Water, Land and Ecosystems - Thrive: Ecosystem services

Podcast: Restoring an invisible lifeline: soil

j.furtado@cgiar.org — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 07:59:00 +0000

Written by

Jeremy Cherfas

The latest episode of the Thrive podcast takes a close look at the ground beneath our feet. Soil, on which terrestrial life depends, is often ignored precisely because it is everywhere and yet invisible. Healthy soils contribute so much to human well-being, from nutritious food to clean water, and yet the soils of more than a fifth of all cropland, pasture, forest and woodland are degraded to some extent. Degraded soils, apart from being unable to meet the needs of the people who depend on them, also emit large amounts of greenhouse gasses, contributing to climate change.

How, then, can we best restore degraded soils? Sessions at Global Soil Week 2015 in Berlin, co-organized by the Water, Land and Ecosystems research program of CGIAR, provided a platform for people to share different approaches, each of which has something to offer.

On the ground, local communities in Malawi have restored tree cover and embraced beehives, protecting the soil and watershed and providing an extra income stream. The government of Malawi is moving away from a reliance on simple mineral fertilisers, which often exacerbate soil degradation, and offering farmers seeds of fertiliser trees that add nitrogen and carbon to the soil, provide fodder for livestock and eventually supply building materials and charcoal.

Surveys in Ethiopia have shown that soils often lack trace elements such as boron and zinc; add those to simple mineral fertilisers and farmers, who had no use for mineral fertilisers that didn’t work, discover the value of improving their soils. And while the contributions of localised restoration efforts may seem small, taken together they could have a large impact on greenhouse gasses.

Of course, there is still much to be done, not least to persuade governments and development agencies that although more complex soil restoration schemes are more difficult to implement, they are more sustainable in the long run. As the International Year of Soils continues, our report from Berlin offers some encouragement.

Our podcast series is now on iTunes, check us out, subscribe, and download for free listening on-the-go

Research ThemeRestoring Degraded Landscapes

Solutions

Landscape Restoration

Topics

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Water Pollution: The Invisible, Creeping Threat

j.furtado@cgiar.org — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 06:51:00 +0000

Written by

Claudia Ringler

Every other week we read of a new water pollution scandal, often after people fall sick, but sometimes because of large-scale fish die off or other adverse environmental impacts. Can we turn the tide of growing water pollution around?

Faecal coliform sample grown from water drawn from the Ganges at Varanasi.

Neil Palmer/ IWMI

Human sources of water degradation include household and industrial waste, agricultural chemicals, and livestock waste, which all end up in water bodies and cause pollution if untreated or not managed appropriately. As a result of insufficient action or plain inaction, today, approximately 1 in 8 or 650 million people live in areas where water quality risks are high due to elevated levels of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and 1/6^th and 1/4^th of the world’s population lives in river basins where water quality risks are high due to excessive nitrogen and phosphorous loadings. Levels of agricultural and domestic BOD, nitrogen and phosphorous are elevated or very high in China and India, parts of eastern and northern Africa; and parts of Mexico and the United States.

Increasing the load

Why should we worry? BOD measures the level of organic pollutants in the water. High BOD levels can indicate contamination with fecal matter that can adversely affect children’s physical and intellectual growth and development. Increased concentrations of dissolved organic carbon can also create problems in the production of safe drinking water if chlorination is used. Too much nitrogen and phosphorous in water leads to eutrophication, killing aquatic life by depleting oxygen. The presence of nitrogen-based compounds in drinking water can be harmful to human health. The most well-known disease is ‘blue-baby’ syndrome, which triggers oxidation of the hemoglobin in the blood resulting in dark blue coloration and is particularly harmful to infants.

As governments, the private sector, farmer associations and cities around the world still do very little to curb growing pollution, 1 in 3 people will be subject to a high risk of nitrogen pollution (2.6 billion people or an increase of 172%) by 2050. Similarly, 1 in 3 people will be at high risk of phosphorous pollution (2.9 billion people or an increase of 129%), and 1 in 5 people will be at high risk of water pollution from BOD (1.6 billion people or an increase of 144%). This estimation was carried out assuming a drier global climate change scenario. The most rapid increases will occur in low- and lower-middle income countries, plus several countries in the Middle East, primarily due to higher population growth in these countries. These large increases in pollution loads will be detrimental to public health, a country’s possibilities to attract business or export food and to long-term environmental sustainability of all natural resources used for productive activities.

IFPRI

Bearing the burden

This alarming trend calls for a rethinking of our current development pathway. Have the global community and key actors woken up to these alarming trends? Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 on water includes a specific target for water pollution (‘By 2030, improve water quality by reducing pollution, eliminating dumping and minimizing release of hazardous chemicals and materials, halving the proportion of untreated wastewater and substantially increasing recycling and safe reuse globally’). While this target is a step in the right direction, how this would be achieved remains unclear. The challenge is largest in low-income countries where pollution levels grow fastest, data on water pollution levels are not collected or monitored, where pollution shares from so-called non-point or diffuse sources dominate and where governance and enforcement mechanisms are limited.

This said, several solutions exist to address this challenge: governments are called to lead the effort to regulate, monitor and enforce water quality standards, the private sector, city administrations and farmers associations are called to implement their own water quality controls, to help ensure the future of our environment and human health. In agriculture, higher nutrient use efficiency can substantially reduce pollution loadswhile public and private sector agricultural research into nutrient-use efficiency by crops needs to be strengthened. Farmer associations should provide information and advice to their members for other measures that improve fertilizer management, with practices such as

Deep placement of urea where it is appropriate
Crop rotations with nitrogen-fixing (cover) crops
No-till or reduced tillage and other conservation measures that can dramatically reduce erosion and thus protect water bodies from the adverse effects of P and N runoff
Precision agriculture methods
- Yield monitors to apply fertilizers where they are needed most, or generate the highest yields
- Replacement of furrow irrigation with drip, which allows direct fertilizer application to the crops and their root systems

While much of the loadings are contributed by agriculture, industries and households also produce large quantities of nitrogen and phosphorous, which can be recovered more easily from effluents and sewage than non-point sources and reused in agriculture, thus helping to close the nutrient cycle. New technologies continue to be developed and applied in most developed countries, but much more needs to be done in the low-income countries where most future loadings are projected to occur.

