Participatory Evaluation of Monitoring and Modeling of Sustainable Land Management Technologies in Areas Prone to Land Degradation

Examples of sustainable land management (SLM) exist throughout the world. In many cases, SLM has largely evolved through local traditional practices and incremental experimentation rather than being adopted on the basis of scientific evidence. This means that SLM technologies are often only adopted across small areas. The DESIRE (DESertIfication mitigation and REmediation of degraded land) project combined local traditional knowledge on SLM with empirical evaluation of SLM technologies. The purpose of this was to evaluate and select options for dissemination in 16 sites across 12 countries. It involved (i) an initial workshop to evaluate stakeholder priorities (reported elsewhere), (ii) field trials/empirical modeling, and then, (iii) further stakeholder evaluation workshops. This paper focuses on workshops in which stakeholders evaluated the performance of SLM technologies based on the scientific monitoring and modeling results from 15 study sites. It analyses workshop outcomes to evaluate how scientific results affected stakeholders’ perceptions of local SLM technologies. It also assessed the potential of this participatory approach in facilitating wider acceptance and implementation of SLM. In several sites, stakeholder preferences for SLM technologies changed as a consequence of empirical measurements and modeling assessments of each technology. Two workshop examples are presented in depth to: (a) explore the scientific results that triggered stakeholders to change their views; and (b) discuss stakeholders’ suggestions on how the adoption of SLM technologies could be up-scaled. The overall multi-stakeholder participatory approach taken is then evaluated. It is concluded that to facilitate broad-scale adoption of SLM technologies, de-contextualized, scientific generalisations must be given local context; scientific findings must be viewed alongside traditional beliefs and both scrutinized with equal rigor; and the knowledge of all kinds of experts must be recognised and considered in decision-making about SLM, whether it has been formally codified or not. The approach presented in this paper provided this opportunity and received positive feedback from stakeholders.     

Towards a 3D National Ecological Footprint Geography

In the last decades several indicators have been proposed to guide decision makers and help manage natural capital. Among such indicators is the Ecological Footprint, a resource accounting tool with a biophysical and thermodynamic basis. In our recent paper (Niccolucci et al., 2009), a three dimensional Ecological Footprint (^3DEF) model was proposed to better explain the difference between human demand for natural capital stocks and resource flows. Such ^3DEF model has two relevant dimensions: the surface area (or Footprint size - EF_size) and the height (or Footprint depth - EF_depth). EF_size accounts for the human appropriation of the annual income from natural capital while EF_depth accounts for the depletion of stocks of natural capital and/or the accumulation of stocks of wastes. Building on the 2009 Edition of the National Footprint Accounts (NFA), global trends (from 1961 to 2006) for both EF_size and EF_depth were analyzed. EF_size doubled from 1961 to 1986; after 1986 it reached an asymptotic value equal to the Earth's biocapacity (BC) and remained constant. Conversely, EF_depth remained constant at the “natural depth” value until 1986, the year in which global EF first exceeded Earth's BC. A growing trend was observed after that. Trends in each Footprint land type were also analyzed to better appraise the land type under the higher human induced stress. The usefulness of adopting such ^3DEF model in the National Footprint Accounts was also discussed. In comparing any nation's demand for ecological assets with its own biocapacity in a given year, four hypothetical cases were identified which could serve as the basis for a new Footprint geography based on both size and depth concepts. This ^3DEF model could help distinguish between the use of natural capital flows and the depletion of natural capital stocks while maintaining the structure and advantages of the classical Ecological Footprint formulation.