Ecological Intensification: Local Innovation to Address Global Challenges

TITTONELL, P.; KLERKX, L.; BAUDRON, F.,; FÉLIX, G.; RUGGIA, A.; VAN APELDOORN; DOGLIOTTI, S.; MAPFUMO, P,; ROSSING, W.A.H.,

Sustainable Agriculture Reviews

Springer

Año: 2016 vol. 19 p. 1 - 34

ISSUES/PROBLEMS: The debate on current and future global food security has become centred on the challenge to increase yields. This focus on availability of food has tended to overshadow consideration of access and utilization of food and the stability of these over time. In addition, pleas for increasing yields across the board tend to overlook the diversity of current positions and contexts in which local agriculture functions. And finally, implicit in the debate on increasing yields is a model of production that is based on mainstream agricultural models in industrialized societies, in which ecological diversity and benefits from nature have been ignored or replaced by external inputs. Achieving productivity increase by agricultural production methods that are highly dependent on external inputs is likely to exacerbate the negative impacts on the environment and on social equity of the current agricultural systems. Strategies to address current and future global food security require local innovation to increase agricultural production in a sustainable, affordable way in the poorest regions of the world, and to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture and its dependence on non-renewable resources. MAJOR ADVANCES: Ecological intensification, or the smart use of biodiversity-mediated ecosystem functions to support agricultural production, is portrayed as the most promising avenue to achieve these goals. We first review examples of ecological intensification from around the world. Functional diversity at plant, field and regional scales is shown to hold promise for reducing pesticide need in potato production in the Netherlands, increasing beef production on the pampas and campos in south-east South-America without additional inputs, and staple crop production in various regions in Africa. Strategies range from drawing on high-tech breeding programs to mobilizing and enriching local knowledge and customs of maintaining perennials in annual production systems, and have in common that larger spatial scales of management, such as landscapes, provide important entry points in addition to the field level. We then argue that the necessary innovation system to support transitions towards ecological intensification and to anchor positive changes should be built from a hybridization of approaches that favour simultaneously bottom-up processes (e.g. developing niches in which experiments with ecological intensification develop) and top-down processes (changing socio-technical regimes which represent conventional production systems through targeted policies) . We show that there are prospects for drawing on local experiences and innovation platforms that foster co-learning and support co-evolution of ecological intensification options in specific contexts, when connected with broader change in the realm of policy systems and value chains. This would require dedicated system innovation programmes that connect local and global levels to sustainably anchor change towards ecological intensification.