February 5, 2015
Linking Food Security, Climate Adaptation and Carbon Management: A Case Study from Indonesia
Jonatan A. Lassa
Nanyang Technological University
Yulius P. K. Suni
Farmers in North Central Timor face local environmental degradation such as soil erosion, water stress, recurrent droughts and erratic climate. These environmental problems are likely to be more intensive and extensive in the context of Timor Island. Failure to address these environmental problems will leave this vulnerable region less resilient in the face of future […] ...
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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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October 16, 2014
Growing Food and Biodiversity
Sam Quinn
The Farm at Sunnyside
Food production and biological conservation may often appear to be at odds, but both share poignant similarities. Farming today faces its own diversity crisis—mirroring precipitous declines in biological diversity, fewer and fewer crops account for an ever-growing proportion of our diet. Thanks to this growing understanding of the inseparable link between wild species and far ...
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August 15, 2014
Grass, Soil, Hope: A Story About Carbon Country
By Courtney White, Quivira Coalition This is the story of how I came into Carbon Country. I’m a former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist who became a dues-paying member of the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association as a producer of local, grass-fed beef. For a boy raised in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, during the […] ...
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