Tag: health
Agroforestry’s Impact on the Environment & Human Health in Sub-Saharan Africa
Agroforestry’s Impact on the Environment & Human Health in Sub-Saharan Africa
Agroforestry’s Impact on the Environment & Human Health in Sub-Saharan Africa
Agroforestry’s Impact on the Environment & Human Health in Sub-Saharan Africa
Agroforestry’s Impact on the Environment & Human Health in Sub-Saharan Africa
Integrated natural resource management as pathway to poverty reduction: Innovating practices, institutions and policies
Poverty has many faces and poverty reduction many pathways in different contexts. Lack of food and income interact with lack of access to water, energy, protection from floods, voice, rights and recognition. Among the pathways by which agricultural research can increase rural prosperity, integrated natural resource management deals with a complex nexus of issues, with tradeoffs among issues that are in various stages of denial, recognition, analysis, innovation, scenario synthesis and creation of platforms for (policy) change. Rather than on a portfolio of externally developed ‘solutions’ ready for adoption and use, the concept of sustainable development may primarily hinge on the strengths and weaknesses of local communities to observe, analyse, innovate, connect, organize collective action and become part of wider coalitions. ‘Boundary work’ supporting such efforts can help resolve issues in a polycentric governance context, especially where incomplete understanding and knowledge prevent potential win-win alternatives to current lose-lose conflicts to emerge. Integrated research-development approaches deal with context (‘theory of place’) and options (‘theory of change’) in multiple ways that vary from selecting sites for studying pre-defined issues to starting from whatever issue deserves prominence in a given location of interest. A knowledge-to-action linkage typology recognizes three situations of increasing complexity. In Type I more knowledge can directly lead to action by a single decision maker; in Type II more knowledge can inform tradeoff decisions, while in Type III negotiation support of multiple knowledge + multiple decision maker settings deals with a higher level of complexity. Current impact quantification can deal with the first, is challenged in the second and inadequate in the third case, dealing with complex social-ecological systems. Impact-oriented funding may focus on Type I and miss the opportunities for the larger ultimate impact of Type II and III involvements.
Agroforestry’s Impact on the Environment & Human Health in Sub-Saharan Africa
The fruits of success: a programme to domesticate West and Central Africa’s wild fruit trees is raising incomes, improving health and stimulating the rural economy
There are around 3000 species of wild fruit tree in Africa, representing an enormously important, and largely untapped, natural resource. For proof of the difference that these fruits can make to the health and welfare of rural communities, you need look no further than the participatory tree domestication programme managed by the World Agroforestry Centre in West and Central Africa. This booklet describes the remarkable progress made by the programme in Cameroon, where farmers and scientists have worked together to develop and domesticate superior varieties of African plum, bush mango, kola nut and several other species. Instead of having to search for the fruits and nuts of these trees in the wild, as their forebears did, farmers are now planting them on their land. Thanks to the domestication programme, farmers can now pay school fees for their children, something many could not afford in the past. They also have a much healthier diet, and sufficient income to improve their homes and buy mobile phones and other consumer goods. In short, the domestication programme has helped thousands of families to lift themselves out of poverty.
A global spectral library to characterize the world’s soil
Soil provides ecosystem services, supports human health and habitation, stores carbon and regulates emissions of greenhouse gases. Unprecedented pressures on soil from degradation and urbanization are threatening agro-ecological balances and food security. It is important that we learn more about soil to sustainably manage and preserve it for future generations. To this end, we developed and analyzed a global soil visible-near infrared (vis-NIR) spectral library. It is currently the largest and most diverse database of its kind. We show that the information encoded in the spectra can describe soil composition and be associated to land cover and its global geographic distribution, which acts as a surrogate for global climate variability. We also show the usefulness of the global spectra for predicting soil attributes such as soil organic and inorganic carbon, clay, silt, sand and iron contents, cation exchange capacity, and pH. Using wavelets to treat the spectra, which were recorded in different laboratories using different spectrometers and methods, helped to improve the spectroscopic modelling. We found that modelling a diverse set of spectra with a machine learning algorithm can find the local relationships in the data to produce accurate predictions of soil properties. The spectroscopic models that we derived are parsimonious and robust, and using them we derived a harmonized global soil attribute dataset, which might serve to facilitate research on soil at the global scale. This spectroscopic approach should help to deal with the shortage of data on soil to better understand it and to meet the growing demand for information to assess and monitor soil at scales ranging from regional to global. New contributions to the library are encouraged so that this work and our collaboration might progress to develop a dynamic and easily updatable database with better global coverage. We hope that this work will reinvigorate our community’s discussion towards larger, more coordinated collaborations. We also hope that use of the database will deepen our understanding of soil so that we might sustainably manage it and extend the research outcomes of the soil, earth and environmental sciences towards applications that we have not yet dreamed of. © 2016 The Authors.