We are nearing 8 billion people on Earth, and each one of us needs nourishment. This ever-increasing imperative for human sustenance requires space, leaving less resources and land available solely for biodiversity. Conservation efforts often push back, creating conflicts between food security and biodiversity conservation. If we are to feed the human population and avoid further species extinction and ecosystem collapse, both activities must coexist in the same space. Studying food security and biodiversity in tandem requires integrating disciplines that might traditionally not have been associated with one another. In this sense, biocultural approaches (combination of inter- and transdisciplinary sciences) might be the best bet to effectively merge food and biodiversity goals in shared landscapes.
Research into the conflict/coexistence duality in multi-use landscapes draws heavily from ecological disciplines when studying human-wildlife interactions which generate biodiversity impacts. This has enabled understanding how nature impacts people’s livelihoods and vice versa. Social disciplines allow dissecting the human-human interactions that can lead to biodiversity conflicts when interests misalign or oppose each other. However, agroecological landscapes are social-ecological systems, thus research now needs to apply both types of disciplines in the same landscape, especially if food security is affected by biodiversity. Biocultural approaches should aim to address conflicts resulting from anything that prevention and compensation of impacts (i.e., livestock predation, crop damage, economic solvency) cannot handle, unrealized food security being one of them.
We are interested in papers that try to understand the relation between food security and biodiversity conservation and how to generate landscapes where both goals coexist. Such papers should include multiple disciplines to show how they can interact and think about the way biocultural approaches can provide different new outlooks on the food-biodiversity coexistence conundrum. We are interested in social-ecological systems where landscapes are multi-use, i.e., contain areas meant to produce food and conserve biodiversity, and particularly interested if such goals are meant to be fulfilled in the same space, such as in land-sharing strategies. Opinion pieces, conceptual developments and in-field case studies are all welcome.
We are nearing 8 billion people on Earth, and each one of us needs nourishment. This ever-increasing imperative for human sustenance requires space, leaving less resources and land available solely for biodiversity. Conservation efforts often push back, creating conflicts between food security and biodiversity conservation. If we are to feed the human population and avoid further species extinction and ecosystem collapse, both activities must coexist in the same space. Studying food security and biodiversity in tandem requires integrating disciplines that might traditionally not have been associated with one another. In this sense, biocultural approaches (combination of inter- and transdisciplinary sciences) might be the best bet to effectively merge food and biodiversity goals in shared landscapes.
Research into the conflict/coexistence duality in multi-use landscapes draws heavily from ecological disciplines when studying human-wildlife interactions which generate biodiversity impacts. This has enabled understanding how nature impacts people’s livelihoods and vice versa. Social disciplines allow dissecting the human-human interactions that can lead to biodiversity conflicts when interests misalign or oppose each other. However, agroecological landscapes are social-ecological systems, thus research now needs to apply both types of disciplines in the same landscape, especially if food security is affected by biodiversity. Biocultural approaches should aim to address conflicts resulting from anything that prevention and compensation of impacts (i.e., livestock predation, crop damage, economic solvency) cannot handle, unrealized food security being one of them.
We are interested in papers that try to understand the relation between food security and biodiversity conservation and how to generate landscapes where both goals coexist. Such papers should include multiple disciplines to show how they can interact and think about the way biocultural approaches can provide different new outlooks on the food-biodiversity coexistence conundrum. We are interested in social-ecological systems where landscapes are multi-use, i.e., contain areas meant to produce food and conserve biodiversity, and particularly interested if such goals are meant to be fulfilled in the same space, such as in land-sharing strategies. Opinion pieces, conceptual developments and in-field case studies are all welcome.