Mapping regional livelihood benefits from local ecosystem services assessments in rural Sahel

Most current approaches to landscape scale ecosystem service assessments rely on detailed secondary data. This type of data is seldom available in regions with high levels of poverty and strong local dependence on provisioning ecosystem services for livelihoods. We develop a method to extrapolate results from a previously published village scale ecosystem services assessment to a higher administrative level, relevant for land use decision making. The method combines remote sensing (using a hybrid classification method) and interviews with community members. The resulting landscape scale maps show the spatial distribution of five different livelihood benefits (nutritional diversity, income, insurance/saving, material assets and energy, and crops for consumption) that illustrate the strong multifunctionality of the Sahelian landscapes. The maps highlight the importance of a diverse set of sub-units of the landscape in supporting Sahelian livelihoods. We see a large potential in using the resulting type of livelihood benefit maps for guiding future land use decisions in the Sahel

Beyond divides: prospects for synergy between resilience and pathways approaches to sustainability

In the context of rapid social, ecological and technological change, there is rising global demand from private, public and civic interests for trans-disciplinary sustainability research. This demand is fuelled by an increasing recognition that transitions toward sustainability require new modes of knowledge production that incorporate social and natural sciences and the humanities. The STEPS Centre’s ‘pathways approach’ and the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s (SRC) ‘resilience approach’ are two distinct trans-disciplinary frameworks for understanding and responding to sustainability challenges. However, the varieties of trans-disciplinarity pursued by the SRC and STEPS each have distinct origins and implications. Therefore, by selecting either the ‘resilience’ or ‘pathways’ approach, or indeed any distinct approach to sustainability, the researcher must contend with a range of foundational ontological and epistemological commitments that profoundly affect the definition of problems, generation of knowledge and prescriptions for action. What does an (un)sustainable world look like? How might we ‘know’ and research (un)sustainability? How should sustainability researchers position themselves in relation to civil society, policy, business and academic communities? In this paper we explore how resilience and pathways address these questions, identifying points of overlap and friction with the aim of generating new research questions and illuminating areas of potential synergy

Research and development challenges in scaling innovation: a case study of the LEAP-Agri RAMSES II project

A widely held assumption is that intensifying agroforestry will lead to sustainable increases in production, societal resilience and food security, urgently needed in the current context of changes in markets, climate and demography. Current thinking assumes that to achieve sustainable innovation a participatory approach with public, civil and private stakeholders is necessary, combined with a systemic, trans-disciplinary approach, rather than a technical approach. This study presents a case of applying the Theory of Change (ToC) concept to test this assumption. The ToC was designed to articulate the process of scaling of action-research findings, and to adapt the research to the context of complex agroforestry systems at plot, household, farm, village and landscape levels. This allowed to develop an intervention logic that unpacks what sustainability means for farmers and other local stakeholders in four West African agroforestry systems. The conceptual approach created an awareness of potential impacts of scaling initiatives based on a ToC with pathways to impact combined with monitoring the effects of the research & development project on a variety of ecological, agronomic and economic performance indicators. A number of constraints and paradoxes that are linked to current research and development short term funding are also discussed

Biodiversity field trials to inform reforestation and natural resource management strategies along the African Great Green Wall in Senegal

International audienc

Make EU trade with Brazil sustainable

Cellular mechanisms in basic and clinical gastroenterology and hepatolog