Blog for People, Food and Nature

In the southwest of Tanzania, the Mbeya region encompasses several important areas for biodiversity. The land has a variety of productive uses, including livestock production in the drylands, irrigated rice near the rivers, small-scale maize in the hills, and fruit and plantation trees in the more humid, higher elevations, while large protected forested areas supply […] ...

By Saul Cunningham, Team Leader for Biodiversity in Managed Landscapes, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia Following on the heels of International Day of Biological Diversity and the Chicago Council’s Global Food Security Symposium, today’s post marries the issues tackled by these two events. Dr. Cunningham, from Australia’s CS ...

Collaboration, local innovation, and integration across scales were themes that permeated this year’s Global Food Security Symposium organized by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. It marked the launch of the report, Advancing Global Food Security: The Power of Science, Trade, and Business, which laid out a blueprint for action targeted at policy leadership (specifically ...

By Seth Shames, Senior Project Manager, EcoAgriculture Partners As the documented and projected impacts of climate change become increasingly alarming, and pressure mounts for dramatic global mitigation efforts, carbon credit markets have developed as a popular policy mechanism.  Though still largely focused on the energy sector, opportunities have emerged for smallholder farm ...

by Fabrice DeClerck (Bioversity International), Mam Kosal, and Gareth Johnstone (World Fish Centre), with contributions from Andrew Noble, Debbie Bossio, Michael Victor, and Camilla Zanzanaini Water is essential to life on this planet, and more specifically to agriculture and healthy ecosystems. This year has been designated as the UN International Year of Water Cooperation, wh ...

Thanks to our first Landscape Roundtable contributors, Saswati Bora, Elisabeth Kvitashvili, and Delia Catacutan, for sharing their perspectives on the topic of conflict, resource management and related impacts on food security. Each of the authors pointed out that the connections between resource management and conflict are complex and can take place at multiple scales. Al ...

By Delia C. Catacutan, Senior Social Scientist, World Agroforestry Centre, Hanoi, Vietnam Dr. Catacutan currently leads research related to governance and natural resources management processes, including policy and institutional analyses in relation to payments for ecosystem services, in the Southeast Asia office of the World Agroforestry Centre. Her insights on avoiding confl ...

By Elisabeth Kvitashvili, Deputy Assistant Administrator-designate for Middle East Bureau and former Director of the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation, US Agency for International Development (USAID). Ms. Kvitashvili has led USAID’s work to analyze and respond to instability, extremism, and insurgency, and has worked on humanitarian and conflict-related programs in ...

By Saswati Bora, Operations Officer, Agriculture & Environmental Services, the World Bank Ms. Bora, the lead author of the background paper “Food Security and Conflict” to the 2011 World Development Report: Conflict, Security and Development, kicks off our first Landscapes Roundtable on the role of integrated landscape management in mitigating or avoiding conflict. With ...

Sometimes the most viable solutions to land management challenges require multiple perspectives, as seen on Wednesday in the case of the System of Rice Intensification in Nepal. Within an agricultural landscape, where there are multiple stakeholder groups and interests, it is of particular importance to have the farmers, private businesses, government institutions, and others b ...