May 21, 2015
Local Knowledge, and Pig Pits, Help Thai Communities Adapt to Climate Change
Angela Jöhl Cadena
International Union for the Conservation of Nature
Over the last 18 months, I have been observing (and documenting) the adaptation process taking place in four communities in Chiang Rai and Sakon Nakhon Provinces, Thailand, under the USAID Mekong Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change (Mekong ARCC) project, implemented by IUCN Thailand. Based on the scientific climate projections, we had some ideas of […] ...
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May 8, 2015
Back to the future: quilombos and their potential to protect Brazil’s Atlantic Forest
Waverli Maia Matarazzo Neuberger
Universidade Metodista de São Paulo
Traveling to Barra do Turvo is like going back in time. Located between the two huge southern Brazilian metropolises of São Paulo and Curitiba, the road that leads to Barra do Turvo crosses the Ribeira River valley, and winds its way through the Atlantic Rainforest. According to UNESCO, this forest is one of the world’s five […] ...
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March 4, 2015
Forests a Food Security Blanket for Communities in India
Salome Yesudas
Rukmini Rao
Gramya Resource Centre for Women
Debal Deb
Kavitha Kuruganti
Countries like India, which claim to have reduced poverty yet have had no reductions in hunger and malnutrition, present quite a paradox that must be addressed. The food sovereignty framework, introduced by the Sustainable Development Goals debate, is promising because it addresses the fact that hunger and malnutrition are not just a supply problem, but […] ...
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February 2, 2015
Traditional Markets are an Important Part of Nutrition-sensitive Landscapes in Morocco
Abderrahim Ouarghidi
Global Diversity Foundation
Bronwen Powell
Winter has arrived here in Morocco. From December to March, there is a lot of rain (more than the rest of the year) – and widespread availability of wild vegetables. Although wild foods, especially wild vegetables, have held an important place in Moroccan culinary practice for generations, up until recently, they have been largely overlooked […] ...
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December 17, 2014
Bearing the fruit of action: Gender-responsive participatory research and collective management of Native Fruit Trees
Hugo A. H. Lamers
Bioversity International
Narasimha Hegde
“For the first time in our village, women of different ethnic and caste groups decided to form a women’s group called Matrabhoomi (Mothers’ land) and started producing kokum juice concentrate. We managed with great success, as the first batch of 350 liters was well received by shopkeepers as a natural product of high quality. Throughout […] ...
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December 5, 2014
Can large-scale landscape restoration initiatives fulfill their promises: a resounding “YES” from northern Ethiopia
Lulseged Tamene
International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)
Frank Van Steenbergen
Kifle Woldearegay
The arid to semi-arid environments of Ethiopia, particularly the Tigray region in northern part of the country, is a typical example which demonstrates that large-scale interventions can fulfill their promises in enhancing food security, ensuring environmental sustainability and creating landscapes resilient to climate and weather variability. Before the years 1994/1995, land ...
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November 24, 2014
Global Landscape Restoration: The Art of the “Do-able”
Peter Besseau
The Global Partnership on Forest and Landscape Restoration
This post is part of an online discussion on large-scale land interventions that runs through December 24th. Can these initiatives fulfill their promises? Comment below or send a max 800 word response to a.waldorf@cgiar.org. It is easy to be intimidated by the Bonn Challenge to restore 150 million hectares of degraded forest landscapes, let ...
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November 21, 2014
A Story of Coffee, Conservation and Livelihoods in the Pico Duarte Region of the Dominican Republic
Lee Gross
EcoAgriculture Partners
The Pico Duarte Coffee Region and surrounding Madres de Las Aguas (Mother of Waters) Conservation Area are areas of critical ecological, economic, and social importance to the people of the Dominican Republic. During the 2000s, much attention was paid to the establishment of protected areas in this Caribbean island nation for the conservation of biodiversity […] ...
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November 7, 2014
Preserving Evolutionary History Alongside Tropical Agriculture
Daniel Karp
University of California, Berkeley
The Nature Conservancy
Luke Owen Frishkoff
How to feed an ever-growing human population while simultaneously preserving Earth’s biodiversity is a major global challenge. Accomplishing both of these goals requires that we understand the potential for agricultural landscapes to harbor biodiversity. In tropical Costa Rica, where we do the majority of our fieldwork, landscapes are extremely heterogeneous. Agriculture can ...
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November 1, 2014
Taking a Look at a Landscape (Approach) Portrait of Africa
Editor’s note: In a recently published article in the journal World Development, researchers at the World Agroforestry Centre and EcoAgriculture Partners surveyed 87 integrated landscape initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa to answer questions like what motivates land managers to start ILIs, which stakeholders are most likely to be involved, and what are the most comm ...
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