Stepping up to the plate

Governments who signed up for the SDGs are called to phase out remaining fertilizer subsidies to improve both human and environmental health. More should also be done to invest in both countries under rapid development who lack infrastructure to manage sewage as well as developed countries in North America and Europe where an upgrade of aging infrastructure with better managed stormwater runoff is necessary.

Cities and states in countries in development need to invest more aggressively in wastewater treatment. Cities everywhere should also embrace more innovative concepts when treating polluted waters, such as incorporating urban forests or constructed wetlands in pollution abatement. Each industry and homeowner should consider recycling and reuse of grey water and separation of water sources.

While all these options exist and many new ones are being developed, the capacity of environmental management in many of the countries where nutrient loadings will increase the most remains limited. Cooperation with the international community is needed to help these countries in their efforts to fight water pollution.

Without significant attention to this looming crisis, the future deterioration of water quality poses a major threat to aquatic environments and the people that depend on them.

For further reading: The murky future of global water quality: New global study projects rapid deterioration in water quality

Research ThemeVariability, Risks and Competing Uses

Topics

Water

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That Luang wetland: development and livelihoods

j.furtado@cgiar.org — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 07:00:00 +0000

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Manythong Siharath is worried. The wetland she depends on for her livelihood is changing and changing fast!

Regions

Southeast Asia

Manythong like many others around the world is watching her wetland shrink while her problems only continue to grow.

Dalaphone Sihanath/ IWMI

Manythong is 50 years old and has four children. She has relied on the That Luang Marsh, on the outskirts of Vientiane, the capital of Laos, for the past 30 years. In the monsoon season she catches fish from it and in the dry season, when the flood recedes, she grows vegetables in it. As well as consuming some, she sells both fish and vegetables at a nearby market. Her livelihood is totally dependent on the marsh and until recently she could make enough money to support her family.

However, in recent years the fishing has become a lot harder. Manythong says, “the fish is not even enough for home consumption. There are not many fish and the fish are small. No one is fishing in the wetland like before”. She continues to grow vegetables but without the wet season fish her income has dropped significantly.

The That Luang wetland covers an area approximately 20km2. There are 17 villages, over 7,000 households and nearly 38,000 people located around it. Many of these people rely on the wetland for their livelihoods. A study conducted in 2004, estimated the economic value of the wetland at just under US$ 5 million, with more than a million of that attributable to fisheries. The wetland also plays an important role in flood mitigation, climate regulation, and treatment of wastewater discharged into it from the city.

The wetland has been altered significantly in recent years as a result of urban encroachment, expansion of agricultural areas and the construction of a “central canal”, intended to facilitate dry season irrigation. More recently, a consortium of Laos and Chinese companies has begun developing the marsh as a new town, comprising houses and urban development.

Without detailed studies it is impossible to quantify the impact of these changes on the wetland and the range of goods and services that it provides. However, it is beyond doubt that they are altering the ecological character of the wetland and seemingly undermining the livelihoods of those people that depend on it.

Changing weather patterns may also be contributing to change. As Manythong herself speculates, the lack of fish might in part be due to low water levels. “Especially, last year, the water level was very low throughout the year. There was not much rain.”

Globally wetlands are disappearing fast, succumbing to a range of development pressures. It is estimated that 64% of wetlands have disappeared since 1900, most converted to agriculture or buried beneath the concrete of urban expansion. With rates of economic development accelerating and the impacts of climate change increasingly felt, the pressures on wetlands are greater than ever. The irony is that as they disappear those left become increasingly important and more and more valuable.

In the future planning and management must take into account the full range of values that wetlands provide. It is essential that peoples’ livelihoods and wellbeing are properly considered. Wise decision-making must ensure that people like Manythong and her family benefit from development and are certainly not adversely affected as a consequence of ill-considered impacts on wetlands.

Research ThemeVariability, Risks and Competing Uses

Solutions

Productivity

Topics

CommentsPost first comment

Science on the pulse: Top 10 Ecosystem Services and Resilience reads of 2015

j.furtado@cgiar.org — Mon, 01 Feb 2016 02:56:00 +0000

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This post is part of the Science on the Pulse series - a series which highlights the latest literature on ecosystem services and resilience.

We asked the Ecosystem Services and Resilience Working Group from the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) what they thought were the best articles on ecosystem services and resilience last year. This is what they said! (Articles presented alphabetically by author)

RuudMorjin/Flickr

1. A sustainability framework for assessing trade-offs in ecosystem services. Cavender-Bares, J. et al., 2015.

“Sustainability” is a word that is very popular in national and global development circles, but difficult to measure in a robust, consistent manner making it hard to know whether or not sustainability has been achieved or even incorporated into science policy-based decision making. Cavender-Bares and team made an important contribution towards making sustainability quantifiable by providing a very clear and logical sustainability framework applicable to ecosystem services. The framework applies concepts from welfare economics to ecological science and proposes optimal sustainable solutions are identified by considering the linkages between the natural capital, provision of ecosystem services and human well-being. The framework addresses thresholds and nonlinear dynamics by incorporating biophysical constraints and human values across different spatial and temporal levels. Highly recommended reading for policy makers and researchers alike!

2. Nature’s bounties: reliance on pollinators for health. Daily, G.C. & Karp, D.S., 2015.

Daily and Karp provide a punchy review of Smith et al.’s (2015) published work in The Lancet modelling future declines in pollinators to human health outcomes. This is one of the first studies trying to link change in an ecosystem service all the way to a human impact, rather than stopping at an intermediate economic or biophysical value meant to represent a measure of human well-being. In it, Smith et al. estimate the impact of a loss of 50, 75 and 100% of pollinators from global landscapes on micronutrient production from pollinator dependent crop (i.e our major source of dietary vitamins). They use data on local diets and consumption to estimate the likely impact of replacing these lost foods with staple crop calories on rates of micronutrient deficiency, non-communicable and malnutrition-related disease and disability adjusted life years (DALY). What allowed them to make this link was the finding that most pollinator-dependent crops contributing to human health are produced and consumed locally rather than imported, i.e. identifying a direct link between ecosystem service and beneficiary.

3. Remote sensing of ecosystem services: A systematic review. De Araujo Barbosa, C.C., Atkinson, P.M. & Dearing, J. a., 2015.

Overwhelmed by the vast quantities of data, tools and models to choose between to assess ecosystem services? Stop, breath and get a cup of coffee, then sit down and read Araujo Barbosa and team’s article. The team conducted an intensive search of scientific literature to assess the state of the art for using remote sensing to assess and value ecosystem services. This article is likely to get you bursting with new ideas about how to improve ecosystem service knowledge for your study site!

