Ecosystem services blog posts

Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration has made a tremendous impact across swaths of West and East Africa where trees had been cleared for agriculture. Now through proper pruning and protection, these trees could grow back, and in turn support entire ecosystem and increase food production.

Achieving food security in the context of Africa is unimaginable without climate change adaptation and practices that support food production while enhancing the ecosystem services and biodiversity that underpin agricultural productivity.

In China, increased pressure from human and livestock populations has resulted in 90% of the pastoral land being classified as degraded to some degree, especially in the more arid regions where ecosystems are the most fragile.

To mitigate risks of ecosystem service degradation, we need to ensure that tradeoffs are managed through informed land use, especially in high potential agricultural areas, such as the Guinea Savanna zone in Africa.

Soils should be at the heart of "climate-smart agriculture". No-till agriculture is as good at capturing carbon as planting a rainforest -- and should be treated as a similar "carbon credit" in any future deal to set up a carbon trading system round the world, says Guadagni of the World Bank.

Currently the cost of land degradation reaches about US$490 billion per year, much higher than the cost of action to prevent it. To rectify this we should first get the basics right: credible quantitative information about current status, drivers, indicators, thresholds, and spatial variability.

In the least favored regions of the world, food production per capita remains at the same level as in the 1960s. There are many reasons, from a purely agronomic perspective, for such disparities. New inputs from science can support indigenous knowledge for landscape restoration and ecological intensification.

Land degradation is no longer a local problem. Increasing land scarcity means that smallholder farmers in Africa may find themselves competing for land in a global market that has seen an exponential rise in foreign investment in soil and water or ‘land grabbing’. Conversion of new lands contributes to climate change. What are we doing about it?

For this year's World Food Day, themed “Sustainable Food Systems for Food Security and Nutrition", we're asking you: What do you think a sustainable food system looks like?

The First World Irrigation Forum in Mardin, Turkey, gives us a chance to take stock on how irrigated agriculture is performing and its role in meeting future demands for food. In agricultural water management, we often appear to be talking about the same issues as three decades ago...

The influence of the intergovernmental Mekong Basin Commission to manage the river is hobbled by its absence of the biggest and most upstream country on the river – China. This time we are in Africa, with Zambia the only country that hasn't joined the commission.