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Biosphere reserves constitute a management proposal that aims to reconcile multiple types of land use on a surface area that is representative of the planet's ecological and cultural diversity. Among their objectives are safeguarding the ecological integrity of core areas dedicated to conservation, which ultimately means taking into account the needs of those human populations inhabiting the reserve. This essay postulates that in order to legitimize conservation efforts within biosphere reserves it is necessary to activate two distinct processes: sustainability and territorialization. In other words, biosphere reserves need to be considered as sustainable territories if they are to achieve their conservation goals. In this case, environmental sustainability is accomplished through the provision of ecosystem services by means of establishing multifunctional landscapes, whereas social sustainability implies the institutionalization of social processes. Territorial appropriation of the reserve on the part of its inhabitants should furthermore be sought. Brought about jointly, environmental sustainability, social sustainability, and territorialization would enable biosphere reserves to become sustainable territories, thus underpinning their conservation potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge co-production has emerged as an important conceptual and processual tool in sustainability research addressing the needs of equity and inclusion. Indigenous communities and local people have engaged with the process of knowledge production, foregrounding their historical relationships with landscapes, based on their unique worldviews and knowledges. However, knowledge co-production, especially for multi-functional landscapes remains a contentious and complicated affair with enduring issues of power-sharing related to the different socio-political positions of stakeholders. This work explores the synergies and challenges in knowledge co-production for landscape re-design in the south Island of Aotearoa NZ through an assessment of the work done at the Centre for Excellence, Lincoln University. At this center, a multi-stakeholder team is grappling with designing a farm, through a transdisciplinary framework that attempts to include multiple worldviews. This work explores the various stages of the co-production process, analyzing the exchanges between various members as they prepare for co-production, the knowledge produced through this engagement, and how this knowledge is being utilized to further the goal of sustainability. Our results show that significant gaps remain between co-production theory and co-production practice which are a result of the mismanagement of the co-production process, the mismatch in the time and spatial scales of project goals, and the differences in the values and objectives of the different stakeholders. However, the process of co-production, though flawed, leads to the building of more open relationships between the stakeholders, and leads to some very meaningful knowledge products that address the multi-temporal and multi-spatial aspirations of multi-functional landscapes in Aotearoa NZ, while contributing to the broader scholarship on co-production in sustainability. Finally, both synergies and challenges prove meaningful when challenging the roadblocks to the inclusion of a diversity of worldviews, by clearly highlighting the places of engagement and why they were made possible. We suggest that knowledge co-production attempts in multi-functional landscapes around the world should attempt a similar assessment of their process. This can help build better relationships between scientists and IPLC, address disciplinary bias and marginalization of non-expert opinions, while also ensuring the relevance of the research to the multiple stakeholders of the land.

Stewardship offers a means of addressing social-ecological sustainability challenges, from the local to the global level. The concept of stewardship has had various meanings attached to it over time, and the links between the theory and practice of stewardship are not well understood. We sought to characterise the practice of stewardship in South Africa, to better understand the relationship between theory and practice. We found that practitioners’ understandings of stewardship coalesce around two core notions: the idea of stewardship as ‘responsible use and care’ of nature, and stewardship as a ‘balancing act’ between stewards’ use of natural resources for agricultural production and their responsibility to protect and manage the wider ecosystem. Stewardship practice in South Africa is strongly influenced by the biodiversity stewardship tool; however, many practitioners are integrating biodiversity stewardship with other approaches. These emerging social-ecological stewardship initiatives operate at landscape-level and work towards integrated social and ecological stewardship outcomes, by facilitating collaboration among diverse stakeholders. Further research is needed to better understand what is required to support these integrated, collaborative and cross-sectoral initiatives. Policy mechanisms that facilitate integrated place-based stewardship practice can contribute to expanding the practice of biodiversity stewardship in South Africa. Significance: • Our findings contribute to a growing understanding of what stewardship looks like in South Africa and how it is put into practice. • We show that biodiversity stewardship is a prevalent understanding of stewardship practice in South Africa and is often combined with other approaches for sustainable landscape management. • A broader understanding of stewardship, for example through the concept of social-ecological stewardship, can enable more integrated, collaborative approaches to landscape management, addressing the wide range of environmental and social development challenges faced in rural landscapes across South Africa.