4. Assessing ecosystem services for informing land-use decisions: a problem-orientated approach. Forster et al. 2015.

If you want to conduct ecosystem service assessments that lead to changes on the ground, this paper is for you! The paper responds to the realisation that as ecosystem service assessments increase in abundance around the globe, decisions based on these assessments are still rare. It provides a clear and grounded guide to conducting ecosystem service assessments to solve real world problems, by reviewing and synthesising existing theories for mainstreaming ecosystem service assessments into a handy one-page schematic.

5. Fairly efficient, efficiently fair: Lessons from designing and testing payment schemes for ecosystem services in Asia. Leimona, B. Meine van Noordwijk, Rudolf de Groot and Rik Leemans. 2015.

Planning to implement or assess a PES scheme? Then, you should definitely read Leimona and team article. This article covers the history of the Payment for Ecosystem Services and identify key modifications to the traditional scheme in order to account for the multidimensionality of poverty and for the context of developing countries. The authors provide evidence from their empirical observation of PES in Asia that you will find valuable in any context.

6. Systems integration for global sustainability. Liu et al. 2015.

Liu and team convincingly argue for improved interdisciplinary integration to facilitate thorough systems research. They propose that achieving global sustainability requires studying changes in institutional, spatial and temporal levels across human and natural systems in an integrated manner, and that it’s only by doing this that we can expect true progress towards finding and making practical advances towards sustainability. Compartmentalised approaches will not provide the breakthroughs that we are hoping for. We wonder if it’s time to define a new category of geographers (as the traditional cross-discplinarians) alongside human and physical to tackle this need for interdiscplinary action head-on...welcome the “socio-ecological geographers”!

7. Plant functional traits in agroecosystems: a blueprint for research. Martin, A.R. and Isaac, M.E. 2015.

Technology is adapting faster to human needs than food production. Compare for example your first cell-phone with your latest one, you will find a large difference particularly in the multi-functionality. However, since the green revolution agriculture has been measured with only one metric, yield, despite the negative impacts at planetary scale of this simplified view of agriculture. Martin and Isaac, in their provocative article highlights the importance of considering agriculture and crops as providers of diverse ecosystem services by selecting crops based on their functional traits. Functional traits is an advanced concept commonly applied in ecology, but that urgently needs to be incorporated into agronomy as the authors call. We invite you to read Martin and Isaac article to challenge how you see and think about agriculture and start contributing to the multi-functional agriculture that we need!

8. Historical dynamics in ecosystem service bundles. Renard, D., Rhemtulla, J.M, and E. Bennett. 2015.

We really liked this paper by Renard et al. because it is one of the first to examine trade-offs and synergies within ES bundles through time - a dimension that is rarely assessed due to the challenges of collating appropriate data. Renard et al. do an extraordinary job of bringing together data on nine ecosystem services from 1971 to 2006 across 131 municipalities in a mixed-use landscape in Quebec, Canada to explore spatio-temporal dynamics of ES bundles. There results show that ES and their bundles are much more variable in time and space that our typical snapshot approach to ES quantification assumes. While most ES increased over the 35 yr timespan by 20-40%, they do so at different rates and shifted spatially through time (only a few ES decreased) to result in more spatial variability by the final time period. Interestingly, they found that subsets of ES can become spatially prioritized across a landscape based on agricultural policy and global market trends - creating and maintaining ES heterogeneity. However, this study also raises questions about using snapshots of ES provision at a single point in time to build our understanding of ES relationships in complex and dynamic social-ecological systems, especially when this knowledge is used as the basis for managing multiple ecosystem services (ES) simultaneously, a key interest of the ESR and WLE group.

9. Have Ecosystem Services Been Oversold? Silvertown, Jonathan. 2015.

This paper provides a critical review of ecosystem services from conception to application and show how this paradigm may have constrained our thinking about conservation and alternative approaches. Ecosystem services have risen rapidly to fame in several research disciplines and this paper provides a useful critique of the pluses and minuses of this rise from a nature conservation perspective. They argue that it would be preferable for biodiversity conservation to use the ecosystem service concept to promote the moral or intrinsic value of nature and move away from monetisation, which risks creating false market values and supporting bad or hidden agendas that may not benefit biodiversity.

10. An integrated approach to understanding the linkages between ecosystem services and human well-being. Yang et al. 2015.

Yang and colleagues go beyond current measures of ecosystem service demand or use to get at the actual impacts of ecosystem services on livelihoods as measured through dependence on ecosystem services and changes in ecosystem services received. We particularly like that they propose an index system of human dependence on ecosystem services, which allows us to start getting at the variation in impact of ecosystem service change on different people, and that they advocate the use of net rather than gross ecosystem benefits to capture both services and disservices of ecosystems. Well worth a read!

Do you have comments on any of the articles that made it to the top 10? Share your thoughts, we’d love to hear them!

Research ThemeEnhancing Sustainable Agriculture

Topics

Ecosystem services

CommentsPost first comment

Breaking down the ecosystem service parlance

j.furtado@cgiar.org — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 06:00:00 +0000

Written by

Pamela Katic

Participatory ranking of ecosystem services helps our project find out what really matters to communities.

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?

Ranking of agroecosystem resources by a women’s focus group in Northern Ghana.

Pamela Katic/IWMI

In a recent project in the North of Ghana, I was tasked with designing a qualitative instrument that can provide information on how ecosystems are affected by irrigation activities in order to complement quantitative data on the linkages between the well-being of communities using irrigation and the local ecosystems they depend on.

I boiled this task down to two questions:

What are the local criteria for human well-being?
Which ecosystem services are recognized and valued by the community?

Rad resource

I approached this challenge by designing focus group discussions with farmers based on the “Participatory Ranking Method”, in which participants identify ecosystem services as products or benefits they derive for their well-being from different resources present in their local agroecosystems (farms, livestock, dams, rivers, forests, scrublands and wildlife).

Later, they rank these “larger” resources from most important to least important rather than ranking all the individual services separately. Since women and youth are involved in different roles in irrigated production, I thought it was better to break the discussion into three groups in each community: adult men, adult women and youth. By using this method, I was able to identify which resources (and their services) are more meaningful to certain groups and locations.

