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The global food system is failing to deliver sufficient and nutritious food to all, while damaging the earth and unsustainably drawing down its resources. We argue that trees and forests are essential to solving these challenges. We outline the current contributions of trees and forests to the global food system and present recommendations to leverage these contributions as part of the efforts to reshape food systems to better support healthy diets and environmental sustainability. Trees and forests provide nutrient-rich foods, incomes for food security, ecosystem services for food production, and add resilience to food systems. At the same time, trees and forests protect biodiversity and mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration. We recommend four approaches to realise the full potential of trees and forests to contribute to healthy and sustainable food systems: scaling up current tree-based food production, reorientating some agricultural investments towards nutrient-dense food production, repurposing production incentives from support of calorie-rich but nutrient-poor foods to support nutrient-dense foods, and integrate nutrition objectives into forest conservation and restoration programmes. Trees and forests have important roles to play in the transformation of our food systems, but more needs to be done to ensure that these roles are realised.
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Conservación de los Recursos Naturales , Ecosistema , Biodiversidad , Secuestro de Carbono , BosquesRESUMEN
Indigenous trees play key roles in West African landscapes, such as the néré tree (Parkia biglobosa (Jacq.) R.Br. ex G.Don). We applied social-ecological network analysis to understand the social-ecological interactions around néré. We documented the benefits néré provides and the multiple social interactions it creates amongst a large range of actors. The flows of rights over the trees and benefits from them formed two hierarchical networks, or cascades, with different actors at the top. The two forms of power revealed by the two cascades of rights and benefits suggest possible powers and counter-powers across gender, ethnicity, and age. We documented how the tree catalyses social interactions across diverse groups to sustain vital social connections, and co-constitute places, culture, and relationships. We argue that a paradigm shift is urgently needed to leverage the remarkable untapped potential of indigenous trees and Cultural Keystone Species in current global restoration and climate change agendas.
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Cambio Climático , Árboles , Red SocialRESUMEN
Halting forest loss and achieving sustainable development in an equitable manner require state, non-state actors, and entire societies in the Global North and South to tackle deeply established patterns of inequality and power relations embedded in forest frontiers. Forest and climate governance in the Global South can provide an avenue for the transformational change needed-yet, does it? We analyse the politics and power in four cases of mitigation, adaptation, and development arenas. We use a political economy lens to explore the transformations taking place when climate policy meets specific forest frontiers in the Global South, where international, national and local institutions, interests, ideas, and information are at play. We argue that lasting and equitable outcomes will require a strong discursive shift within dominant institutions and among policy actors to redress policies that place responsibilities and burdens on local people in the Global South, while benefits from deforestation and maladaptation are taken elsewhere. What is missing is a shared transformational objective and priority to keep forests standing among all those involved from afar in the major forest frontiers in the tropics.
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Cambio Climático , Bosques , Conservación de los Recursos Naturales , Humanos , Políticas , PolíticaRESUMEN
Globally, anthropogenic environmental change is exacerbating the already vulnerable conditions of many people and ecosystems. In order to obtain food, water, raw materials and shelter, rural people modify forests and other ecosystems, affecting the supply of ecosystem services that contribute to livelihoods and well-being. Despite widespread awareness of the nature and extent of multiple impacts of land-use changes, there remains limited understanding of how these impacts affect trade-offs among ecosystem services and their beneficiaries across spatial scales. We assessed how rural communities in two forested landscapes in Indonesia have changed land uses over the last 20 years to adapt their livelihoods that were at risk from multiple hazards. We estimated the impact of these adaptation strategies on the supply of ecosystem services by comparing different benefits provided to people from these land uses (products, water, carbon, and biodiversity), using forest inventories, remote sensing, and interviews. Local people converted forests to rubber plantations, reforested less productive croplands, protected forests on hillsides, and planted trees in gardens. Our results show that land-use decisions were propagated at the landscape scale due to reinforcing loops, whereby local actors perceived that such decisions contributed positively to livelihoods by reducing risks and generating co-benefits. When land-use changes become sufficiently widespread, they affect the supply of multiple ecosystem services, with impacts beyond the local scale. Thus, adaptation implemented at the local-scale may not address development and climate adaptation challenges at regional or national scale (e.g. as part of UN Sustainable Development Goals or actions taken under the UNFCCC Paris Agreement). A better understanding of the context and impacts of local ecosystem-based adaptation is fundamental to the scaling up of land management policies and practices designed to reduce risks and improve well-being for people at different scales.
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Agricultura/métodos , Conservación de los Recursos Naturales/métodos , Ecosistema , Bosques , Humanos , Indonesia , Tecnología de Sensores Remotos , Población RuralRESUMEN
Climate change and related adaptation strategies have gender-differentiated impacts. This paper reviews how gender is framed in 41 papers on climate change adaptation through an intersectionality lens. The main findings show that while intersectional analysis has demonstrated many advantages for a comprehensive study of gender, it has not yet entered the field of climate change and gender. In climate change studies, gender is mostly handled in a men-versus-women dichotomy and little or no attention has been paid to power and social and political relations. These gaps which are echoed in other domains of development and gender research depict a 'feminization of vulnerability' and reinforce a 'victimization' discourse within climate change studies. We argue that a critical intersectional assessment would contribute to unveil agency and emancipatory pathways in the adaptation process by providing a better understanding of how the differential impacts of climate change shape, and are shaped by, the complex power dynamics of existing social and political relations.
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Cambio Climático , Identidad de Género , Investigación , Factores Socioeconómicos , Adaptación Psicológica , Feminismo , HumanosRESUMEN
This synthesis article joins the authors of the special issue "Gender perspectives in resilience, vulnerability and adaptation to global environmental change" in a common reflective dialogue about the main contributions of their papers. In sum, here we reflect on links between gender and feminist approaches to research in adaptation and resilience in global environmental change (GEC). The main theoretical contributions of this special issue are threefold: emphasizing the relevance of power relations in feminist political ecology, bringing the livelihood and intersectionality approaches into GEC, and linking resilience theories and critical feminist research. Empirical insights on key debates in GEC studies are also highlighted from the nine cases analysed, from Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific. Further, the special issue also contributes to broaden the gender approach in adaptation to GEC by incorporating research sites in the Global North alongside sites from the Global South. This paper examines and compares the main approaches adopted (e.g. qualitative or mixed methods) and the methodological challenges that derive from intersectional perspectives. Finally, key messages for policy agendas and further research are drawn from the common reflection.