Landscape stewardship offers a means to put social-ecological approaches to stewardship into practice. The growing interest in landscape stewardship has led to a focus on multistakeholder collaboration. Although there is a significant body of literature on collaborative management and governance of natural resources, the particular challenges posed by multifunctional landscapes, in which there are often contested interests, require closer attention. We present a case study from South Africa to investigate how collaborative stewardship can be fostered in contested multifunctional landscapes. We conducted this research through an engaged transdisciplinary research partnership in which we integrated social-ecological practitioner and academic knowledge to gain an indepth understanding of the challenges of fostering collaboration. We identified five overarching factors that influence collaboration: contextual, institutional, social-relational, individual, and political-historical. Collaborative stewardship approaches focused on the development of formal governance institutions appear to be most successful if enabling individual and social-relational conditions are in place. Our case study, characterized by high social diversity, inequity, and contestation, suggests that consensus-driven approaches to collaboration are unlikely to result in equitable and sustainable landscape stewardship in such contexts. We therefore suggest an approach that focuses on enhancing individual and social-relational enablers. Moreover, we propose a bottom-up patchwork approach to collaborative stewardship premised on the notion of pluralism. This would focus on building new interpersonal relationships and collaborative capacity through small collective actions. Taking a relational, pluralistic approach to fostering collaborative stewardship is particularly important in contested, socially heterogeneous landscapes. Drawing on our study and the literature, we propose guiding principles for implementing relational, pluralistic approaches to collaborative stewardship and suggest future research directions for supporting such approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural communities have faced significant socio-economic challenges for the past several decades due to structural shifts and changing social expectations regarding the management, production of, and markets for natural resources, including production agriculture. The New Natural Resource Economy (NNRE) is an economic development approach to the use of natural resources, including agriculture, in ways that can build healthy environments and healthy, resilient local economies (Hibbard and Lurie, 2013). A major attribute of the NNRE is its focus on very small businesses, the predominant business type in rural settings. Emerging trends, such as regional food networks (RFNs) that connect food producers to consumers within a state or local region, may provide opportunities for rural communities to diversify and expand local businesses around the use of natural resources, thereby helping to restore greater capacity for self-direction and adding to local community vitality. Thus, we address whether RFNs in rural Oregon counties display characteristics of an NNRE development strategy through the relationships between agricultural producers and consumers that support very small agricultural enterprises. Based on analysis of Oregon producer survey data from 2016 in the more rural resource-dependent Oregon counties, we find that the RFN producer survey respondents are indeed very small businesses engaged in small-scale, multifunctional agriculture. They are motivated by economic, social, and environmental concerns as they contribute to the economic activity in their communities. We also surveyed Oregon consumers, finding that although consumer survey respondents in the same region are not primarily driven to buy local based on environmental considerations, they are nonetheless interested in supporting agriculture and local businesses. The demand for local products can create a virtuous cycle contributing to the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of the community. Given appropriate policy and program support, there is fertile ground to create new opportunities to generate farm income and acquire food within the NNRE healthy environment-healthy economy paradigm for rural economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We currently face both an extinction and a biome crisis embedded in a changing climate. Many biodiverse ecosystems are being lost at far higher rates than they are being protected or ecologically restored. At the same time, natural climate solutions offer opportunities to restore biodiversity while mitigating climate change. The Bonn Challenge is a U.N. programme to restore biodiversity and mitigate climate change through restoration of the world's degraded landscapes. It provides an unprecedented chance for ecological restoration to become a linchpin tool for addressing many environmental issues. Unfortunately, the Forest and Landscape Restoration programme that underpins the Bonn Challenge, as its name suggests, remains focused on trees and forests, despite rising evidence that many non‐forest ecosystems also offer strong restoration potential for biodiversity and climate mitigation. We see a need for restoration to step back to be more inclusive of different ecosystem types and to step up to provide integrated scientific knowledge to inform large‐scale restoration. Stepping back and up will require assessments of where to restore what species, with recognition that in many landscapes multiple habitat types should be restored. In the process, trade‐offs in the delivery of different ecosystem services (e.g. carbon, biodiversity, water, albedo, livestock forage) should be clearly addressed. We recommend that biodiversity safeguards be included in policy and implemented in practice, to avoid undermining the biophysical relationships that provide ecosystem resilience to climate change. For ecological restoration to contribute to international policy goals will require integrated large‐scale science that works across biome boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stewardship offers a means of addressing social-ecological sustainability challenges, from the local to the global level. The concept of stewardship has had various meanings attached to it over time, and the links between the theory and practice of stewardship are not well understood. We sought to characterise the practice of stewardship in South Africa, to better understand the relationship between theory and practice. We found that practitioners' understandings of stewardship coalesce around two core notions: the idea of stewardship as 'responsible use and care' of nature, and stewardship as a 'balancing act' between stewards' use of natural resources for agricultural production and their responsibility to protect and manage the wider ecosystem. Stewardship practice in South Africa is strongly influenced by the biodiversity stewardship tool; however, many practitioners are integrating biodiversity stewardship with other approaches. These emerging social-ecological stewardship initiatives operate at landscape-level and work towards integrated social and ecological stewardship