Landscape management systems: Diversification for Sustainable and Resilient Agriculture

Landscape 2021, Berlin

Session 3.5: Scaling up landscape interventions based on sustainable intensification and diversification approaches for improving rural livelihoods in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa

Convenors:

• Kaushal K Garg, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), India

• Jennie Barron, SLU Uppsala, Sweden

• Amare Haileselassie, International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Ethiopia

Sustainable intensification and diversification is needed for improving rural livelihood system while balancing ecosystem services within and beyond designated agricultural landscapes.

Landscape based approaches use holistic approaches for addressing rural poverty while simultaneously restoring degraded soils that support livelihoods. These approaches use integrated packages of interventions including diversification of crops and animal to build system level resilience and support sustainable intensification.

Realizing and operationalizing this potential now receives more than two billion USD/year by various development agencies in Asia and Africa (Mandal et al., 2020). However, there is scope to strengthen the planning, designing and execution of such interventions through science led approaches aligned with local innovations. In addition, there is a need to strengthen the capacity of and partnerships between different actors, to ensure more equal opportunities and sharing of benefits and costs.

The CGIAR Collaborative Research Program on Water Land and Ecosystems (WLE) and partners have more than 40 years of experience in science-based landscape management approaches. ICRISAT, IWMI in collaboration with state governments and other partners in India and Ethiopia have implemented initiatives from pilot scale in micro catchments to the scale of river basins, which addressed water availability, land degradation, to diversify livelihood opportunities whilst strengthening ecosystem services. In this session, we will share some of our lessons learned to catalyse upscaling of landscape diversification approaches. The session invites contributions that provide new understanding and novel science findings on how diversified landscapes can contribute to system resilience, ecosystem regeneration, optimizing trade-offs, impacts on livelihoods etc. as well as their application with various stakeholders for co-design and effective implementation. It also aims to highlight lessons learned in building essential and effective partnerships for scaling, to share both costs of implementation and the benefits attained.

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