There were some differences in the way communities practicing different types of irrigation perceive the resources available in their local ecosystems. Unsurprisingly, dams were relatively more important in communities with small and large dams. Farms were consistently perceived as the most or second most important in at least one of the three groups (men, women, youth) in every community.

Among sex/age groups, men in most irrigation schemes ranked farms and livestock as the top two resources, suggesting that men consider material wealth more important for their well-being than other aspects such as a clean environment, health or social networks. Generally in the region, male household heads and adult male family members are the sole owners and managers of farm assets (mainly land and livestock) thus being significantly more involved than women and youth in irrigated agriculture. In addition, in most cases, adult men are the ones who use the lands allocated to families by public irrigation schemes. Although there is increased access to land for farming purposes by women and youth, these groups still don’t own land and mostly have to negotiate for contract lands from adult males or authorities of irrigation schemes.

In contrast, water resources were in general considered very important by women in all irrigation schemes. As women are traditionally in charge of household chores, such as cooking, washing and caring for their children, they are much more involved in the fetching and use of water than their male counterparts (as in most parts of Africa). Easy access to good quality water is especially important to women, because it can dramatically reduce their workloads, and free up time for other economic activities. The youth group had a similar ranking to women, with dams or rivers considered the top resource in half of the communities suggesting that women may be playing a critical role in shaping the younger generations’ views on how to manage the local ecosystems they depend on.

Interested in exploring participatory tools, here’s what worked during our implementation:

Start with a participatory ranking of the local criteria for well-being to understand what well-being means for different groups.
To facilitate ranking of agroecosystem resources, I used pictures representing different resources that stimulated discussion and understanding.
Include a presentation by groups at the end of the exercise and an open-ended discussion to contribute to learning and communication among groups.
Make sure the moderator and note-taker change their group they work on across communities.
Ask local evaluation or project teams about cultural practices to consider before a focus group discussion. In Ghana, we started each discussion with a prayer, followed by a re-cap of previous fieldwork activities undertaken by the same project.

Has anyone had experience using participatory tools to understand relationships with ecosystem services in West African communities?

Research ThemeEnhancing Sustainable Agriculture

Topics

Ecosystem services

CommentsRead 1 comments

Science on the Pulse: Top reads from December

j.furtado@cgiar.org — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 03:50:00 +0000

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This post is part of the Science on the Pulse series - a series which highlights the latest literature on ecosystem services and resilience.

Here’s a spin on what caught our eye this month. First, we want to highlight “The Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity Agriculture and Food” (or TEEBAgFood) interim report released at the Global Landscapes Forum in Paris. This report provides an excellent means of assessing the sustainability of agricultural and food systems and the multitude of trade-offs that should be considered in food production systems.

CIAT and partners explore ecosystems trade-offs to benefit both the environment and improve farmer incomes and livelihoods in the Tana River Basin, Kenya.

Georgina Smith/CIAT

From an ecosystem service point of view, what I find the report really calls into question is the logic of classifying agricultural production as an ecosystems service. As a Nepali colleague at ESP commented – “The way we produce food today is an ecosystem disservice, not an ecosystem service!” It also calls to question whether we should be focusing more attention to regulating cultural services in rural landscapes. Congratulations to the TEEBAgFood authors for getting this out, and to the many CGIAR Water Land and Ecosystems colleagues whom contributed!

Climate change is on the agenda. We didn’t start the fire…

The Indonesian peat fires continue to capture headlines in Science and Nature. Susan and Bill Laurance write that peat fire emissions are likely to worsen reaching proportions of global crisis. Combined economic and environmental pressures are likely to worsen the crisis with continued drought conditions and efforts to establish a Council of Palm Oil Producing Countries to force major forest-exploiting corporations to relax their zero-deforestation pledges. We rapidly need combined forest and agricultural policies to tackle this crisis to address conservation, climate and regional health concerns. Wijedasa and colleagues in the same issue highlight the need for continued consumer pressure to tackle the problem including some of the successes of the Singapore Transboundary Haze Pollution Act.

Brazil also made the news in the pages of Science this month with an ambitious proposal to reduce emissions by 43% below 2005 levels (on par with EU targets). However, they note that the situation is worrisome in the Cerrado—the most coveted region for agribusiness expansion—where 80% of the private property can be legally deforested, particularly for soybean production. Deforestation in the Cerrado contributes to 26% of emissions from land-use change and is expected to increase because there remains 40 Mha that could be legally deforested. Additional conservation policies, such as payments for ecosystem services and protected area expansion, are unlikely to curb emissions from deforestation to the levels promised by Brazil.

What’s in it for me?

Bioversity scientist Adam Drucker teams up with others in Midler et al. to “unravel the effect of payments for ecosystem services on motivation for collective action”. Their results, based on an existing initiative to reward Peruvian farmers conserving agricultural biodiversity, suggest that individual rewards outperform collective rewards except where there is strong social cohesion and communication between farmers is encouraged.

Thinking small to see big.

Biodiversity and ecosystem services typically conjure images of bees providing pollinator services – but its very likely that the workhorses of ecosystem services are microbes – particularly in agriculture. Colleagues in the pages of Science call for a Unified Microbiome Initiative (UMI) to “to discover and advance tools to understand and harness the capabilities of Earth's microbial ecosystems”.

The group argues that: “given that nearly every habitat and organism hosts a diverse constellation of microorganisms—its “microbiome”—such knowledge could transform our understanding of the world and launch innovations in agriculture, energy, health, the environment… By manipulating interactions at the root-soil-microbe interface, we may reduce agricultural pesticide, fertilizer, and water use, enrich marginal land and rehabilitate degraded soils.” We’ll be sure to keep an eye on this rapidly evolving domain of microbiology and how we might consider micro-biodiversity in our CGIAR work on Regenerating Degraded Agricultural Ecosystems.

Although in another domain “Feeding the brain and nurturing the mind: Linking nutrition and the gut microbiota to brain development” presented by Goyal et al. in PNAS show the power of the microbiome. They propose that gut microbiome diversity (tens of trillions of organisms!) is a critical component of brain development. They postulate disruption of the assembly of the gut microbiome through malnutrition during the first 2-3 years of post-natal life can lead to persistent cognitive abnormalities including the brain’s default mode network.

There is a lot that soil science might be able to learn from this growing field of the gut microbiome and its approaches by focusing on the metabolic impacts of soil degradation and restoration, to managing soil biodiversity for greater carbon storage.

Africa poised to rescue U.S. Agriculture?

