Symposium: Ecological Restoration and Sustainable Agricultural Landscapes

Recent scientific research suggests that certain working landscapes and agricultural practices provide fundamental environmental services to society and significantly contribute to biodiversity conservation. In those regions where the livelihoods of great part of the population depend on degraded landscapes, the role of ecological restoration will be decisive. For this reason, it is urgent to develop and test approaches that can integrate conservation and restoration practices in productive landscapes, in a way that is possible to achieve simultaneously the objectives of conservation, generate environmental services, mitigate and adapt to climate change, increase agricultural production, guarantee food security and human welfare.

To achieve these goals, it is fundamental to learn from the large-scale restoration initiatives that currently exist and that address these challenges from different perspectives. The examples include: restoration of riparian corridors in fragmented landscapes in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, production of Yerba Mate in agroforestry systems in Argentina, and intensive silvopastoral systems in Colombia and Mexico.

This symposium will provide an opportunity to review the advances of current initiatives that address the objectives of conservation and restoration in productive landscapes. The speakers will briefly present their projects, the environmental and socioeconomic impacts, critical reflections, and some lessons learned. The symposiumwill conclude with a synthesis that will highlight the priorities for future research and the opportunities to strengthen capacity building and regional efforts for collaboration to advance these and other similar initiatives.