COVID-19 pandemic offers opportunity to rethink status quo conservation efforts: Forest News article on work co-authored by Terry Sunderland
The coronavirus pandemic creates an opportunity to rethink generally accepted underperforming business-as-usual approaches to conservation, say more than 20 conservation and development professionals in an editorial published by environmental news provider Mongabay. Current approaches should prioritize locally managed ecosystems, they state. Initial efforts to address the environmental impacts and origins of COVID-19 are frequently oversimplified and […]
Reconciling forest and tree conservation with food security: A new article on Research Outreach featuring Terry Sunderland
Forests and trees are a critical resource for human communities. However, conservation efforts to prevent biodiversity loss increasingly conflict with the rights and access of communities using forests for their livelihoods and crucially to meet their nutritional needs. Prof Terry Sunderland of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, has long pointed to the importance of […]
Big congratulations to Winy Vásquez for winning the prestigious 2020 John G. Bene Fellowship
Our lab member Winy just won the 2020 Trees and People: Resilience in a changing climate – John G. Bene Fellowship ! This will support her research on ‘The Right to Food in Contested Spaces: How Food Sovereignty Can Help Alleviate Food Insecurity and Meet Conservation Goals Inside of Protected Areas in the Peruvian Amazon’. […]
Communities, conservation, and development in the age of COVID:A Mongabay commentary co-authored by Terry Sunderland
‘The global conservation community now faces the added challenge of Covid-19 on top of a longstanding set of complex conservation, sustainability, and development challenges. In the wake of this pandemic, return to business as usual is not a viable option. The existing systems and structures upon which conservation is based must evolve. Climate change, biodiversity […]
Deforestation and pandemics. Radio interview with Terry Sunderland by Global News Programme, The Shift
Chris Gilbert from Global News Programme spoke with Terry Sunderland about COVID-19, biodiversity, food and forests. Listen to the full interview here.
How our food choices cut into forests and put us closer to viruses: Perspective from Terry Sunderland on The Conversation
‘As the global population has doubled to 7.8 billion in about 50 years, industrial agriculture has increased the output from fields and farms to feed humanity. One of the negative outcomes of this transformation has been the extreme simplification of ecological systems, with complex multi-functional landscapes converted to vast swaths of monocultures. We must harness […]
Integrated landscape approaches in the tropics: Webinar by Terry Sunderland and James Reed
‘Integrated landscape approaches’ are governance strategies that attempt to reconcile multiple and conflicting land-use claims to harmonize the needs of people and the environment and establish more sustainable and equitable multi-functional landscapes. In this webinar, Terry Sunderland and James Reed discuss a paper that provides an update on developments in the science and practice […]
A photo essay on traditional practices and beliefs in landscape management in West Kalimantan
Traditional and local beliefs, taboos, norms and knowledge play such a critical role in conserving local biodiversity and landscapes that researchers are now considering whether these might be applied more widely and in a variety of locations that are under threat. Could informal “institutions” – including belief systems and practices – become more recognized as […]
Forests News coverage: Reflections on landscape challenges and opportunities in Kalomo
With our field work stalled by social unrest in Zambia and then the global COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to seize this opportunity to reflect on what we have accomplished in two years of work in Zambia’s Kalomo district with the initiative Collaborating to Operationalise Landscape Approaches for Nature, Development and Sustainability (COLANDS). Before the project’s […]
New paper on ‘Conceptual Links between Landscape Diversity and Diet Diversity’
Conceptual Links between Landscape Diversity and Diet Diversity: A Roadmap for Transdisciplinary Research Malnutrition linked to poor quality diets affects at least 2 billion people. Forests, as well as agricultural systems linked to trees, are key sources of dietary diversity in rural settings. In the present article, we develop conceptual links between diet diversity and […]