This is not a situation we are accustomed to considering. However, two articles over the past couple of years suggest that US farmers may be switching to more drought tolerant millet and sorghum in the face of growing water shortages. Secondly, a more recent article in CNN explores whether African honeybees may be part of the solution to the pollinator crisis in California, Texas and Florida. These two papers suggest that we might be thinking about “assisted migration” with functional biodiversity (pollinators and drought tolerant species/varieties), similar to conservation approaches of supporting the relocation of species across fragmented landscapes. This will first require a better understanding of species traits, their pairing with agricultural environments, and the functions they provide.

The importance of maintaining connectivity, in an increasingly fragmented current and future world was nicely highlighted in a piece by Mann et al. Here’s a quote from their punch line worth mulling over: “the end of the last ice age was fatally unique because the geographic ranges of arctic mega-fauna became permanently fragmented after stable, interglacial climate engendered the spread of peatlands at the same time that rising sea level severed former dispersal routes”. We’d argue that maintaining connectivity is more important than ever as agriculture continues to dice up our landscapes. We’ll be pushing our colleagues at NatCap to help us add a connectivity model in the next iteration of MESH – see the section below on Bridges and Barriers for other applications).

Oh spare me, not this old this argument again!

A fascinating paper in Nature by Mauser and colleagues suggested that “global biomass production potentials exceed expected future demand without the need for cropland expansion”. Mauser et al. results indicate that it is feasible to meet global food security needs by improving farm management with increased cropping intensity and more annual harvests where feasible accompanied with an economically more efficient spatial allocation of crops to maximize farmers’ profit.

Although it is a valid academic exercise, it is not clear that this path will help us to solve the global challenges we currently face. For example, the focus on high-energy crops suggests that we may all be fat and sassy in 2050, but potentially severely undernourished. There is no mention of fruit, nut, and vegetable production which Chris Murray of the University of Washington suggests needs to increase by 44-68% to meet the “low risk diet” needs of today’s population, let alone the 9 billion. Mauser’s study is loosely grounded in a land-sparing framework, It would be also fascinating to repeat Mauser’s study with variable proportions of croplands set aside for conservation – i.e. 10, 20, 30% out of agriculture production for habitat, connectivity, pollination, pest control and stream buffers, or land sharing scenarios to see how the numbers change.

Last week in Paris, at the recent Global Landscapes Forum, Patrick Holden of the Sustainable Food Trust begged that we put this nonsensical land-sharing/land-sparing debate to rest – “sharing” is the only option for achieving sustainability and moving away from the notion that we can sustainably feed 9 billion, mitigate climate change, ensure access to clean water, and protect biodiversity with a land-sparing approach. I agree, let’s put that baby to bed.

Time for ecosystem services.

We’re rapidly increasing in our capacity to assess multiple ecosystem services, however, the time dimension is rarely included in such assessments. In PNAS, Renard, Rhemtulla, and Bennett provide us with one first analysis looking at the “historical dynamics of ecosystem service bundles”. By going back to 1971 and considering nine specific ecosystem services, they demonstrate clear evidence of the dynamic nature of ecosystem service interactions and identify the processes and drivers behind changing relationships between services.

Bioversity scientist Sylvia Wood, also working with Rhemtulla, published in this month’s issue of Agriculture, Ecosystems and the Environment on “trading off ecosystem services for economic gain in shifting cultivation landscapes”. They found that enriched fallows (or orchards) in the Amazon provide equivalent levels of 5 ecosystem services as traditional fallow forests, but with reduced habitat values. The economic gains of these orchards remained relatively low however, begging the question of their capacity to transition communities out of poverty, and collective impacts on forest conservation.

Variety is the spice of life – and may enlarge safe operating space.

This paper by Carpenter et al. published in PNAS merits some mulling over. The take home message offered by the co-authors is that actions that reduce variance in the provision of an ecosystem service over the short-term increases long-term fragility increasing the risk of surpassing important ecosystem thresholds. Decreased variability drives ecosystem fragility by changing boundaries, cancelling signals of decreased resilience, and removing pressures that may build tolerance to stress.

Bridges and Barriers

The notion of “bridges and barriers”, that is, whether conservation interventions that foster connectivity for wild biodiversity, can serve as barriers for agricultural pests is an interesting example of integrated landscape management. Bouyer and colleagues from CIRAD published really cool work in PNAS for establishing the landscape friction for the tsetse fly. Friction is a measure of how difficult it is for a species to move through a landscape. The approach they present provides a useful landscape tool for informing choice on the most appropriate intervention strategies to be implemented against pest species and also be used to support conservation of endangered species. One of our own studies in Costa Rica is also looking at “bridges and barriers” to the coffee berry borer.

Research ThemeEnhancing Sustainable Agriculture

Solutions

Landscape Restoration

Topics

Ecosystem services

CommentsPost first comment

Science on the Pulse: Top reads from November

j.furtado@cgiar.org — Tue, 10 Nov 2015 09:09:00 +0000

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This post is part of the Science on the Pulse series - a quarterly review highlighting the latest literature on ecosystem services and resilience.

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?

We continue to be interested in how biodiversity contributes to the provisioning of multiple ecosystem services - and note continued novel research in this domain throughout the literature. One of the challenges of interdisciplinary work is in assessing the synergies and trade-offs of multiple functions. Several studies have demonstrated that the importance of diversity increases with the number of functions sought from a system - we therefore suspect that there are some important relationships between landscape diversity and multifunctionality- but are not there yet with the methods and analysis.

Maize is a staple crop for many across the world. One PNAS study is taking a look at the utilization of bats in reducing pests amongst maize fields.

CIMMYT

Dooley and colleagues made efforts to advance methods and understanding in this field with their recent publication in Ecology Letters testing of the effects of diversity in multi-functionality using a multivariate model which found support for the diversity/multi-functionality hypothesis - their framework and methods will certainly be of interest to those of working to test these ideas in agricultural systems and landscapes.

Focusing on a singular ecological function, some of the notable highlights including work by Josiah and colleagues in PNAS on the impact of bats on reducing pests in maize fields. There has been lots of innovative work on bats in coffee and cacao systems, but what really caught our eye here are bats and maize - this is not where we might have first thought to look for bat provided agroecosystem services!

