This book examines the challenges and impacts of poor diets and nutrition from current food systems and the potential contribution of biodiversity and ecosystem services in addressing these problems. It also presents a multi-country, cross-sectoral analysis of initiatives that have promoted local food biodiversity in four countries: Brazil, Kenya, Turkey and Sri Lanka.

Food security, at national and household levels, is on the decline because traditional capital (physical, natural, human and financial) has not fully led to its improvement. There is an increasing shift of attention to social capital as an element that explains household food security, but there is a lack of adequately documented information on this. Therefore, this study investigates the effects of social capital on food security, using data collected on a cross-section of 775 cassava farming households from four zones of Nigeria.

At present, our ability to comprehend the dynamics of food systems and the consequences of their rapid ‘transformations’ is limited. In this paper, we propose to address this gap by exploring the interactions between the sustainability of food systems and a set of key drivers at the global scale.

Overlooked in national reports and in conservation programs, wild food plants (WFPs)

Land tenure, or access and rights to land, is essential to sustain people’s livelihoods. This paper looks at how farm households perceive land tenure (in)security in relation to food (in)security, and how these perceptions evolve throughout different policy periods in Laos. The paper highlights the centrality of farmers’ strategies in configuring the dynamic relationships between tenure (in)security and food (in)security, by demonstrating how farmers’ perceived and de facto land tenure insecurity shapes their decisions to diversify livelihood options to ensure food security.

Agriculture used to be at the center of
Zimbabwe’s economy, accounting for about
20% of GDP. But it has since declined to
about 10%, since the introduction of the
land reform bill. The government has been
intensifying efforts to prioritize the sector
until 2020. The mostly rural population
depend on agriculture, which provides
60-70% of the population with income.
Yet smallholder farmers face significant
challenges. Low and erratic rainfall,
drought, low and declining soil fertility

Biochar is one of the most affordable negative emission technologies (NET) at hand for future large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which is typically found essential to stabilizing global temperature rise at relatively low levels. Biochar has also attracted attention as a soil amendment capable of improving yield and soil quality and of reducing soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this work, we review the literature on biochar production potential and its effects on climate, food security, ecosystems, and toxicity.

Since Vietnam shifted to a market-economy in the 1980s, Hanoi has seen rapid urban expansion similar to that of other South East Asian cities - involving megaprojects, luxury developments, rural-to-urban migration, informal housing construction, and escalating speculation. Researchers have considered how unemployment and the disruption of community life followed the urbanization of rural areas. However, little has been said about how people adjusted their everyday life to cope with the changes.

Economic globalization promotes the economic development of underdeveloped regions but also influences the ecological environments of these regions, such as natural forest degradation. For inland developing regions with underdeveloped traffic routes, are the effects on the ecological environment also as obvious?

ABSTRACTED FROM CONTEXT SECTION: A study was commissioned by the Mekong Region Land Governance Project (MRLG) to investigate the origins and the implications of implementing the 70 percent forestland policy, and to outline policy considerations. This discussion note aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the origin, rationale, geography and tenure implications of the 70 percent policies.