that located in Yunnan province have maintained sustainable yields in spite of frequent extreme droughts in the past dozens of years, which demonstrated its adaptability in successfully coping with extreme droughts. In the meantime, the mountainous region where Hani rice terracess distributed for hundreds even thousands of years is characterized by monsoon climate with seasonally intensified rainfall and floods; this in and of itself could serve as a strong evidence of the adaptability of terrace system in coping with flood disasters and climate change.The current paper takes Yuanyang County, which located in Honghe Hani & Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Yuannan province, as research area.264 villages and 35 village committees were selected from 2 townships of core area-Xinjiezhen, Panzhihuaxiang and 1 township of buffer area-Niujiaozhaixiang. In order to understand the adaptation mechanisms of Hani rice terraces in coping with climate change, a combination of multidisciplinary research and analysis methods from ecology, sociology and economics and so on were employed, supplemented with available information such like basic database and county annals. It indicated that Hani rice terraces, which has evolved into a complex agricultural ecosystem, characterized by its comparatively strong stability, resilience to disturbance and dynamic balance; within this complex ecosystem, sustainable management of natural resources has been achieved and effective management of social organizations/components has been realized; these together serve as the fundamental base that enables the whole system be able to adapt to climate change.The management of natural resources in Hani rice terraces complex ecosystem including:1) sustainable management of land resources, including, take the advantage of local climate, topography, geology, soil and other essential components to develop forest-village-terrace-river agro-ecosystem with altitudinal gradient vertically properly distributed; to allocate land use types in a reasonable way, to control the size of the village, to control the migration and settlement of population, to control and regulate the rate of (size of population)/(area of farmland); 2) efficient management and utilization of water resources, including, water conservation, water resource allocation, construction and maintenance of irrigation canals and ditches; 3) sustainable use of forest resources, including strictly preservation of those forests that have ecological as well as cultural functions, rational utilization of those forests that have economic benefits; 4) management and utilization of genetic resources, including the utilization of wildlife resources and agro-biodiversity conservation.Social organization and management within the terrace system including,1) self-governance of Hani community, namely, to formulate, implement and supervise customary laws and community-based rules, to provide basic solutions in addressing problems and disputes arise from natural resources management and social issues, its importance lies in clearly define the ownership of all kinds of natural resources, to be able to make full use of and yet to avoid over-exploitation of natural resources.2) Creation and inheritance of traditional knowledge, including, religious beliefs, festival customs, traditional calendar system, traditional farming technologies and traditional ecological knowledge, and so forth.By making use of self-governance system and traditional knowledge, adapting to the natural environment in a concerted evolutional manner, Hani community as a whole has evolved into an efficient, stabilized complex ecosystem. The mechanism developed in coping with climate change is a combination of both short-term relief and long-term adaptation strategies. Relief strategy depends on self-regulation capacity acquired from years of sustainable management of natural resources; Adaptation strategy relies on rules established by social organizations along the course of self-governance. This mechanism plays as the principle element for Hani rice terraces complex ecosystem to maintain sustainable development and efficiently cope with climate change; meanwhile, it could serve as an exemplary case to which agro ecosystems of other regions could be referred in coping with the impacts posed by climate change worldwide. |