Not only did Josiah’s bats suppress insect pests, but they also apparently suppressed several fungal pathogens and aflatoxins associated with those pests. With more than $1 billion in services provided by bats to maize fields annually, it may be time to see these eerie-creatures of the night as helpful neighbours and start to invest in habitat, or a least in bat boxes. We’ll take this opportunity to briefly flag an interesting piece by Offenberg reviewing “ants as tools in sustainable agriculture” in the journal of Applied Ecology.

Ask not what biodiversity can do for you, but what you can do for biodiversity.

We do tend to focus on the functional side of biodiversity in agricultural systems, but it’s also good to recognize agriculture’s impacts on biodiversity. Perrings and Halkos in IOP conduct a much needed study of the impact of agricultural expansion versus intensification on SubSaharan biodiversity. Their results show agricultural extensification is associated with increasing threats to biodiversity at all time scales, whereas intensification drove a significant reduction in threat across long time scales.

Of course one of the founding ideas of biodiversity and ecosystem service research is that biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provisioning are linked. Agricultural expansion driving forest fragmentation and loss has obvious impacts on habitat conversion, but Bregman and colleagues also demonstrate that fragmentation impacts the species interactions that regulate the collapse of biodiversity and the services it provides, particularly seed dispersal and pest control within agricultural landscapes.

When we see papers about the influence of climate change on natural vegetation patterns, its forces us to ask how agriculture can positively respond to such changes. A hypothesis that is never far from the back of our minds is that efforts to make agriculture more sustainable become more expensive/challenging the further an agricultural system departs from its baseline natural system position. But what happens when this baseline shifts?

A paper by Gherardia and Sala in PNAS caught our attention here in demonstrating that increasing precipitation variability, which is a condition many CGIAR farmers are faced with, drives a transition from grassland to shrubland vegetation. Changes in precipitation variability decreased grassland productivity by 81%, but increased shrubland productivity by 67%.

This begs the question as to which crops may become the most suitable for rainfed systems under shifting climate regimes, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, Panagos and colleagues take a breather to consider the impact of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy on soil conservation using RUSLE2015. Many of our team members are familiar with USLE/RUSLE as a core element of the NatCap InVEST toolkit for targeting ecosystem service based interventions.

Panagos and friends show that over the past decade, the European guidelines for soil protection have reduced soil loss rate by 9.5% on average in Europe. Still a way to go, but good signs of progress - slow and steady wins the race. We’d love to see a similar study for Africa, maybe by having Pagnos team up with Kaptue’s work mentioned below.

Why do we need an eye in the sky?

So how do we apply what we know about biodiversity to help solve practical challenges in ecosystem service management? Well, a good starting point is finding ways to measure and monitor change in biodiversity-related variables. Many of our readers will be aware of the challenges of measuring the impact of biodiversity and ecosystem service change over large areas and long time scales, particularly the case in fast paced global environment where band-aid solutions seem to be drowning out the value of long term visions and approaches to sustainability.

Biodiversity itself is a tricky subject, with plenty of debate (and misconceptions) as to what it is, and how to measure it. Petrou and colleagues provide a handy synthesis of the capacity of different satellite sensors to track biodiversity variables for monitoring progress towards the 2020 Aichi targets, showing that freely available data can now be used to track changes in 12 headline indicators. Progress in using remote sensing technologies in ecosystem science continues to grow and we think these approaches will be increasingly important as countries seek methods to meet monitoring requirements for the SDGs. For example, Kaptue and colleagues in PNAS detect regional greening trends in sub-Saharan Africa despite regional differences in the extent and direction of change. Their work and methods sound quite promising both for assessing the impact of large scale interventions over time, but more importantly for targeting degradation hotspots where restoration is most needed.

Finally, in case you missed it.

Because we’re embarrassed to say that we sure did - PNAS dedicated its 100th anniversary issue to Natural Cap ital. This is a great issue with twelve specific papers from the ecosystem service research community on ecosystems services and natural capital.

See the core concept section by Amy West on “Ecosystem Services” which is open access and gives a nice one page synopsis of the state of the art. The articles including in the special issue span a broad range of tropics on ecosystem services - however the main thread that we found of interest the movement from “promise to practice” and growing evidence of ecosystem services and natural capital making their way into the private sector, and legislative planning.

We’re pleased that PNAS chose a topic so near and dear to our hearts to celebrate its 100th year and wholeheartedly support to need for ecosystem service research to become practical.

Research ThemeEnhancing Sustainable Agriculture

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Ecosystem services

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Science on the Pulse: At the intersection of biodiversity, environmental and human health

j.furtado@cgiar.org — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 10:19:00 +0000

Written by

Fabrice DeClerck

This post is part of the “Science on the Pulse” series - a two-part quarterly review highlighting the latest literature on ecosystem services and resilience.

You are what you eat.

We’ve been engaging increasingly with the health sector to explore the relationship between biodiversity, environmental health and human well-being – particularly through our collaboration on multifunctional landscapes with EAT. Stay tuned for this CIAT-hosted EAT x event occurring on October 30th which features a Latin American Perspective on food, health, and the environment. It’s a fascinating realm with plenty of new and exciting ideas.

Human health and landscapes: Mozambicans introduce sweet potato into their diets

Mann/ ILRI

Bioversity is currently engaged in a debate on the role of biodiversity and dietary diversity on human nutrition in small-holder production systems.

Some work we noted on this front includes a new “global biogeography of human infectious diseases” published in PNAS. What surprised the researchers was that despite significant trends in globalization, disease distribution remains largely biogeographical, with strong indicators of ecological barriers limiting the spread of diseases globally. There’s room here for much more process-based work on landscape change and connectivity of disease spread which we feel would be of great relevance to (and collaboration between) agricultural pests and diseases, in conjunction with human ones.

Another aspect of the human-environmental health relationship that we have been analyzing is the influence of dietary diversity on human health and its effect on feedbacks to agricultural systems, landscape diversity and multifunctionality. This current debate on dietary guidelines is well described by Merrigan and colleagues in this Policy Forum piece on “Designing a sustainable diet”.

The article draws attention to the potentially powerful force that including aspects of sustainable food production in dietary guidelines could play in aiding agricultural policy. For example, should a dietary guideline make recommendations on reducing red meat intake for both a human health (reducing coronary heart disease), as well as environmental health (methane emissions and deforestation) perspective? As we said above, the increased presence of the health sector in agricultural and environmental policy is shaking things up, and it’s getting interesting.

Well I’ll be dammed!

