Final Report Summary - SESYP (Identifying Social-Ecological System Properties Benefiting Biodiversity and Food Security)
Food security and biodiversity conservation are central challenges of the 21st century. Traditionally, these have often been framed as competing objectives, and food security and biodiversity conservation have often been analysed in isolation of one another. This project provided an alternative lens of analysis, treating food security and biodiversity conservation as intimately linked within the context of social-ecological systems complexity. To this end, we conducted work at the global scale, as well as a working on a detailed case study in southwestern Ethiopia – a region that is food insecure and also internationally recognised as a biodiversity hotspot. Our findings suggest that conventional, disciplinary framings, rooted in a preservationist approach (for biodiversity) and a green revolution approach (for food security) generate an apparent trade-off between food security and biodiversity conservation. In contrast, taking a social-ecological approach has proven to be effective to highlight possible synergies. For example, our case study work in southwestern Ethiopia demonstrated intimate links between diversified livelihoods, food security and biodiversity; suggesting that landscape multifunctionality was likely to be beneficial for both food security and biodiversity conservation. Moreover, our social-ecological perspective highlighted the need to look beyond economic and technological solutions. Both process-related and structural governance challenges widely impact the effectiveness of policies on food security and biodiversity conservation. Finally, our social-ecological perspective highlighted that the sustainable attainment of food security, in particular, has a strong equity dimension to it – which has been largely glossed over in conventional, disciplinary framings. This equity component was studied with respect to ecosystem services, including in a context of gender. In combination, the project highlighted that a social-ecological perspective has the potential to provide a much more rounded picture of the challenges related to food security and biodiversity conservation than conventional, disciplinary approaches.