Blog for People, Food and Nature

“Water, like its flow through the physical landscape, touches almost every sector of society and aspect of human life.” – State of Watershed Payments 2012 Last week the Landscapes Blog highlighted some work at the World Resources Institute on promoting ‘green infrastructure‘ to protect watershed health (plus, see this article from WRI Insights for ...

Food loss and waste has been a hot topic the past couple of weeks. A new report by the UK-based Institute of Mechanical Engineers, Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not, estimates that 30-50% of all food produced is wasted in harvesting, storage, transportation, retail, and consumption. One of the main messages of the report was not the […] ...

As noted yesterday on the Landscapes Blog, this week marks the first meeting of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Though biodiversity is the focal point, there is a host of other benefits from nature that are related, including climate regulation. We tackled the intersection of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation ( ...

While last week the Landscapes Blog paid particular attention to the part a productive landscape plays in maintaining ecosystem services, this week actually marks the first meeting of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in Bonn, Germany. Established in April of last year, the IPBES serves a purpose similar to the Intergovernmental [&h ...

Natural ecosystems provide the many essential services people depend on, such as clean drinking water, protection from floods and droughts, and habitat for fisheries. Wednesday’s blog post focused on the importance of ecosystem services in Africa, while a recent post from Landscape Initiative Co-organizer World Resources Institute’s (WRI) blog explores the topic i ...

A recent article in the journal Ecosystem Services examines the range of ecosystem services in Africa, the threats to them, and policies to preserve them. It touches on an issue related to Monday’s Landscapes Blog post on sparing land for nature. While the authors recognize the importance of protected areas for biodiversity conservation, they also […] ...

We’ve heard of the imminent peak oil, peak water, and in some circles even peak soil. Now researchers at the Rockefeller University in New York say that we may have reached peak farmland. This is not to say that the planet no longer has arable land to spare, but rather that agricultural production has reached […] ...

A new initiative that launched yesterday aims to spur change in the complex global food system by fostering the growing community of voices on food issues. What’s more, it is attempting to tackle the system as whole, bridging the current ‘silos’, and bringing together the breadth of stakeholders from researchers and the NGO community to […] ...

Understanding and Managing Change in Human-Shaped Environments This year’s first Exploring the Evidence blog post helps bring us back to the emerging literature on landscape approaches, and grounds the concept in cases in practice. Dr. Tobias Plieninger (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities) and Dr. Claudia Bieling (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) ...

‘Green Growth’, considered one of the paradigms for a new, more sustainable pattern of development, seeks to achieve a triple win of environmental, economic, and social benefits. In contrast to past modes of economic development, green growth strategies intend to ensure that policies and investments reflect priorities both for reducing poverty and for natural resour ...