Trade-offs between multifunctionality and profit in tropical smallholder landscapes

Land-use transitions can enhance the livelihoods of smallholder farmers but potential economic-ecological trade-offs remain poorly understood. Here, we present an interdisciplinary study of the environmental, social and economic consequences of land-use transitions in a tropical smallholder landscape on Sumatra, Indonesia. We find widespread biodiversity-profit trade-offs resulting from land-use transitions from forest and agroforestry systems to rubber and oil palm monocultures, for 26,894 aboveground and belowground species and whole-ecosystem multidiversity. Despite variation between ecosystem functions, profit gains come at the expense of ecosystem multifunctionality, indicating far-reaching ecosystem deterioration. We identify landscape compositions that can mitigate trade-offs under optimal land-use allocation but also show that intensive monocultures always lead to higher profits. These findings suggest that, to reduce losses in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, changes in economic incentive structures through well-designed policies are urgently needed

Towards more resilient food systems for smallholder farmers in the Peruvian Altiplano: the potential of community-based climate services

Experiences from the disastrous 2016 El Niño revealed that its forecast, although available, was not known, accessed or understood by a large part of agricultural communities living in remote rural areas. This is all the more striking since these population groups are particularly vulnerable to adverse climate events as their livelihoods heavily depend on climate-sensitive agricultural production. In the framework of Climandes, a twinning project between the meteorological services of Peru and Switzerland, we implemented and evaluated the impact of community-based climate services that were co-developed with the target smallholder communities of the semi-arid highlands of the southern Peruvian Andes, where small-scale farmers are especially exposed to adverse climate events due to high inter-annual climate variability and weak socio-economic capacities. In this chapter we analyse the project implementation through a socio-economic lens. Research results generated alongside the project indicate that the well-directed user engagement resulted in a strong increase of trust in the weather service SENAMHI Peru and led to improved consideration of the information provided in the respective decision-making processes. We highlight the key steps that proved to be indispensable for the implementation of meaningful and sustainable climate services. The project outcomes point to the great and widely untapped potential of community-based climate services to reduce vulnerability and strengthen resilience of smallholder farmers in the face of changing climate conditions

Network simulations to study seed exchange for agrobiodiversity conservation

International audienceCrop diversity is essential for sustainable development because diverse crops cope better with disease and climate change. A way to maintain crop diversity is to sustain seed exchange among farmers. Network simulations help in establishing which network properties promote crop diversity conservation. Here, we modelled the likelihood that an introduced crop variety will spread in a seed exchange network. The network model is based on published data on a directed network of barley seed flows in seven villages of Northern Ethiopia. Results show that the number of households that can be reached when introducing a new variety depends on the number of outgoing links of the household that first received the new variety. The distribution of the number of both incoming and outgoing links shows a departure from a normal distribution. This trend is explained by the presence of a minority of highly connected households and of a majority of weakly connected households. For the whole network, there is no significant correlation between the number of incoming and outgoing links of households. The findings explain the common observation that individual farmers do not cultivate all varieties present in a seed system. Absence of reciprocal exchange makes such networks less vulnerable to wholesale displacement of farmer varieties by improved ones