The videos and presentations from the event “Landscapes in a Carbon Focused World” are now available online. The event was organized on the 26th of October 2012 in collaboration between Focali, SIANI, GMV and Naturskyddsföreningen. The presentations and videos of the presentations and the final discussion are published here.
The ‘landscape’ view has risen in importance within discussions on sustainability, resilience, improved agriculture and climate change. This is particularly evident in large parts of the developing world where landscapes are heterogenic in character and the sectorial divisions of agricultural, pastoral and forestry land use are less evident. The landscape lens is a tool to help us work with geographical areas in a state of flux.
The importance of having a holistic perspective of the landscape was discussed during the seminar. Interactions between different sectors in the landscape influence e.g. food provision, biodiversity and ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration. The landscape perspective can thus be an important tool to better understand these linkages and fluctuations between different sectors in the landscape. The importance of a Landscape perspective is increasingly recognized. One recent example is that CIFORs general director Peter Holmgren yesterday declared that the event “Forest Day” now will become “Landscape Day”. On the 21st of November 2012 he wrote about the importance of this on the CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research) blog:
“I have said earlier that it is time for forestry to come out of the forest. Moving on from Forest Day to a Landscape Day is an excellent example of what needs to happen. There are no sharp boundaries between forests and the wider landscape. Not geographically, not economically, and not for sustainable development.”
Recently at the Rio+20 the focus on agriculture and rural development was superseded in discussions by a need to focus on landscapes as a more inclusive and dynamic measure in which to situate both research and policy. Within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) two policy processes are relevant in terms of a move towards a landscape approach for carbon accounting. Within the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) there is an ongoing discussion on expanding the land use, land use change and forestry activities (LULUCF) from the present possibilities narrowed down to only afforestation and reforestation or pure agricultural projects to a more inclusive variety of projects. Within the discussions on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) a move has evolved from pure deforestation as it was in the beginning to a more complex interactive approach including also drivers of deforestation and degradation, such as agricultural expansion.