Holistic Approaches to Landscape Restoration and Sustainable Livelihoods Development

Dear Colleagues,

Ecosystem services are being lost as a result of land degradation, unsustainable farming practices, over-exploitation of natural resources, infrastructural developments, climate change, and population growth. Current farming practices are often unsustainable due to increasing population pressure, which leads to an over-exploitation of land for crops and livestock that are not suitable for such intensive use. The intensification of monocropping and large-scale cash crop planting contributes to even more widespread land degradation. Deforestation and forest degradation put increased pressure on the environment and decrease the ability of forests to provide essential ecosystem services. The drivers of this negative trend are complex, as they relate to multiple processes at multiple levels and scales.

When ecosystem processes and functions are drastically perturbed, various consequences with significant socio-economic impacts follow. Communities suffer from a less resilient farming system, while biodiversity declines due to degradation. Given the multi-level/multi-scalar drivers of degradation, community-based approaches no longer suffice. Action is required to foster landscape restoration from a holistic perspective to address the multi-faceted drivers of landscape change. The “landscape approach” (Sayer et al., 2013) provides a useful guiding framework to help decision-makers and practitioners implement response options that are locally appropriate and integrated. In particular, it promotes inclusive and participatory learning processes to identify practical solutions. It seeks to address the competing interests of different stakeholders across a landscape to engage in multi-sectoral, collaborative land management.

An array of other approaches and definitions (such as the ecosystem services and Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) frameworks, among others) coexist in the pursuit of similar goals. In the past twenty years, they all have gained increasing traction in research and decision-making across multiple sectors and disciplines. However, we still lack a unified definition or approach in the pursuit of landscape restoration and sustainable livelihood development, which hampers the capacity to provide robust and comparable empirical evidence on the implications of different interventions.

Important questions to answer are: How can the landscape and other holistic approaches contribute to identify and compare action to improve landscape management, restoration, and livelihood development across different spatial and temporal scales? How can multi-stakeholder collaboration be fostered across sectors and disciplines in a participatory manner? What are the current experiences with bottom-up landscape restoration, and what opportunities and challenges are encountered in the pursuit of multiple benefits? What are the most effective ways to communicate the results to stakeholders across landscapes?

Empirical evidence of “how” the use of holistic approaches to landscape restoration research (such as the ecosystem services, SES, and landscape approaches) can foster community-based landscape restoration and sustainable livelihood development remains limited. In this Special Issue, we aim to collect such evidence.

We aim to collect articles that demonstrate in particular the functioning of landscape approaches and SES, and that analyze the role of communities and stakeholders in ecosystem management. We will explore possible solutions in combatting further land degradation and resource depletion, with a view to enhance wellbeing and adapt to climate change.

Themes:

• Use of the landscape approach, Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) framework, and other holistic approaches in ecosystem services management at the landscape level (to address the research questions of this Special Issue).
• Evidence of truly bottom-up landscape restoration interventions (including opportunities, challenges, and lessons from practice).
• Tools and approaches for participatory multi-stakeholder collaboration in holistic landscape management.

Dr. Theo van der Sluis
Dr. Nicola Favretto
Dr. Cora Van Oosten
Guest Editors

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• holistic landscape restoration
• landscape approach
• ecosystem services
• socio-ecological systems (SES)
• stakeholder engagement
• sustainable livelihoods
• landscape ecology