March 10, 2014
Reimagining the Urban and Rural as Integrated City Region Landscapes
Thomas Forster
The New School
Editor’s note: Originally posted on FoodTank.com, this piece by a co-author of the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative’s new report, City Regions as Landscapes for People, Food and Nature urges people who care about sustainable development to break down the divide between urban and rural. In the past few years, there has been […] ...
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February 24, 2014
Scattered Trees Buffer Ecosystems and Livelihoods in the Lower Mekong River Basin
The Lower Mekong River Basin, spanning Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Viet Nam, is home to millions of impoverished rural people who depend on healthy ecosystems for food production and livelihoods. The area is rich in biodiversity but is also economically significant, as it provides half of the world’s rice exports. The intensive and mixed-use nature […] ...
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February 17, 2014
Victoria to Chilwa: Integrated Development Successes at the Lake Basin Scale
Krista Heiner
EcoAgriculture Partners
Jes Walton
On February 10, 2014, the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program hosted an event on Integrated Development in Two African Lake Basins. Panelists reported on programmatic and project-level successes, showing the benefits of integrating population, health and the environment for sustainable development. Lake basins are characterized by unique cultures, rich ...
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February 5, 2014
Sustainability Certification: A Tool for Taking Climate Smart from Farm to Landscape
Jeffrey Hayward
Rainforest Alliance
Martin Noponen
Editor’s note: Our guest authors today highlight work that marries climate change and sustainable supply chains. Rainforest Alliance and the Sustainable Agriculture Network standard, along with its climate module, are operating at the farm level up along the supply chain to achieve landscape-scale benefits for producers and the environment under a changing climate. Gha ...
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January 31, 2014
Mapping Resource Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa
Secure land tenure and resource rights is often cited as an important foundation for long-term sustainable land management, and can provide the incentive needed to maintain multiple ecosystem and livelihood benefits on the land. In order to get a better sense of where the challenges are and what their nature is, the World Resources Institute […] ...
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January 29, 2014
For Kids in Africa, Balanced Nutrition Grows on Trees
Smallholders in Africa often look to clear trees on their land to make way for more crops. Around the world, from subsistence farmers to giant agriculture operations, clearing trees from land is a common response to increasing pressure to produce more food for more mouths. But for a farmer with hungry children, those fallen trees […] ...
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January 27, 2014
Managing Water and Agroecosystems in Landscapes
Water is a resource on which we all rely, and yet continues to face increasing scarcity and degradation. Particularly for agriculture, which is one of the primary consumers of water, this problem is of growing concern both in terms of production and human livelihoods. A new book edited by Eline Boelee, Managing Water and Agroecosystems […] ...
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January 22, 2014
One Watershed at a Time: Improving Water Quality in the Mississippi River Basin
As we saw on Monday, the measuring, valuing, and mapping of ecosystem services has progressed in recent years, and new tools are emerging that can help decision makers account for the benefits landscapes provide and target areas that are most important to ecosystem function. In the United States context, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) is […] ...
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January 20, 2014
Mapping to Make Decisions: Evolution of Ecosystem Services Assessment and Tools
By Ken Bagstad, U.S. Geological Survey, Geosciences & Environmental Change Science Center, Denver, Colorado, USA Healthy ecosystems provide many benefits – from food and clean water to flood management and climate mitigation – and we’ve seen previously on the blog how both the human-modified and natural elements of landscapes can contribute. Our guest author t ...
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January 8, 2014
Participatory Action Research for Smallholder Carbon Projects
Quinn Bernier
Getting the details of agricultural carbon projects right requires paying close attention to local institutions. These entities—including community groups, local NGOs and local governments—are pivotal in encouraging the participation in carbon projects and adoption of carbon-sequestering farm-based activities. They contribute to the monitoring and tracking of results and ...
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