International Landscapes for People, Food and Nature – An international effort to scale up sustainable rural development

Our current food, forest and wetland production systems are at risk and there is doubt about their capacity to feed the increasing global population or the growing number of people that are already hungry and malnourished.

Land and water are becoming scarce, some 75% of crop diversity has been lost from farmers fields since the 1990s and climatic changes are starting to adversely affect our ability to grow food successfully.

All this signifies an urgent need for a paradigm shift in agricultural approaches.

Finding ways to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services, improve livelihoods, and feed the world while helping to address climate change, is a tall order. But the good news is that there are already many innovative small-scale farmers, policymakers, food companies, conservation agencies and grassroots organizations, that are out in the field doing just that, albeit with little support and recognition from policy makers and investors.

A new 3 year initiative – International Landscapes for People, Food and Nature - will build on these successful innovations to support new scaled-up sustainable landscape management approaches in over 60 biodiversity hotspots around the world. Bioversity International is one of the co-organizers of this international collaborative effort.  

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