Happy New Year! With 2014 upon us, it’s a good time to review some of the big emerging or debated issues related to integrated landscape approaches the Landscapes Blog covered last year.
Climate change was a pervasive theme on the Landscape Blog, and in conversations on agriculture, environment, and development. Issues related to climate change were prominent throughout the year, gaining special notice during the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conference, and the Global Landscapes Forum held during that two-week meeting. Spanning lessons learned from smallholder carbon projects in Africa to gender considerations in Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD), the understanding of agriculture and land use’s role in climate change mitigation made considerable advancements. In a guest post, Brenda Lin of Australia’s CSIRO discussed how policy shapes these land management responses to climate change, and how it greatly influences whether they are relatively myopic or support the broader range of benefits beyond carbon sequestration or food production that landscapes can provide.
But as we saw last year, it’s not just about mitigation. Adaptation, ‘resilience’, and the ways that communities and landscapes can weather the pressures of global change have become central issues in sustainable development circles. With an eye on increasing climatic variability and extreme weather, Professor Tim Benton of the University of Leeds explained earlier in the year how a landscape approach and diversified farming are critical to building resilience in food systems. Focusing on the importance of ecosystem services, Megan Meacham from the Stockholm Resilience Centre discussed work on resilience presented at the Ecosystem Services Partnership conference held in Bali in August.
Sustainable intensification, the meaning and practice of which still varies, is another topic that continued to stir discussion. It has been proposed as a means to conserve biodiversity while simultaneously meeting our agricultural production needs, though necessarily manifesting itself differently in practice depending on the landscape context. Three guest authors – Joern Fischer, Norman Uphoff, and Harry Stoddart – tackled the question of ‘how the way we think about intensifying agricultural production changes when not just focused at a farm level’ during a Landscapes Roundtable discussion on the blog.
Sustainable intensification is also implicated in the term ‘inclusive green growth’, which presents a vision for development models that also support long-term environmental sustainability. In the green growth conversations, public-private partnerships, the role of business in development, and sustainable supply chains have garnered considerable interest. When experts weighed in on the role of landscape management in markets and sourcing, there was resounding agreement on the need for standards and collaboration in agricultural supply chains.
A commonality throughout all of these threads is the multifunctionality of integrated agricultural landscapes. With a new emphasis on ecosystem-based approaches by the United Nations Environment Programme, and the launch of a Multifunctional Landscapes Roadshow within Europe, this trend seems to be on the rise. As 2014 kicks off, we are looking forward to another year of landscapes.
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