• Energy Research

AbstractSustainability measurement addresses the social, economic, and environmental aspects in order to support policy and decision‐making. In the Peruvian Amazon, some smallholder livestock farmers have subsisted through time, partially preserving the ecosystems and demonstrating in practice a certain degree of sustainability. In this regard, this study aims at measuring the sustainability of smallholder livestock farming in the Peruvian Amazon. Sustainability was measured using a multi‐criteria method, through the construction of sustainability indicators based on information obtained from field surveys, and soil and macrofauna sampling in the pastures. For this purpose, economic, environmental, and socio‐cultural indicators were considered, with a rating scale from 0 to 4, where 0 is the least sustainable category and 4 is the most sustainable one. Smallholder livestock farming was considered sustainable if the general sustainability index (GenSI) was equal to or greater than 2 and, at the same time, if none of the three indicators had a value lower than 2. The socio‐cultural indicator was within the sustainability threshold, but the economic and environmental indicators did not fulfill the necessary requirements to consider smallholder livestock farming a sustainable activity in the city of Yurimaguas, Peru. The critical points affecting the sustainability of smallholder livestock farming in Yurimaguas were as follows: degraded soils, lack of silvopastoral systems, inefficient transport system, low annual income, and low levels of associativity. The results suggest the need for mitigating these limitations, as well as promoting associativity and implementing silvopastoral systems for the improvement of the welfare of smallholder livestock farmers.

In order to characterize the historical climate for the Western Honduras region, it was developed monthly surfaces by years through spatial interpolation and available records of weather stations. The interpolated surfaces were generated at 1-km of spatial resolution (30 arc-seconds) for monthly precipitation (1981-2015), and minimum and maximum temperature (1990-2014). It was followed the method described by Hijmans et al. (2005), using data from: (1) the DGRH (General Direction of Water Resources of the Honduran Ministry of Natural Resources); (2) the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), including data from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and the Global Surface Summary of the Day (GSOD); and (3) the ENEE (National Electric Power Company of Honduras). In some areas with low weather station density, it was added pseudo-stations from CFSR (Climate Forecast System Reanalysis) for temperature (Ruane et al., 2015) and CHIRPS (Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station; Funk et al., 2015) for precipitation. <br> For future climates, it was performed a statistical downscaling (delta method or change factor) process based on the sum of the anomalies of GCMs (General Circulation Models), to the high resolution baseline surface (the 20-yr normal) at monthly scale (Ramirez & Jarvis, 2010). It was used data from ~20 GCMs from the IPCC AR5 (CMIP5 Archive) run across two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP 2.6 and 8.5), for the reported IPCC future 20-year periods (IPCC, 2013): 2026-2045 (2030s) and 2046-2065 (2050s).

AbstractFruit and vegetable species and varieties, their wild relatives, and pollinators and other associated organisms underpin diverse food production systems and contribute to worldwide health and nutrition. This biodiversity, however, is threatened, remains poorly conserved, and is largely undocumented. Its loss leads to a narrowing of new food options, reduced variation for breeding, and yield gaps due to pollinator decline. This constrains the supply of climate-resilient and nutritious foods to the global human population and limits long-term progress towards the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and any future goals set thereafter. It will require that awareness be raised globally to safeguard and sustainably use fruit and vegetable biodiversity and that a global rescue plan for reducing and reversing the decline in this biodiversity be devised. Success will depend on a global partnership of custodians and users of fruit and vegetable biodiversity and requires an investment of at least 250 million USD over ten years.

The Andean-Amazon foothills region, one of the richest biodiversity ecoregions on earth, is threatened by climate change combined with unsustainable agricultural and extensive livestock farming. These land-use practices tend to reduce the diversification of rural farming, decreasing households’ livelihood alternatives and rendering them more vulnerable to climate change. We studied the relationship between rural livelihood diversification and household-level vulnerability to climate change in a sample of Andean-Amazon foothills households in Colombia and Peru. Firstly, we determined typologies of households based on their rural livelihood diversification, including farming diversification (agrobiodiversity and farming activities) and agroecological management practices. Secondly, we evaluated each household typology’s vulnerability to climate change by assessing sensitivity and adaptive capacity based on the ‘livelihood assets pentagon’, which encompasses the five human capitals: natural, social, human, physical, and financial. We concluded that households with higher rural livelihood diversification are less vulnerable to climate change. However, it is impossible to draw significant conclusions about the relationship between the factors of diversification of management practices and vulnerability to climate change because most households have few agroecological practices. Results may inform future interventions that aim to decrease Andean-Amazon foothills households’ sensitivity and strengthen their adaptive capacity to climate change.

