Blog for People, Food and Nature

Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative co-organizers the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) gear up for the United Nations Convention on Sustainable Development Rio+20.  This upcoming meeting is an important one for the Initiative, as it is the ideal setting to bring together all three objective ...

Regreening initiatives are striving to combat or even reverse land degradation in the arid Sahelian region of Africa. This tactic is reaching significant scale, with benefits not only to the environment, but also for agricultural production and the livelihoods of rural people. Tony Rinaudo, World Vision’s natural resource management advisor in Australia, and wife Liz [&hellip ...

A recent article from Reuters news argues that there is no one-size-fits-all for a green agricultural revolution. What the climate editor, Laurie Goering, refers to as “myriad ‘green bullets'” resonates with the site-specificity promoted in an integrated agricultural landscape approach. What do these ‘green bullets’ include? Transitioning to crops ...

Last week, we highlighted recent research and discussion around organic versus conventional agricultural methods as a means to feed the world. Today, Dr. Lise Andreasen, International Coordinator for the International Centre for Research in Organic Food Systems (ICROFS) in Denmark, explores how organic agriculture can play a role in a landscape approach to sustainable intensifi ...

A newly released report by the U.N. Division for Sustainable Development, Food and Agriculture: The future of sustainability, provides strategic input to the “Sustainable Development in the 21st Century Report” to be launched at the Rio+20 Summit. On our current trajectory, severe disruptions to national and regional food systems are highly likely to happen – ...

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) Rio+20 takes place in less than two months, the 20-22 of June, in order to forge a future with reduced poverty, improved social equity, and enhanced environmental protection. With agriculture forming the basis of many developing countries, it will likely play an important role in the upcoming […] ...

We have looked at ecosystem services provision within agricultural landscapes in a couple of different contexts on the Landscapes Blog. Today, Dr. Tobias Plieninger, Head of the Ecosystem Services Research Group at the Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany, provides a European policy perspective on the topic. It calls for a more integrated and [&hell ...

“The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet,” noted an article from the Institute for Food and Development Policy. Referencing a new study in the journal Nature by Seufert, Ramankutty, and Foley, the article argues that the primary concern now in combating food insecurity is with access and […] ...

Humans have been farming for thousands of years, and while the practices and tools have evolved significantly over that time period, some time-worn agricultural methods may prove invaluable in solving our modern-day dilemmas. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores how a specific pre-Columbian indigenous Amazonian agriculture ap ...