You are here: Home » Publications » Towards Productive Landscapes
The landscape approach has increasingly been promoted as a new perspective on addressing global challenges at a local level. In the face of increasing and competing claims to the land and the exhaustion of natural resources, planners, scientists and policymakers have come to realize the limitations of sectoral approaches. Integrated landscape level considerations have begun to supersede those restricted to, for instance, water, forests, farming and development programmes.
Given this interest, and the potential impacts of such initiatives, it is important to learn from the many practical experiences in applying integrated landscape management throughout the world. This issue of ETFRN News 56, ‘Towards productive landscapes’, brings together 29 papers by practitioners from all over the world who highlight the successes and challenges of applying landscape approaches.
Jointly, the articles explore:
This ETFRN News explores how foresters, farmers, pastoralists and other land users have taken charge and jointly shape the landscape they inhabit. How the private sector finds ways to integrate supply chains into sustainable landscapes. And how this helps the global community to address the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity.
The articles highlight the contribution of increased social cohesion as a key benefit of landscape approaches. In many cases, it is catalyzed by an environmental problem serious enough to require negotiated solutions that create better outcomes for everyone. Stimulus and support from external actors in the form of compensation, co-investment and independent facilitation is usually needed to make this happen.
Although the authors quote many benefits of landscape approaches, a systematic framework against which to assess and evaluate the impacts of landscape approaches seems to be lacking. There is a need for people engaged in landscape approaches to put their experiences together, compare them and look for general patterns that explain why certain approaches work and others fail. A clear language is needed for understanding landscapes and landscape approaches to help monitoring and evaluating landscape efforts.
© European Tropical Forest Research Network (ETFRN) | For comments or questions please contact the ETFRN Coordination Unit at etfrn@etfrn.org