Biocultural approaches to well-being and sustainability indicators across scales.

Monitoring and evaluation are central to ensuring that innovative, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are effective. The development of relevant indicators for local sustainable management outcomes, and the ability to link these to broader national and international policy targets, are key challenges for resource managers, policymakers, and scientists. Sets of indicators that capture both ecological and social-cultural factors, and the feedbacks between them, can underpin cross-scale linkages that help bridge local and global scale initiatives to increase resilience of both humans and ecosystems. Here we argue that biocultural approaches, in combination with methods for synthesizing across evidence from multiple sources, are critical to developing metrics that facilitate linkages across scales and dimensions. Biocultural approaches explicitly start with and build on local cultural perspectives - encompassing values, knowledges, and needs - and recognize feedbacks between ecosystems and human well-being. Adoption of these approaches can encourage exchange between local and global actors, and facilitate identification of crucial problems and solutions that are missing from many regional and international framings of sustainability. Resource managers, scientists, and policymakers need to be thoughtful about not only what kinds of indicators are measured, but also how indicators are designed, implemented, measured, and ultimately combined to evaluate resource use and well-being. We conclude by providing suggestions for translating between local and global indicator efforts.

Agricultural biodiversity as a link between traditional food systems and contemporary development, social integrity and ecological health.

Traditional food systems offer a key link between the social and economic resilience of smallholder farmers and pastoralists and the sustainable food and nutrition security of global populations. This paper addresses issues related to socio-cultural diversity and the continuing complex engagement of traditional and modern communities with the plants and animals that sustain them. In light of some of the unhealthful consequences of the 'nutrition transition' to globalized modern diets, the authors define and propose a process for a more successful food system transition that balances agro-biodiversity and processed commodities to support diet diversity, health and social equity alongside sustainable economic growth. We review empirical research in support of practice and policy changes in agriculture, economic development and health domains as well as cross-sectoral and community-based innovation. High-value food crops within domestic and global value chains can be an entry point for smallholders' participation as contributors and beneficiaries of development, while sustainable small farms, as purveyors of environmental and public health services, diversify global options for long-term adaptation in the face of environmental uncertainty.

Nutrición: la base para el desarrollo

Presenta un estudio de como es importante la nutrición para el desarrollo, como en la educación, población, salud, medio ambiente, agricultura, género, pobreza, en los momentos de crisis, derechos humanos, en las comunidades y en la política.

Agricultural biodiversity, nutrition, and health: making a difference to hunger and nutrition in the developing world.

BACKGROUND: In spite of the strides made globally in reducing hunger, the problems of micronutrient deficiencies and coexisting obesity and related cardiovascular and degenerative diseases constitute a formidable challenge for the future. Attempts to reverse this trend with single-nutrient intervention strategies have met with limited success, resulting in renewed calls for food-based approaches. The deployment of agricultural biodiversity is an approach that entails greater use of local biodiversity to ensure dietary diversity. OBJECTIVE: To outline a new strategy proposed by the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI) that employs agricultural biodiversity as the primary resource for food security and health. METHODS: The authors carried out a meta-analysis to review and assemble existing information on the nutritional and healthful properties of traditional foods based on a diverse set of case studies and food composition and nutritional analysis studies. The methods highlight particular examples of foods where analysis of nutrient and non-nutrient composition reveals important traits to address the growing problems of malnutrition associated with the rise of chronic diseases. Finally, the authors analyze social, economic, and cultural changes that undermine the healthful components of traditional diets. RESULTS: Based on this multidisciplinary and comparative approach, the authors suggest a holistic food-based approach that combines research to assess and document nutritional and healthful properties of traditional foods, investigating options in which nutritionally valuable traditional foods can contribute to better livelihoods, and ways that awareness and promotional campaigns can identify healthful components of traditional diets that fit the needs of urban and market-oriented consumers. CONCLUSIONS: There is an urgent need for agricultural research centers, national agricultural research systems, universities, and community-based organizations to work together under a shared policy framework with the aim of developing a strong evidence base linking biodiversity, nutrition, and health. Although these initiatives are still ongoing, the gains realized in small-scale and local pilot efforts have encouraged IPGRI to work with local partners toward the implementation of scale-up efforts in various regions.

Linking biodiversity, diet and health in policy and practice.

Simplification of human diets associated with increased accessibility of inexpensive agricultural commodities and erosion of agrobiodiversity leads to nutrient deficiencies and excess energy consumption. Non-communicable diseases are growing causes of death and disability worldwide. Successful food systems in transition effectively draw on locally-available foods, food variety and traditional food cultures. In practice this process involves empirical research, public policy, promotion and applied action in support of multi-sectoral, community-based strategies linking rural producers and urban consumers, subsistence and market economies, and traditional and modern food systems. Implementation of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute's Global Nutrition Strategy in Sub-Saharan Africa offers a useful case study. Relevant policy platforms, in which biodiversity conservation and nutrition are and should be linked, include the Millennium Development Goals, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Convention on Biological Diversity, Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health, Food-Based Dietary Guidelines, Right to Adequate Food and UN Human Rights Commission's Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The largely unexplored health benefits of cultivated and wild plants include micronutrient intake and functions related to energy density, glycaemic control, oxidative stress and immuno-stimulation. Research on the properties of neglected and underutilized species and local varieties deserves higher priority. In tests of the hypothesis that biodiversity is essential for dietary diversity and health, quantitative indicators of dietary and biological diversity can be combined with nutrition and health outcomes at the population level. That traditional systems once lost are hard to recreate underlines the imperative for timely documentation, compilation and dissemination of eroding knowledge of biodiversity and the use of food culture for promoting positive behaviours.