No abstract

Addressing the global challenges of climate change, food security, and poverty alleviation requires enhancing the adaptive capacity and mitigation potential of agricultural landscapes across the tropics. However, adaptation and mitigation activities tend to be approached separately due to a variety of technical, political, financial, and socioeconomic constraints. Here, we demonstrate that many tropical agricultural systems can provide both mitigation and adaptation benefits if they are designed and managed appropriately and if the larger landscape context is considered. Many of the activities needed for adaptation and mitigation in tropical agricultural landscapes are the same needed for sustainable agriculture more generally, but thinking at the landscape scale opens a new dimension for achieving synergies. Intentional integration of adaptation and mitigation activities in agricultural landscapes offers significant benefits that go beyond the scope of climate change to food security, biodiversity conservation, and poverty alleviation. However, achieving these objectives will require transformative changes in current policies, institutional arrangements, and funding mechanisms to foster broad-scale adoption of climate-smart approaches in agricultural landscapes.

No abstract

ABSTRACT. The terms "landscape" and "landscape approach" have been increasingly applied within the international environmental realm, with many international organizations and nongovernmental organizations using landscapes as an area of focus for addressing multiple objectives, usually related to both environmental and social goals. However, despite a wealth of literature on landscapes and landscape approaches, ideas relating to landscape approaches are diverse and often vague, resulting in ambiguous use of the terms. Our aim, therefore, was to examine some of the main characteristics of different landscape approaches, focusing on how these might be applied in the process of taking a landscape approach. Drawing on a review of the literature, we identify and discuss three different kinds of landscape approaches: using the landscape scale, a sectoral landscape approach, and an integrated landscape approach. Focusing on an integrated landscape approach, we examine five concepts to help characterize landscape approaches: multifunctionality, transdisciplinarity, participation, complexity, and sustainability. For each term, a continuum of application exists. To help improve and move the integrated landscape approach more toward operationalization, more focus needs to be placed on the process of taking the approach. Although the process can be implemented in a range of ways, in a more integrated approach it will require explicitly defined objectives as well as a clear understanding of what is meant by multifunctionality and sustainability. It will also require collaborative participation, transdisciplinarity/cross-sectoral approaches, managing for adaptive capacity, and applying an iterative process to address the inherent complexity within the system. Although these concepts are not new, we present continuums on which they can exist, allowing for clarification and distinctions to be made regarding what it means to take a landscape approach.

This paper critically reviews and analyses participatory GIS (PGIS) and participatory mapping applications within participatory spatial planning for community‐based natural resource management in developing countries. There is an often implicit assumption that PGIS use is effective, in that it meets content needs, satisfies underlying local stakeholder interests and therefore is a tool for better governance. The analytical framework looks at participatory spatial planning performance with respect to key dimensions of governance, especially the intensity of community participation and empowerment, equity within communities and between ‘governed’ and ‘governing’, respect for indigenous knowledge, rights, ownership, legitimacy, and effectiveness. Specific development focus is given by a case study using participatory mapping and PGIS in community forest legitimization, planning and management in Tinto, Cameroon. ‘Good governance’ criteria are applied ex‐post to the implementation procedures, the geo‐information outputs, and the longer‐term outcomes of the PGIS processes. Impacts of incorporating PGIS were examined in terms of the types and degrees of participation in the process; access to, and the uses made of, the geographic information; whether the information outputs met stakeholders’ requirements; and the overall changes in equity and empowerment in the community. It was found that PGIS/participatory mapping processes contributed – positively, though not comprehensively – to good governance, by improving dialogue, redistributing resource access and control rights – though not always equitably – legitimizing and using local knowledge, exposing local stakeholders to geospatial analysis, and creating some actor empowerment through training. PGIS promoted empowerment by supporting community members’ participation in decision‐making and actions, and by enabling land use planning decisions beyond community forestry itself.