Across much of the world, agricultural systems, ecosystem health, landscape integrity, and rural resource-based livelihoods are in crisis, with major planetary boundaries having already been transgressed.
Over the next few decades, agriculture and food systems likely will be forced to go through an extraordinary transition to meet food production in a more sustainable way.

This is especially relevant in a global context under which climate change, growing populations, regional inequalities and economic transformations all pose complex and largely intractable challenges for rural landscapes. Navigating these challenges more sustainably implies identifying new ways to manage our natural resource base to secure the full range of ecosystem goods and services potentially provided by landscapes, capitalizing on synergies and reducing tradeoffs. Biodiversity and ecosystem conservation strategies are also in urgent need of transformation, embedding them more deliberately into increasingly production-oriented landscapes and considering human well-being in a more inclusive sense than in the past.

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly defined 17 Sustainable Development Targets that are intended to be achieved by the year 2030. In the context of this “Agenda 2030”, sustainable landscape management has been recognized as a key strategy to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in agricultural and forestry production landscapes globally.
Sustainable landscape management conceives conservation and restoration of biodiversity, the production of food, the protection of critical ecosystem services, and rural livelihoods as joint objectives, rather than dealing with them in isolation or in direct confrontation.

A landscape approach enables synergies and tradeoffs among ecological, economic, cultural, and social objectives to be examined at a larger-than-farm scale to reveal how interactions among different land uses are complementary and/or competing. Management strategies within and across the four aforementioned objectives thus can be negotiated between multiple stakeholders to produce an optimal balance of multiple objectives within any given landscape context. Adopting such an approach to management implies working across sectors to ensure that knowledge and information as well as land uses, markets, and policy strategies are adequately integrated. This “integrated” approach to realizing sustainable landscapes is thus a fundamental precept of sustainable landscape management


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Full paper: Plieninger, T., Muñoz-Rojas, J., Buck, L.E. & Scherr, S.J. (2020): Agroforestry for sustainable landscape management. Sustainability Science 15: 1255–1266. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00836-4