Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture Interventions in Mountain Areas-Lessons Learned From a 5-Country Project to Upscale Best Practices

Many people living in mountain regions in lowand middle-income countries are vulnerable to food and nutrition insecurity, which contributes to poor nutritional status. Food and nutrition security require stability of access to affordable, safe, diverse, and nutritious foods. In mountainous areas, affordability and access to diverse foods are challenged by climatic factors constraining agricultural production, poor infrastructure, and geographic isolation. This article describes a nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) project focusing on 5 countries—Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Pakistan, and Peru— where 132 microinterventions were implemented by rural service providers (RSPs) who received training and technical support from the project. These microinterventions serve as learning cases for advocacy work to promote the NSA approach at the local, national, and global levels. They are also documented on an Internet platform allowing RSPs and other stakeholders to share best practices and lessons learned at the national and global levels. Preliminary results indicate that this approach is highly effective in addressing nutrition and livelihood issues in remote mountain areas. To scale up the approach and boost its integration into policies at the local, national, and global levels, 2 aspects will be critical. First, more systemic and integrated NSA initiatives need to be implemented that functionally combine production- and consumption-related aspects to effectively change nutrition behavior and serve as learning cases for scaling up. Second, effective capacity development of RSPs and encouragement of interaction among them is key to empowering them as change agents

Refocusing sustainability education: using students’ reflections on their carbon footprint to reinforce the importance of considering CO2 production in the construction industry

The construction industry is the most significant contributor to the UK’s CO2 emissions. It is responsible for an annual output of approximately 45% of the total. This figure highlights the role the industry must play in helping to achieve the UK Government’s CO2 reduction target. It is ergo incumbent on construction-related educators to emphasise this issue and explore ways in which it can be achieved. Unintentional desensitisation has resulted in the term ‘sustainability’, particularly CO2 production, being seen by students as just another concept to be studied from a theoretical perspective. Many students fail to grasp its broader implications and how it should affect strategic environmental decisions about construction processes, technologies, and products. In an attempt to address this problem, an innovative learning, teaching, and assessment strategy was used with final year undergraduate construction students to improve their level of sustainability literacy. The theory of threshold concepts in the context of transformative learning was used as the baseline philosophy to the study. The approach involved asking students to calculate their carbon footprint and to reflect upon and extrapolate their findings to the construction industry and its practice. Content analysis was performed on the reflective commentaries acquired from student portfolios collected over four academic years. The results showed how the students’ reflections on their carbon footprints proved to be an enlightening experience. Terms such as ‘shocked by my footprint’, ‘surprised at the findings’, and ‘change in attitude’ were among the contemplative comments. When students linked their findings to the construction industry, phrases such as ‘waste generation’, ‘technologies’, and ‘materials’ were some of the concepts considered. By using their personal experiences as a benchmark, students were able to gain a deeper level of understanding of the causes and consequences of CO2 production. They also found it more straightforward to relate these issues to the construction industry and its practice. Several novel recommendations are made to raise the level of sustainability literacy in the construction industry thereby facilitating a potential reduction in worldwide CO2 production

Education responses to climate change and quality : two parts of the same agenda?

Increasing attention to climate change and the current global economic crisis has underscored the need for approaches to education that equip and empower people of all ages to deal with uncertain environmental, economic and political futures. A range of educational and research initiatives already exist which could support this aim, however, policy and discussion continue to focus on technical solutions or 'knowledge transfer' without seriously engaging with the content of education. This paper suggests that education responses are needed which attend to provision of both appropriate educational infrastructure and relevant knowledge and skills. It also explores the connections between education for sustainable development (ESD) and education quality, and argues that these frameworks already support potentially effective education responses to climate change. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd

Design for sustainable cultural landscapes - A whole-systems framework

This article explores how Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) could be used as a guidance framework for the capacity development of those engaged in the process of identifying, protecting, conserving, presenting and transmitting cultural landscapes. It draws insights from the Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) curriculum intended to serve the purpose of educating for the transition to a comprehensive sustainable culture; and incorporates learning objectives from the Education for Sustainable Development Goals report by UNESCO. The framework follows the pattern of the EDE curriculum organised in four dimensions of sustainability and the three dimensions of learning - cognitive, socio-emotional and behavioural. Each of these four dimensions, in turn, contains five modules- thus twenty subject areas in total, all of which need to be considered by sustainable cultural landscape educational programmes. The paper concludes that in order to create a whole-systems guidance framework addressing cultural landscape complexities, a wide variety of viewpoints needs to be considered including community, nature rights and traditional ways of knowing and other panicipatory epistemologies.</p

Closing the Gender Gap in African Agriculture in the Face of Climate Change

Gender is not about ‘women and girls’ but about roles, responsibilities, access and control over resources and relations between men and women, boys and girls which are socially ascribed. Women’s meaningful participation in decision-making requires going beyond the presence of more women in institutions and processes. Comprehensive gender analyses at national and local levels are necessary to identify the challenges and opportunities for developing gender-responsive agricultural policies. A Gender Action Plan (GAP) for agriculture with a well-structured and robust M&E system is essential. Strengthening Gender Management Systems in the agriculture sector with regular gender audits can promote greater equity between women and men