This chapter assesses scientific evidence on the interconnections between forests and social‑economic resilience, focusing both on how forests bolster human systems and on the resilience of forests themselves. Strong evidence demonstrates that resilient forests help societies adapt to and mitigate global changes such as land‑use change, biodiversity loss, disaster risk, and climate change—pressures disproportionately driven by economic growth. Using a social‑ecological systems (SES) lens, the chapter highlights how forests respond to cascading stressors through resistance, recovery, or transformation, with resilience reducing uncertainty and safeguarding contributions to human well‑being. Forests provide products, ecosystem services, and cultural values that sustain livelihoods, health, biocultural diversity, and resilience across scales, including clean water, soil conservation, and carbon sequestration. At the global level, resilient forest SES play a critical role in preventing further transgression of planetary boundaries and mitigating impacts of thresholds already crossed. At meso‑scales, forests and forest‑human relationships are shaped by interconnected social and ecological processes, underscoring their importance for sustainable futures and attainment of the SDGs.
Tag: cultural values
The Challenge of Improving Soil Fertility in Yam Cropping Systems of West Africa
Yam (Dioscorea spp.) is a tuber crop grown for food security, income generation, and traditional medicine. This crop has a high cultural value for some of the groups growing it. Most of the production comes from West Africa where the increased demand has been covered by enlarging cultivated surfaces while the mean yield remained around 10 t tuber ha1. In West Africa, yam is traditionally cultivated without input as the first crop after a long-term fallow as it is considered to require a high soil fertility. African soils, however, are being more and more degraded. The aims of this review were to show the importance of soil fertility for yam, discuss barriers that might limit the adoption of integrated soil fertility management (ISFM) in yam-based systems in West Africa, present the concept of innovation platforms (IPs) as a tool to foster collaboration between actors for designing innovations in yam-based systems and provide recommendations for future research. This review shows that the development of sustainable, feasible, and acceptable soil management innovations for yam requires research to be conducted in interdisciplinary teams including natural and social sciences and in a transdisciplinary manner involving relevant actors from the problem definition, to the co-design of soil management innovations, the evaluation of research results, their communication and their implementation. Finally, this research should be conducted in diverse biophysical and socio-economic settings to develop generic rules on soil/plant relationships in yam as affected by soil management and on how to adjust the innovation supply to specific contexts.