East African Learning Landscape Regional Knowledge Exchange

Editor's Notes

• #2: I founded EcoAgriculture Partners in 2002 as a coalition housed within the organization Forest Trends, for whom I then worked, because we looked at the places where deforestation and biodiversity loss were happening fastest, and looked at the places where people were most reliant on agriculture for their incomes, and were most struggling to make ends meet, and saw that these places were the same places. We can’t address biodiversity loss, or ecosystem degradation, or environmental collapse, or whatever you want to call it, without addressing how we do agriculture and rural development. So for more than a decade now, EcoAgriculture Partners has focused on helping local communities manage their own landscapes to accomplish both goals, writ large. Healthy environment and improved local livelihoods through agriculture. What we came to call Landscapes for People, Food and Nature.
• #3: There are a lot of terms to keep track of in the ever more vociferous and contentious food and agriculture debate. It is a great thing that regular people, consumers, eaters, are demanding more from their food system besides ever-present cheap calories, and so are keeping a very watchful eye on the corporations who have profited most from a system designed to deliver those cheap calories at high environmental cost. Costs that have been largely born by the workers, the farm communities, and our fellow species, rather than by the corporations responsible. And so it is critical that new “industry buzzwords” be discussed openly and approached skeptically. Such has been the recent response to the widespread appearance of the term “Climate-Smart Agriculture,” bandied about recently by no less important personages than President Obama and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim. There is even a US-supported Global Climate-Smart Agriculture Alliance, for which I sit on the steering committee.
• #4: This project takes place under a larger initiative known as the landscapes for people, food and nature initiative
• #5: This project takes place under a larger initiative known as the landscapes for people, food and nature initiative
• #7: The effects of climate change on agricultural yields, on average, is difficult to model, as there are many variables to consider and scientists differ in their estimation of each’s relative importance to yields. Of course, agriculture is a highly local endeavor, and impacts, both positive and negative, from a warming climate, increased atmospheric Carbon Dioxide levels, shifting weather patterns, severe weather events, and other climate change driven factors will not be evenly distributed. One recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that: “Weather events at the equator will become more extreme with 2C of warming, meaning tropical countries already dealing with frail infrastructure and poverty will experience more than 50 times as many extremely hot days and 2.5 times as many rainy ones.” Preparing agriculture to deal with climate change, to take advantage of positive effects and survive the worst, is called adaptation. Of course, the lack of scientific consensus about the impacts of climate change on agriculture has hampered investment to prepare communities for potential impacts. Meanwhile, many agricultural areas are already being hit hard by climate change impacts; just look at the Drought in California, or the devastating storms and flooding in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
• #8: This project takes place under a larger initiative known as the landscapes for people, food and nature initiative
• #15: Krista, can you add dots for the Kenyan landscapes?