In this article, we operationalized a sustainability framing based on the Sustainable Rural Livelihood Resources Framework (SLF), which consists of five capitals—human, physical, social, financial, and natural. We proposed a sustainability index (SI) for two landscapes dominated by two agricultural systems: cattle ranching and small-scale family agriculture. Farm variables within each capital were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis. Key variables were identified and index values were calculated for each capital. These were combined through a set of simultaneous equations to estimate farm-specific capitals and SI from the observed farm variables. Principal component and cluster analyses were used to group the farms according to their index scores and to further compare their characteristics. Furthermore, with the purpose of comparing the index scoring with an independent metric, a landscape indicator, which comes from a continuous forest, was calculated. From the results, the capitals that contributed to a higher SI score the most were financial and physical. As cattle ranching was associated with higher economic returns and infrastructure investments, this livelihood was identified as the most sustainable. Yet, cattle ranching has been a deforestation driver in the region. These results are attributed to the current conceptual framework design, which gives greater weight to material and economic variables; therefore, it generates a weak sustainability measure. Although the framework allowed us to identify land-use alternatives that could improve SI scores (i.e., silvopastoral systems), corrections to the proposed framework and methodological approach will need to include additional environmental benefits currently unaccounted for. Farmers that use their farms for conservation purposes should be recognized and compensated. An improved environmentally focused SI operational framework could help to endorse and promote sustainable livelihoods and to generate a strong sustainability measure.

The Andean-Amazon foothills region, shaped by Andean moist forests and Amazon forests in southwestern Colombia, Napo province in Ecuador, and Ucayali Province and Napo Basin in Peru, provides local and global ecosystem services as food, water, world climate regulation, water purification, and carbon absorption. However, it faces major problems of land-use change that are exacerbated by climate change that affects these ecosystem services. For instance, conventional agriculture contribute to deforestation, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss, which might be further aggravated by climate change–induced droughts, thus reducing staple crop production and, consequently, food security. Cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz), maize (Zea mays L.), and plantain (Musa paradisiaca L.) are major staple crops in the region. They play a key role for food security and local farmers’ income but are highly exposed to climate risks. This article aims to quantify the level of exposure to climate change (measured as climatic suitability) of these crops in the Andean-Amazon foothills by using the EcoCrop model by the 2030s, 2050s, and 2080s under Representative Concentration Pathway 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5 scenarios. EcoCrop results showed that, whereas cassava will not lose climatic suitability, maize will lose more than half of its current suitable area, and plantain will gain and lose area, which would affect local food security. Globally, these results are important in highlighting adaptive and cost-effective strategies in agriculture and suggest that agricultural crop diversification may improve resilience by promoting the use of local crops varieties.

AbstractGovernments are updating national strategies to meet global goals on biodiversity, climate change and food systems proposed in the Convention on Biological Diversity post-2020 framework and agreed at the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference (COP26) and Food Systems Summit (UNFSS). This represents a unique and crucial opportunity to integrate and accelerate food system actions to tackle interconnected global challenges. In this context, agroecology is a game-changing approach that can provide the world’s growing population with nutritious, healthy affordable food, ensure fair incomes to farmers and halt and reverse the degradation of the natural environment. Here, we explore agroecological transition pathways in four case studies from low- and middle- income countries and identify catalysts for change. We find that enabling policy and market environments, participatory action research and local socio-technical support each plays a critical role in stimulating transitions towards agroecology. We propose strategies and priorities for research to better support agroecological transitions using these catalysts of change as entry points. Engagement of governments, private sector, civil society, farmers and farm workers in this research agenda is essential.