Reinventing agriculture to harmonize people and nature

Background/Question/Methods

The future of agriculture will shape the well-being of both people and nature in far-reaching ways.  I will explore and synthesize work in three arenas, in which promising initiatives are underway to secure biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human livelihoods.  The first is in the policy realm, where new policy and finance mechanisms are being deployed to secure natural capital and promote human development.  The second arena is at the science-policy interface, where new decision-support tools and approaches are being tested that interrelate the status of ecosystems (and their biodiversity and services) and the status of human communities, to inform joint investments in both.  And the third is in the science realm, where critical questions concern whether, how efficiently, and at what scales multifunctional landscapes can reduce or break the tradeoffs between biodiversity and ecosystem services, and among provisioning and other services. 

Results/Conclusions

I will illustrate these three arenas with cases spanning local to continental scales:  in Hawai’i (land-use planning for food and energy security and to support native Hawaiian values); in Latin America (watershed management to secure water supplies in the face of development pressures and climate change); and China (a new reserve system to secure a broad suite of ecosystem services and promote human development).  While tremendous advances are being made, the challenge is to scale them up and to integrate ecological science into them in meaningful ways.