On environmental health, we flag the work of our colleague Matthew McCartney of IWMI considering the impact of dam construction on malarial vectors as an area of interest as well. The study finds that there are at least 1.1 million cases of malaria that are associated with communities located in proximity of large dams. We’re working with NatCap to include a malaria model in InVest - let us know if there are any avenues you think we need to pursue on this front.

Negative impacts of land use on water quality, and associated human health problems through direct consumption or contamination of the food chain, can be reduced or averted by ecosystem filtration and retention of pollutants. Riparian buffers seem to be the darling of environmental interventions in this respect, highlighted for the plethora of benefits that they can provide, and prevalent in many national policies. They were highlighted in several research articles recently, improving our capacity to make statements as to their contribution in providing multiple ecosystem services and conservation functions.

For example Connolly et al. indicate that while nitrogen contamination can be mitigated by reducing fertilizer use, and that NOx concentration increases in proportion to the upstream agricultural area, riparian buffers were able to provide some buffering, though not enough to meet water quality guidelines. Changes in agricultural practices need to accompany buffer vegetation to achieve desired impacts on water quality.

Cole et al. focused on the insects found in riparian buffers rather than on water and found that riparian margins were effective at supporting greater pollinator abundance than in adjacent grasslands. The width of the buffer increased pollinator abundance as well. Also see one more riparian buffer case from Giam et al. who published in Conservation Biology on the role of riparian buffers in mitigating the impacts of oil palm monocultures in freshwater fish in Southeast Asia. This team again found that maintaining such buffers rather effectively mitigated the loss of freshwater fish diversity in the absence of buffers.

Something is in the air, quite literally.

While we often focus on the impact of agriculture on water quality - its impact on air quality is what has been drawing attention in both the press and the research literature.

Lelieveld and colleagues published a global assessment of the contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality in the September 17 issue of Nature. They highlight that poor air quality leads to more than 3.3 million premature deaths globally. Agriculture plays a surprisingly large role here and is the biggest source of outdoor air quality related premature deaths in China, Russia, the United States and Europe.

The authors explain that these high numbers come from the NH3 emissions from fertilizer use and domesticated animals. NH3 impacts air quality through several multiphase pathways, through the authors specifically highlight how NH3 is often limiting in particulate matter formation, and thus a reduction in NH3 use could make an important contribution to air quality. The study includes a category on biomass burning, which when looking at the map appears to be closely related to forest clearing in the Amazon and Congo basins. Biomass burning accounts for 5% of the premature mortality globally and is particularly high in Indonesia (27%).

Is health policy a driver of change in agricultural practices?

Our own research with the The Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity for Agriculture and Food (TEEBAgFood) focusing on California rice production systems highlighted how the air quality concerns over rice straw burning in the Central Valley of California forced a burning ban and a shift to winter flooding as a means of eliminating rice straw. It’s a nice demonstration of the influence of human health on agricultural practices. The California story ends well, the shift in practices converted many rice fields to rich wetlands over the winter - Cal Rice now provides nearly half of the wetland habitat for the state and farmers are quite proud of it. For those whose imagine of California as a desert landscape, we’ll highlight that pre-European colonization, California’s Central valley was a vast wetland ecosystem with the largest lake west of the Mississippi.

The California work causes us to reflect on news from Indonesia of agricultural fires forcing the evacuation of infants from impacted areas, and the multi-day closure of airports. This news begs the question whether as in California, health policy might be the driving force to changing agricultural practices in the region away from burning and on how agricultural and environmental research can team up with health policy to provide sustainable solutions.

Solutions

Resilience

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Ecosystem services

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Sustainable Intensification: let’s refine industrial farming instead of abandoning it

awaldorf — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 08:54:00 +0000

This post is written in response to: Sustainable intensification of agriculture: oxymoron or real deal?

Most evidence points to conventional, intensive farming as a better option for the environment than more extensive or organic systems, and it has been getting better over time.

Few other human activities have caused so much environmental harm as agriculture in the last half century. Farming is major contributor to habitat loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and eutrophication, as well as freshwater depletion and soil erosion. Against this background of increasing environmental impacts from food production, calls are being made to shift to an alternative paradigm: sustainable intensification.

Sustainable, that is, in contrast to the assumed unsustainability of today’s farming, dominated by intensive, industrial systems. But in terms of environmental impacts per unit of food produced - the fairest way to evaluate farming itself, separate from trends in population or diets - agriculture has for the most part gotten better, not worse, over time.

Modernization of agriculture

USDA/Bob Nichols

Intensification reduces habitat loss

The most devastating impact of food production on the natural world is the habitat loss that results from expanding farmland area. The way farmers can mitigate this, given a certain level of food demand, is by producing more food on less land. In this respect, intensification over the last few decades has been an enormous success.

Farmers today produce three times as much crops using only 13% more land than about 50 years ago. The area of pasture has gone up by only 9% in the same time period. In fact, the global farmland area has remained stable since the mid 1990s, in spite of the global population growing by more than 20% and GDP per capita nearly doubling.

Granted, intensification has also caused loss of biodiversity on existing farmland. Populations of many European farmland birds, for instance, have declined markedly. Yet at a global level, it is likely that more biodiversity has been saved by avoided area expansion, than has been lost on farmland as a result of intensification. In this sense, global yield improvements have been a boon for the environment.

High input systems yield net positive for the environment

These yield improvements would not have been possible without vastly increased energy inputs in the form of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and machinery. Most of this energy has come from fossil fuels, thus contributing to climate change.

Modern farming actually uses more energy per unit of crop output than traditional systems. Yet the increasing amounts of carbon emitted from farming operations has been more than offset by the greenhouse gas emissions that have been saved through avoided deforestation. For this reason, intensification has led to lower net greenhouse gas emissions compared to a scenario without intensification, according to a study by Jennifer Burney et al.

When it comes to fertilizers and the harm they cause through eutrophication and coastal dead zones, the picture is more mixed at a global level. At early stages of their development, countries tend to apply nitrogen fertilizer very liberally, leading to more pollution. But beyond a certain point, countries have historically curbed this trend, and moved towards increasingly nitrogen-efficient farming.

The amount of nitrogen pollution per unit of crop output in the United States peaked in the early 1970s, and has declined by about one-third since then. Similar trends have been observed across other developed regions, including Europe. What is more, richer countries with higher yields consistently cause less nitrogen pollution per unit output than regions with lower yields. Crop yields in OECD countries are 70% higher than in non-OECD countries, with only 54% greater nitrogen inputs.

