Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A plea for multifunctional landscapes

2017; Wiley; Volume: 15; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/fee.1464

1540-9309

Joern Fischer, Megan Meacham, Cibele Queiroz,

Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management

There is a growing consensus among ecologists and resource managers that we need smarter landscapemanagement through “sustainable intensification”. After all – or so the rhetoric goes – we have a growing population to feed, and more efficient production is an inevitable necessity. Increased food production is sold as a panacea for reducing hunger and providing for the world's burgeoning population. But this argument ignores the fact that the vast majority of food-insecure people are constrained by insufficient access to food, not by its lack of availability. There is a real risk that the ever-more-efficient production of global commodity crops will simply exacerbate trends of increasing obesity and inequity, while doing little to help those who are food insecure. Other strategies for improving food security are probably far more important, including reducing poverty, increasing equity, and supporting healthy diets. Moreover, optimizing landscapes for more efficient production without carefully considering the potential side effects can seriously erode landscape multifunctionality, giving rise to negative ecological and social consequences. The ecological value of landscape multifunctionality is controversial. Advocates of “land sparing” favor the separation of landscapes into two “monofunctional” entities – one optimized for agricultural production and one for biodiversity conservation. While calls for land sparing are particularly strong in frontier cultures, regions with long histories of agricultural land use often favor “land sharing” – the integration of agriculture and conservation within multifunctional landscapes. For example, multifunctionality has been enshrined in the European Union's (EU's) Biodiversity Strategy and in Japan's National Strategy for Biological Diversity. But ecological outcomes aside, there is an unrecognized social dimension to landscape multifunctionality. During our collaborations with researchers from PECS (Program on Ecosystem Change and Society), we repeatedly noted that it is not just which benefits are generated that make multifunctional landscapes interesting, but also who receives them. Based on those observations, we argue that typically, in multifunctional landscapes, a more diverse set of ecosystem services is accessible to a broader range of beneficiaries. Furthermore, the benefits flowing from ecosystem services are usually experienced more locally, and local people are more likely to be in charge of landscape management. Take the case of southern Transylvania in Romania. Here, important ecosystem services include not only healthy soils, clean drinking water, firewood, and crops for local markets, but also scenic beauty and sense of place (Loos et al. 2016; ISBN 978-954-642-809-7; Sofia, Bulgaria: Pensoft). Most of these services directly benefit local people. Firewood and drinking water, for instance, are essential goods for many households. Many local people are also closely connected to the natural environment, because they engage in semi-subsistence farming (sometimes in addition to other work), have large vegetable gardens, or obtain much of their food from local sources. Until now, outside involvement in southern Transylvania has been limited, and most of the land-use decision makers actually lived within the region. However, as the influences of joining the EU are becoming more noticeable, that is changing. This contrasts starkly with more monofunctional landscapes that are optimized for crop production. In these situations, few people are involved, and the benefits flow to a small set of privileged actors, or are exported. What's more, local people living in such landscapes tend to import goods generated by ecosystems elsewhere – monofunctional landscapes thus reinforce a growing disconnect between people, local ecosystem services, and the landscapes where these services are produced. The US Midwest is a good example. Over the past two decades, biofuel projects were promoted in the region by agribusiness and the government, with both entities claiming that these projects would provide employment, help reverse rural depopulation, and generate biofuel. However, findings from six communities in rural Kansas and Iowa highlight how the benefits of biofuel production to local livelihoods have been minimal, with depopulation continuing as before. Yet monoculture cropping has led to cases of environmental degradation, including reduced water quality (Kulscar et al. 2016; J Rural Studies 47: 291–99). Landscape multifunctionality is not only an issue of which ecosystem services are being generated, but also one of who benefits from these services. Of course, not all landscapes need to be multifunctional. But the growing obsession with increasing the efficiency of agricultural landscapes needs to be seriously questioned for social as well as ecological reasons. Producing crops is a means to an end. Meaningful ends in their own right – such as human well-being, equity, sustainability, or biodiversity – must not be compromised by subscribing to a rhetoric that blindly asserts that more is always better. Oftentimes, a little bit of everything might be just what the world needs. Joern Fischer Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany Megan Meacham Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Cibele Queiroz Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden