Enhancing Sustainable Agriculture blog posts

With the current drought in Southeast Asia, downstream Mekong countries are concerned that their water is being held up by large mainstream dams in China and Laos. There are, however, hundreds of small dams on Mekong tributaries, and the cumulative effect of these cannot be ignored.

We asked the WLE-ESR community what they thought were the best articles on ecosystem services and resilience in 2015. This is what they had to say.

Ecosystem services is a term that does not translate easily into different languages, making it difficult to explain across cultures and contexts. The challenge becomes even more daunting when we want to understand how local communities use, perceive and value different ecosystem services: how can we collect views from others on a concept that is described by an amalgam of financial, conservation, regulatory and scientific parlance?

Floods. It seems no matter where you turn these days, you can’t escape news of flooding in some part of the world. In the face of climate change and COP21, towns and cities all over the world must look to develop sustainably. Here's a look at green infrastructure issues in the Mekong.

Here’s a spin on what caught our eye this month. From the TEEBAgFood interim report released at the Global Landscapes Forum in Paris to the Indonesian peat fires to microbes and ecosystem service bundles. Read on! 

What is the future for Indonesia and its landscapes?  The country is at an extraordinary moment.  Under the new populist government of Joko Widodo, huge areas of the country’s state lands may change hands in the next few years. 

Green infrastructure involves making conventional urban infrastructure more sustainable, cost effective, and resilient to climate change. But implementing such techniques, in less well-planned cities in Southeast Asia may prove to be more difficult than in western cities.

Here’s what has grabbed our attention in the research literature on Ecosystem Services and Resilience over the past few months. What has biodiversity done for you lately?

It is no coincidence that we're launching the Thrive podcast today, World Environment Day. The theme this year is sustainable consumption and production, and that's exactly what drives the podcast's first guest: Andrew Noble, Director of the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems.

Climate science has a large interest in ‘average weather’. There is an obsession with predicting larger climate trends: regional long-term patterns of rainfall, temperature peaks and averages. How this pans out locally in time and space in less understood.