Dr. Alice Hughes: Maintaining Biodiversity in Complex Landscapes | The CBCGDF Organized Seminar on “The Mainstreaming of Agricultural Biodiversity and ITPGRFA”
2019/7/14 20:25:00 本站

July 10, 2019, a special day: China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF) successfully organized a Seminar in Beijing on the theme of “The Mainstreaming of Agricultural Biodiversity and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA)”. The Seminar presented a collision of high-end expert ideas in the agricultural field, which enabled policy makers, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) officials, experts and scholars from relevant research institutes, and key stakeholders to come together to participate in effective communication and dialogue on topics such as China’s joining in ITPGRFA. biodiversity conservation in agriculture, the Fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties of the United Nation's Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP15), which will be held in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China in 2020. They shared objective and scientific expert opinions also help to promote the development of relevant policies and regulations to achieve the goal of sustainable agriculture and food security beyond 2020.

 

At this Seminar, Dr. Alice C. Hughes, the principal researcher of the Landscape Ecology Group and associate professor of the Centre for Integrative Conservation of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of Chinese Academy of Sciences gave a keynote sharing.

 

British girl Alice is young and promising, and she has a global footprint. Alice is doing phenomenal work on quantifying the impacts of infrastructure development on habitat and biodiversity loss across Southeast Asia. She takes what we would consider a "landscape approach" by questioning the adequacy of existing infrastructure datasets to capture their true extent and impact. In strategy and effort, this goes well beyond the approaches of most recent global studies of its kind. Landscape Architecture in practice may play limited roles in most large-scale infrastructure development; however, these kinds of critical scientific approaches transcend scales and are increasingly important for building awareness when our disciplines undertake master plans in biodiversity-rich developing countries.

 

Despite their high levels of biodiversity and endemism, the Asian tropics are frequently forgotten in global discourse on tropical biodiversity loss. Here, in addition to mapping regional biodiversity patterns, she explored the main threats to the region’s biodiversity, evaluating their relative impact and outlining the prognosis for different areas and key ecosystems. Much of Asia has reached a point of almost no return for much of its native biodiversity, with rates of undocumented road building in many parts of the region (e.g., 90% of roads in central Kalimantan are unmapped) symptomatic of the rapid deforestation and exploitation of natural resources and native species in these regions. She also discussed priorities for action and implementation, approaches to setting these priorities, and the major barriers to implementing the necessary policy and management protocols to secure a future for the region’s biodiversity. Finally, she discussed scalable conservation approaches and the role of intergovernmental agreements in enforcing various regulations (e.g., SDGs, Aichi targets) to try to change the trajectory of this region and its threatened biota.

 

Alice specifically mentioned that the “International Treaty” (ITPGRFA) and the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are in parallel and mutually reinforcing. She questioned intensive agriculture and believed that traditionally grown crops were more nutritious and resilient, more resistant to climate change, more diverse, and less susceptible to market volatility. She emphasized the concept of a collaborative ecosystem and believed that modern intensive agriculture and monoculture would lead to the loss of biodiversity.

 

Another point that Alice mentioned is the growing global concern: the varieties of food consumed by people around the world are becoming more singular. People need to not forget the origin to return to the tradition, but also to maintain the economy of certain regions. Agriculture can be combined with local ecosystems to protect the local ecology, conserve biodiversity, and protect natural resources, and local agricultural products also have a vast market. Here she gave an example of Latin American comparison with the example of Ethiopia.

 

She also cited the example of Southeast Asia, which believes that the world's cultural diversity is increasing. On the one hand, people need to protect food security. On the other hand, traditional farming provides more nutritious food while protecting local biodiversity. Therefore, the comprehensive landscape planning is very important.

 

When talking about China, Alice said that China is one of the world's rich biodiversity hotspots, and it is rich in ethnic and cultural diversity. She believes that China will be able to find new ways to protect the original species owned by many ethnic minorities to prevent the disappearance of species. She believes that the success of the CBD COP15, which will be held in Kunming next year, needs to include some other methods and other conventions; it also requires the joint efforts of different departments to achieve the goals of the agricultural sector.

 

In the end, she concluded that from the design of the landscape to the promotion of traditional low-density planting methods, it can provide a good way for humans to protect biodiversity while also maintaining people's way of life. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the needs of people, but also to consider biodiversity, but also to consider the lifestyle of indigenous people.

 

In particular, Alice's keynote presentation is organized as follows to readers.


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(Photo credit: Alice Hughes, please indicate the source.)


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(Photo credit: CBCGDF)


By / Niu Jingmei