Source
doi:10.5337/2014.231 — original publication (opens in a new tab; the file is not redistributed)
Summary
Biggs et al. (2014) is the 114-page IWMI-CGIAR White Paper that first fully conceptualized Environmental Livelihood Security (ELS), the framework the Biggs et al. (2015) journal article (LIT_099) later condensed. It has three parts: Part I surveys the environment of Southeast Asia and Oceania (climate, cyclones, sea-level rise, biodiversity, pollution, and social/political/environmental vulnerabilities); Part II builds the full ELS concept by bridging environmental-security theory with the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach; and Part III is a primer on geospatial / Earth-observation data and methods for spatially assessing and monitoring ELS at sub-national resolution. For the Neobiome project its value is conceptual and methodological, not a data feed: it is the origin of the supply-versus-demand balance that underpins how NI frames self-sufficiency, and Part III’s argument for fine-resolution, sub-national assessment maps directly onto NI’s coordinate-first, per-site approach.
Key claims
See key_claims frontmatter (8 claims, all cited to source location). All are conceptual or methodological; the paper carries no NZ-specific benchmarks and nothing that feeds an NI cell.
Neobiome Intelligence relevance
- The fuller ELS primary (extends LIT_099). This white paper supplies the complete ELS framework: the full Figure 21 (the six livelihood capitals plus vulnerability, transforming processes and outcomes, balanced against the water-energy-food-climate nexus), and the explicit statement that scale is central to operationalizing ELS. That supply-versus-demand balance is the conceptual root of NI’s domain-ratio logic (ESR/WSR/FSR) and the composite that aggregates them. It feeds the Self-Sufficiency Calculation Framework as the foundational primary alongside LIT_099. OT_194
- Part III geospatial methods (most novel to the corpus, relevant to NI’s GIS approach). The paper’s core methodological argument, that credible resource-security assessment must move away from national-boundary indices toward fine-resolution, sub-national, spatially explicit data, is precisely NI’s premise. The specific method families it surveys (cropland mapping, evapotranspiration, precipitation, crop yield from vegetation indices, VGI) are useful framing for NI’s GIS layer choices, though its datasets are global / tropical rather than the NZ layers NI actually uses. OT_194
- Indicator caution (supports NI’s design). “No neat, simple algorithm” exists for measuring sustainable livelihoods, and macro-indicators miss community-scale status and priorities, so disaggregated indices are needed. This is external support for NI’s community-scale, disaggregated domain-score approach over national composite indices. OT_194
- Bottom-up / participatory / TEK / VGI framing (thesis). The emphasis on participatory methods, traditional ecological knowledge and volunteered geographic information as complements to top-down assessment supports the project’s community-scale, local-knowledge framing, and is a citation for the thesis governance/methodology discussion. OT_194
- ⚠ Scope. Conceptual and methodological. No NZ numbers, no NI calculation-cell inputs. NZ is in the study region but the applied data is tropical-SIDS.
Research targets
Documents to retrieve
- None. This is itself the primary LIT_099 pointed to; its foundational references (Chambers & Conway 1992, Scoones 1998, DFID 1999, Hoff 2011) are well-known or already in corpus, and its geospatial datasets (MODIS, TRMM, SPAM, WorldPop, FAO AquaMap) are global products superseded for NI by the project’s own NZ GIS data foundation.
Research gaps
- None new. The composite-design and aggregation questions this source informs are already tracked against the existing composite-design targets referenced on self_sufficiency_calculation.
Connections
Links to
Sources (1): LIT_099
Concepts (1): Self-Sufficiency Calculation Framework
Referenced by
Concepts (2): Environmental Livelihood Security (FEW-Nexus +… · Self-Sufficiency Calculation Framework
Sources (1): LIT_099