outcomes, by facilitating collaboration among diverse stakeholders. Further research is needed to better understand what is required to support these integrated, collaborative and cross-sectoral initiatives. Policy mechanisms that facilitate integrated place-based stewardship practice can contribute to expanding the practice of biodiversity stewardship in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landscape stewardship offers a means to put social-ecological approaches to stewardship into practice. The growing interest in landscape stewardship has led to a focus on multistakeholder collaboration. Although there is a significant body of literature on collaborative management and governance of natural resources, the particular challenges posed by multifunctional landscapes, in which there are often contested interests, require closer attention. We present a case study from South Africa to investigate how collaborative stewardship can be fostered in contested multifunctional landscapes. We conducted this research through an engaged transdisciplinary research partnership in which we integrated social-ecological practitioner and academic knowledge to gain an in-depth understanding of the challenges of fostering collaboration. We identified five overarching factors that influence collaboration: contextual, institutional, social-relational, individual, and political-historical. Collaborative stewardship approaches focused on the development of formal governance institutions appear to be most successful if enabling individual and social-relational conditions are in place. Our case study, characterized by high social diversity, inequity, and contestation, suggests that consensus-driven approaches to collaboration are unlikely to result in equitable and sustainable landscape stewardship in such contexts. We therefore suggest an approach that focuses on enhancing individual and social-relational enablers. Moreover, we propose a bottom-up patchwork approach to collaborative stewardship premised on the notion of pluralism. This would focus on building new interpersonal relationships and collaborative capacity through small collective actions. Taking a relational, pluralistic approach to fostering collaborative stewardship is particularly important in contested, socially heterogeneous landscapes. Drawing on our study and the literature, we propose guiding principles for implementing relational, pluralistic approaches to collaborative stewardship and suggest future research directions for supporting such approaches.

The need for understanding the factors that trigger human responses to climate change has opened inquiries on the role of indigenous and local ecological knowledge (ILK) in facilitating or constraining social adaptation processes. Answers to the question of how ILK is helping or limiting smallholders to cope with increasing disturbances to the local hydro-climatic regime remain very limited in adaptation and mitigation studies and interventions. Herein, we discuss a case study on ILK as a resource used by expert farmer-fishers (locally known as Caboclos) to cope with the increasing threats on their livelihoods and environments generated by changing flood patterns in the Amazon delta region. While expert farmer-fishers are increasingly exposed to shocks and stresses, their ILK plays a key role in mitigating impacts and in strengthening their adaptive responses that are leading to a process of incremental adaptation (PIA). We argue that ILK is the most valuable resource used by expert farmer-fishers to adapt the spatial configuration and composition of their land-/resource-use systems (agrodiversity) and their produced and managed resources (agrobiodiversity) at landscape, community and household levels. We based our findings on ILK on data recorded for over the last 30 years using detailed ethnographic methodologies and multitemporal landscape mapping. We found that the ILK of expert farmer-fishers and their 'tradition of change' have facilitated the PIA to intensify a particular production system to optimize production across a broad range of flood conditions and at the same time to manage or conserve forests to produce resources and services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today we have to face new challenges about decreasing water resources, wastewater treatment, limited spaces and ecological preservation. This problem must be solved in a sustainable way using innovative water management strategies that combine technology with landscape design by enhancing ecosystem services provision. An effective way of tackling this problem is to use Constructed Treatment Wetlands (CTW) as low-cost alternative to conventional secondary or tertiary wastewater treatment. The aim of this paper is to evaluate their multifunctional role in terms of biodiversity and ecosystem services’ enhancement by taking into account a case study in southern Italy. For this purpose an annual monitoring of fauna and vegetation has been carried out in order to identify species of national and international interest strongly related to the new habitats availability. Results have shown the ability of CTW in providing ancillary benefits, well beyond the primary aim of water purification, such as sustaining wildlife habitats and biodiversity at local and global scales, as well as its potential role in terms of recreational and educational opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global change is exacerbating the need for more effective mechanisms and approaches for working towards economic, social/cultural and environmental sustainability. It is now well recognised that science for sustainability will require integrated problem-focussed research that is by nature trans-disciplinary. Resolutions to both global and regional scale issues must involve participation of a diverse number of stakeholders. One region that would benefit greatly from such an integrated approach is the Northern Territory of Australia. This area is home to some of the most pristine savanna landscapes in the world and it is also occupied by one of the oldest living human cultures which are still in existence today. However, in recent years there has been increasing pressure to develop this region. The Northern Territory is also facing problems associated with having a growing Aboriginal population with deepening health and social problems. So as well as needing to facilitate adaptation in response to global change and development for economic prosperity of the region, there is an obligation to alter management practices to reduce social disadvantage. In light of this, it will be important that future landscapes are multifunctional and designed to ensure the preservation of biological and cultural diversity, as well as having provision for the livelihoods of the people that live within them. This article recommends the adoption of a landscape ecological approach for strategic development and sustainable planning, which captures and incorporates the values and identities of the different stakeholders, as well as engaging them in a continuous, adaptive process of planning and management, and in doing so discusses the importance of human ecological holism as part of the conceptual framework for landscape ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]