Integrated landscape management

Integrated landscape management is a way of managing a landscape that brings together multiple stakeholders, who collaborate to integrate policy and practice for their different land use objectives, with the purpose of achieving sustainable landscapes.

Integrated landscape management is one approach to addressing the major global challenges of poverty, food security, climate change, water scarcity, deforestation and loss of biodiversity at the local level. Proponents of integrated landscape management argue that as these challenges are interconnected, coordinated approaches are needed to address them, in order for landscapes (heterogenous geographic areas) to generate multiple benefits. For example, one river basin can supply water for towns and agriculture, timber and food crops for smallholders and industry, and habitat for biodiversity; the way in which each one of these sectors pursues its goals can have impacts on the others. The integrated approach goes beyond traditional sector-based practices that manage these different land uses independently of each other, even where they depend on the same resource base. The intention is to manage landscapes in a joined-up way, so that society's needs can be met in the short term, and in the long term.

Integrated landscape management is increasingly recognised and taken up by intergovernmental bodies, government initiatives, research institutes, and some of the world's largest conservation NGOs, resulting in an increase in the number of examples of the approach in practice. However, barriers to uptake include difficulties in monitoring integrated landscape management and the proliferation of definitions and terms relating to it.

Efforts to develop and implement concepts that integrate social and economic development, and biodiversity conservation are not new. Integrated landscape management has evolved through multiple iterations and alongside other concepts – from watershed management to landscape ecology and from landscape-scale conservation to indigenous biocultural territorial development. It has much in common with the concept of the water-energy-food nexus, and draws on the ecosystem approach (the primary framework for action under the Convention on Biological Diversity). There are particular parallels with ‘climate-smart agriculture', which also aims for landscapes to provide multiple benefits in terms of food security, rural livelihoods, and climate change adaptation and mitigation.

...
Wikipedia