Campbell, B. M., D. J. Beare, E. M. Bennett, J. M. Hall-Spencer, J. S. I. Ingram, F. Jaramillo, R. Ortiz, N. Ramankutty, J. A. Sayer, and D. Shindell. 2017. Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries. Ecology and Society 22(4):8. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09595-220408

“Landscape approaches” seek to provide tools and concepts for allocating and managing land to achieve social, economic, and environmental objectives in areas where agriculture, mining, and other productive land uses compete with environmental and biodiversity goals. Here we synthesize the current consensus on landscape approaches. This is based on published literature and a consensus-building process to define good practice and is validated by a survey of practitioners. We find the landscape approach has been refined in response to increasing societal concerns about environment and development tradeoffs. Notably, there has been a shift from conservation-orientated perspectives toward increasing integration of poverty alleviation goals. We provide 10 summary principles to support implementation of a landscape approach as it is currently interpreted. These principles emphasize adaptive management, stakeholder involvement, and multiple objectives. Various constraints are recognized, with institutional and governance concerns identified as the most severe obstacles to implementation. We discuss how these principles differ from more traditional sectoral and project-based approaches. Although no panacea, we see few alternatives that are likely to address landscape challenges more effectively than an approach circumscribed by the principles outlined here.

Using reduced-impact timber-harvesting practices in legally logged tropical forests would reduce global carbon emissions by 0.16 Gt/year at a modest cost and with little risk of "leakage" (increased carbon emissions elsewhere).

[Extract] In a world of 9.5 billion people, global demand for food, fiber, and biofuels has to be met with minimal possible increases in land, water, fossil fuels, and the minerals used to produce fertilizers (1–4). The problem is debated at three levels: first, that agriculture will not be able to produce enough because it will come up against both biophysical and environmental limits that restrict yields (3, 5, 6); second, that the need to expand and intensify agriculture will destroy the broader environmental values of forests, wetlands, marine systems, and their associated biodiversity (7–9); and third, that there are institutional obstacles to the diffusion and adoption of the innovations that could solve these problems. Although there is debate on these issues, there is also strong consensus that we are witnessing unprecedented changes in our major agricultural systems (6). Major shifts are occurring in the way food and other agricultural commodities are produced, in the scale at which this happens, in the geographical locations of agriculture, and perhaps most notable, the agencies and actors driving these processes (10–14). Growth in demand for agricultural products will mainly occur in markets of emerging economies, particularly in the most populous countries of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, the ways in which China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa respond to growing food demand will be major determinants of environmental change at a global scale (3, 6, 11)