Overview of Nutrition-Sensitive Landscapes

Global challenges—including unsustainable food systems, environmental degradation, and the double burden of malnutrition (under-nutrition and obesity) are interconnected and require a fresh look at how people interact with their environment to fulfill the goals of food and nutrition security. Current agricultural practices are moving toward intensified monocultures, which increase grain yields in the short term, but limit dietary and biological diversity. In addition, population growth, climate change and changing consumer preferences add pressure to these vulnerable systems. A landscape focus on nutrition is called for in order to place greater focus and emphasis on building diversity and ecosystem service based approaches into meeting human dietary and nutritional needs in production landscapes. We provisionally call this the Nutrition Sensitive Landscapes approach (NSL). NSL goes beyond traditional “no harm” approaches toward one that is system and landscape based. The NSL method offers proactive management towards more sustainable diets for vulnerable populations. The approach asks: (1) what are potential synergies and trade-offs between agricultural production, the environment, and food and nutrition security in a given landscape; (2) how do human food choices and food system dynamics have an impact on ecosystem services and human health in a given landscape, and vice versa; (3) how does this relationship change over space and time as landscapes and populations transition, for example, the adoption of agricultural intensification, from subsistence to commercial agriculture, or from rural to urban settings; (4) what are landscape and food system opportunities for enhancing diversity of diets and of the ecosystem and; (5) which system interventions, dietary guidelines, institutions, and incentives can be promoted to create synergies between nutrition, livelihoods, and the environment? In collaboration with the CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs) on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), Aquatic Agricultural Systems (AAS), Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) and Integrated Systems for the Humid Tropics (Humidtropics), the first phase of NSL research is focusing on pilot projects in three landscapes,: (1) the Barotse floodplain in Western Zambia; (2) Northern Zambia; and (3) Western Kenya. Working in these differing landscapes demonstrates interactions between ecosystems and their populations, and differentiates contextspecific factors from those that can be applied in other similar landscapes. In this session we will present the NSL approach and the methods used to assess landscape nutritional capacity and preliminary results from several of the sites where we have initiated work. We anticipate that the presentation will facilitate the use of the methodology in other sites.