As I just nibbled, IUCN’s book Conservation for a New Era is out. It
…outlines the critical issues facing us in the 21st century, developed from the results of last year’s World Conservation Congress in Barcelona.
You can download the pdf. Agriculture has a chapter all to itself, starting on page 160. It’s nicely balanced, and worth reading in full.
If we hope to maintain global biodiversity and a reasonable balance between people and the rest of nature, then agriculture needs to be part of the conversation.
On the other hand, conservation has much to contribute to sustainable agriculture.
The high point for me was the stuff on crop wild relatives (and indeed livestock wild relatives), in particular their potential role in breeding for climate change adaptation. Genebanks are mentioned in passing, but the specific need for ex situ conservation in the context of a rapidly changing environment is not, alas, highlighted. Crop improvement is recognized as a key response to climate change, but perhaps the link to diversity is not as explicit as might have been warranted.
Effective responses to climate change will require changing varieties, modifying management of soils and water, and developing new strategies for pest management as species of wild pests, their natural predators, and their life-cycles alter in response to changing climates.
I liked the paragraph on the role of agrobiodiversity in plant protection, though it missed a trick in not mentioning the importance of the genetic diversity of the crops themselves. There is the expected reference to multi-storey agroforestry systems, but also less-expected mentions of perennial crops and underutilized crops. There’s sensible stuff on biofuels, too (though not much in the agriculture chapter, actually).
So, a step forward in the integration of agriculture and agrobiodiversity into the global conservation agenda? I think so, though it could have been a bigger one. At least agriculture seems not to be seen exclusively as The Enemy.
Yes, on the whole encouraging as you highlight. I also like the comments about the need for greater collaboration and cooperation between the conservation and agriculture communities and working more with farmers to build their expertise as ecosystem managers (many are already!).
All important stuff especially in terms of linking protected and unprotected areas and improving connectivity under climate change. Yet still very much open to interpretation. Compatible forms of agriculture? Compatible for who and for what?
I do not want to dull Luigi’s spin on the Conservation for a New Era which I guess is not meant to be specific but I just think again it draws attention to the need for joined-up conservation, that is the integration of biodiversity with agro-biodiversity conservation which I believe is far too often ignored altogether or simply given lip-service only. The biodiversity and agro-biodiversity communities still too often attend different sets of conference, belong to different societies, sit on different committees and publish largely in different journals, and although today I would agree there has been some movement, I do feel the need to better integrate biodiversity and agro-biodiversity conservation is as critical now as it was then.
McNeely and Mainka does highlight the necessity of crop wild relative conservation stating almost in passing that
but fails to mention how this is to be achieved. Further, it fails to mention the need for traditional crop landrace conservation in the context of broader biodiversity conservation actions — surely the highest priority goal in the majority of the world for conservationists. Yet both crop wild relative and landrace conservation are clearly ‘ideal’ examples of how to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of combining biodiversity conservation with food security.
As a specific example of the need for biodiversity and agro-biodiversity conservation community collaboration, let’s take crop wild relatives. They are recognized as an important natural resource, due to the actual or potential economic benefit that can accrue from their sustainable exploitation in crop breeding. Yet their conservation has been neglected as they tend to fall between the priorities of professional nature protection and agro-biodiversity conservation sectors. The nature protection community affords them per se a low priority because they remain largely unrecognized as a category of wild species worthy of specific action, while the agro-biodiversity community gives CWR a low priority because they are wild plant species and their focus is primarily on the conservation of the crop diversity itself. There are currently no protected areas in Europe and few globally that were established to conserve the genetic diversity of CWR species. You might think that they are safely conserved ex situ in our seed banks but as an example less than 6% of European CWR species have seed samples present in seed banks, in fact there are more CWR species present in botanic garden collections than agricultural gene banks.
Given the sheer number of wild species that are related to crops and the need to conserve the full range of genetic diversity for future exploitation, it is just not feasible to focus entirely on ex situ CWR conservation alone, therefore the biodiversity and agro-biodiversity conservation communities will have to work together in the future.
For me in a time of climate change and increasing food insecurity THE issue is how the better integrate biodiversity with agro-biodiversity conservation, not fashionable perhaps but a real priority. The McNeely and Mainka text in my view fails to address this issue!
Thank you, Nigel, for highlighting the critical need to integrate biodiversity and agro-biodiversity conservation and the question of how to do that. It does indeed seem that the McNeely and Mainka publication provides little more than continued lip service (although admittedly that is better than ignoring the issue altogether).
Part of the problem is indeed among the professional societies that are concerned either biodiversity conservation or agro-biodiversity conservation (but not both), which, as you say
Yet, getting the professionals in these societies to talk together would be only the first step, not directly leading to conservation of crop wild relatives.
As you indicate, there are few protected areas that were created to protect CWR species. Beyond that is another problem: our lack of information about where such areas ought to be created. Only for a limited number of major crops has there been sustained attention to researching the identities and distributions of these related species. In the case of wild species related to “underutilized” crops, the problems are compounded because we often do not even know what species are related to the crop and where those species are distributed. Just as you note that their conservation
so too research on these species also falls between priorities of funding agencies that might support research on either wild plants or crop diversity. Populations of CWR species are disappearing before we even know where they are — and in some cases, before the species are described and named by taxonomists.
Wild species that are related to cultivated crops (and wild plant varieties that are taxonomically placed within cultivated species) do fall into a hole between disciplines, exactly as Nigel states. But not only are they and their habitats and ecological associations neglected, so are the past and present relationships between people and those wild species and varieties.
Agriculture began by people making use of wild and semi-wild plants, and many such plants are still harvested and used as crop plants – as wild or semi-wild crop plants. To learn about these, we need deeper and more effective three-way interactions between the anthropological, biological and agricultural research communities.
A topic that might attract the integrated efforts of all three research communities is ‘biocultural diversity’. How can biocultural diversity be described, where can it be found, and how can it be preserved, supported or restored?
Biocultural diversity is a topic that requires attention to the full spectrum of wild, semi-wild, ruderal, and cultivated habitats within which people, plants and animals actually live — not just the idealised extremes of natural wilderness and cultivated fields.
Agreed, focusing on “agrobiodiversity” without considering “biodiversity” is to make the modern mistake of putting these two topics into separate intellectual silos. They are ultimately the same thing. “Nature” is not merely a source of predators, disease and weeds, but is the foundation of all that we have built and all that we will build. We can forget this, and imagine that we have built modern society on technology alone. Technology gives us tools for manipulation, but in agricultural terms what we manipulate is the planet’s biodiversity.
Biodiversity is the basis of human existence, and agrobiodiversity is a subset of it. The only boundary between the two exists in university faculties.
Nice post and good followups. It helps newbies like us to understand the nitty Gritties of agriculture and related issues.
Kudos to you.