There is also evidence to suggest that higher-yield systems cause less soil erosion than low-yield systems, at a global level. One study estimated that rates of soil loss are more than twice as high in developing countries than in developed countries. This may be due to the fact that farming often takes place on more marginal land in developing countries, and the increasing adoption of conservation and no-till methods in developed regions.

In terms of meat production, intensive systems on average tend to have lower environmental impacts per unit of output than their less productive counterparts. The most productive livestock system in North America uses twenty times less land than the most productive system in Sub-Saharan Africa to produce the same amount of beef.

Feedlot systems in the United States use 45% less land, and have 51% lower nitrogen and phosphorous emissions and 40% lower greenhouse gas emissions per unit of beef than grass-fed systems. Meat production has also become more efficient, and thus less damaging to the environment, over time. For instance, the amount of feed required to produce a pound of beef in the US declined by 19% between 1977 and 2007.

Conventional farming gets better over time

Even when comparing conventional with organic farming within developed countries, the more intensive, conventional systems are often superior from an environmental perspective. Organic farming on average requires at least 20% more land to produce a given amount of food, while generating similar or higher levels of nitrogen pollution. As organic farming scales up, it appears to lose its advantage over conventional farming in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

In sum, most evidence points to conventional, intensive farming as a better option for the environment than more extensive or organic systems, and it has been getting better over time.

But it is far from perfect. To accelerate the positive trends that have been emerging, precision farming should be spread more widely in developed countries, so that fertilizer, pesticides, and water inputs can be minimized in relation to yields. It also means spreading modern agricultural technologies like fertilizers, irrigation, and machinery in developing countries, so that their yields can keep pace with population growth and changing diets. Along with intensification, landscape-level conservation planning can help ensure that agricultural production takes place, as far as possible, on already cleared land, and that the most biologically rich areas are protected.

Industrial farming will not be appropriate in every context. Communities may choose to dedicate some of their land to organic practices, or farming methods that preserve a cultural landscape. In some regions, less intensive farming supports threatened species of birds and other wildlife. There will continue to exist demand for grass-fed beef.

Yet on a planet of seven going on nine or ten billion increasingly wealthy people, producing more food while minimizing environmental impacts will for the most part be a story of refining, rather than abandoning, industrial farming.

Let us know what you think of the Ecomodernist Manifesto in the comments section below.

Download the newly released Ecomodernist Manifesto
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A Thrive Debate: Organic versus non-organic agriculture

Written by

Linus Blomqvist

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From Trees to Taps

wle_admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 07:01:00 +0000

Written by

Charles Oluchina

This post is written in response to Water Funds: Priming the corporate pump? by Fred Pearce

A Public-Private Partnership for Sustainable Source Water Conservation

Standstill traffic jams are a daily occurrence now in Nairobi. My hometown’s population has more than tripled in the last 25 years and the infrastructure has not been able to keep pace with this rapid growth. While the number of cars on the road is a clear indicator of this imbalance, the bigger problem is that at least 60 percent of Nairobi’s residents do not have access to a consistent, reliable water supply.

Water affects everything and everyone, and in ways that might not be obvious at first glance. For example, very few schools in Nairobi have access to tap water. Sometimes when the schools don’t have water, the students just don’t show up. What does that mean for the economic future of the city?

The Upper Tana-Nairobi Water Fund is our vision for a healthy watershed that can improve the quantity and quality of water for the Nairobi area’s 9 million residents.

What Is a Water Fund?

Water funds are founded on the principle that it is more effective to prevent water problems at the source than it is to address them further downstream. In short: Water consumers and donors downstream contribute to support watershed management, farming systems improvement and appropriate infrastructure development upstream in the Upper Tana watershed, resulting in improved water quality and supply.

The Upper-Tana Nairobi Water Fund was officially “launched” at an event in Nairobi this March. The successful event was the culmination of more than two years of work, including conducting scientific studies on hydrological status, developing economic studies, meeting with hundreds of landowners and working to secure $10 million in capital investment.

Standing in front of a large audience of stakeholders, partners and journalists, I felt the wind in my sails. It almost felt like the hard part was over. But in reality, we are just at the beginning of our journey toward creating a sustainable water balance.

And the future of Nairobi depends on it.

Who Is Helping?

Since this is a problem that affects everyone, it’s important that everyone be part of the solution. The Upper Tana-Nairobi Water Fund is the first public-private partnership of its kind in Africa, and it brings together like-minded public, private and civil society entities. It’s completely Kenyan-owned and Kenyan-driven.

Engaging water users upstream and downstream is crucial to the success of a water fund. The upstream communities are the land managers and custodians of the watershed who depend on its functioning for their sustenance.

Our partners, like the Kenya Farmers Federation and the Green Belt Movement, are working side-by-side with 5,000 farmers in the Upper Tana watershed, with a target of 17,000. We are advancing an ambitious land treatment and water system management plan based on a ridge-to-ridge land and riparian system restoration framework in target watersheds. Conservation measures included in this framework include land terracing for reduced sedimentation runoff and planting up to 100,000 new trees.

Many of these land owners are already benefitting from improved land management techniques, improved technology and improved productivity. The Fund will eventually include a component of payment for the ecosystem services their land provides.

Downstream users, on the other hand, understand that their operations and businesses are entirely dependent on a reliable, clean water supply. Their contributions to conservation of the watershed will not only help their bottom line, but it will benefit all other water users as well.

What’s Next?

Now that we have paved the way, we must lay the foundation.

Our immediate next steps include:

Facilitate the registration of the independent water fund entity and put into place a management structure
Development of a strategy to execute our ambitious agenda
Raise both public and private capital for immediate needs and for the long-term endowment of the fund.

Our work is far from done. At a time when water is more expensive than fuel for the majority; when more valuable topsoil is washed away in Noachian proportions; and when available science predicts radical shifts in climate, there is little scope left for debate and conjecture.

This situation calls for strategic and evidence-based actions that connect people, nature and the economy at a transformative scale. The Water Fund presents a platform for participatory and forward-leaning source water conservation investment and is predicated on partnership, innovative mobilization of domestic and global capital and accountability.

The Upper Tana-Nairobi Water Fund is a vision for a green belt of green infrastructure across this important watershed over the next 30 years. Maybe then I can stand in front of an audience of fellow Kenyans and truly breathe a sigh of relief.

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East Africa

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Productivity

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From Trees to Taps

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