Targeted agroecological action to enhance food security and farmland biodiversity
Rooted in land system science, I assess interactions between food security, agriculture, biodiversity and livelihoods in the context of weather extremes and other disturbances. Vulnerability and resilience of agriculture, communities and food systems, actors’ differentiated impacts and expectations, critical thresholds and archetypical patterns of socio-ecological systems receive particular attention. Agroecology provides a basis to focus on shared landscapes in which agriculture and biodiversity thoughtfully interact. Insights support decision making to enhance food security and sustainable land management at local, regional and global scales and guide policy towards effective response options that enhance resilience. Learning from regional diversity supports policy tailoring and provides knowledge for scaling the insights obtained fostering the achievement of global targets on food security, Land Degradation Neutrality and biodiversity, among others.
I am a lead author of IPBES Nexus Assessment, the thematic assessment of the interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food and health of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
I coordinate Future Earth’s Global Land Programme (GLP) Working Group on “Archetype Analysis in Sustainability and Land Governance Research”.
Д-р. Diana Sietz
Related thematic areas and guiding questions:
Indigenous Peoples’ food systems can be particularly affected by pollution and other types of environmental degradation, e.g. when pesticide accumulation contributes to a decline in native pollinators and pest predators upon which Indigenous (and other) food systems depend (Fernández-Llamazares et al., 2020). Moreover, the loss of subsistence/traditional livelihoods (Torres-Vitolas et al., 2019; Blackmore et al., 2021) and limited access to and other actors’ appropriation of land and associated resources can decrease adaptation to current and newly emerging shocks (Parraguez-Vergara et al., 2016; IPBES, 2019). This restricts traditional food system management including the application of Indigenous knowledge and generation of novel insights/practices that address newly emerging opportunities and challenges. In addition, various actors’ risk perceptions and future visioning can create trade-offs and conflicts so that the design of multi-scale governance approaches is important (Hess & Brown, 2018).
Archetype analysis can help reveal recurrent patterns in the trade-offs and synergies between land use, food, biodiversity and climate adaptation, among others, and in the configurations of associated policy processes (Sietz et al., 2019; Oberlack et al. 2023). Focussing on food system interactions, insights into archetypes can support the tailoring of integrative response options. The up-scaling of actions to sustainably transform food systems can be informed by closing of regional knowledge gaps about archetypical interactions and systematic investigation of scenario archetypes (Sietz & Neudert 2022).
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