Multifunctional Landscapes for Resilient Neighbourhoods

The rise in population has affected the environmental quality and liveability of urban areas. This brings in new challenges to address the resilience capacity of the cities. The multifunctionality of urban areas are considered to be one of the strategies to build urban resilience. The paper explores the development of multifunctional landscapes from a neighbourhood planning perspective. For this, it considers open spaces within a neighbourhood as an element which can be conserved and transformed to productive spaces where waste generated within a neighbourhood is treated and used for developing green spaces. Besides, the system provides an opportunity to transform such land parcels within the city into productive spaces thereby integrating solid waste management and landscape development sustainably. The proposed concept discusses the social, economic and environmental benefits of implementing such spaces which are inevitable in the pursuit of wellbeing and quality of life of the people in a resilient city. At a broader level, the system proposed contributes in making green spaces in any neighbourhood and in the long run, this concept should find its place in urban planning policies of similar city contexts to ensure that our cities, its system of waste management and their landscapes remain sustainable.

Beyond CO2: Multiple Ecosystem Services From Ecologically Intensive Grazing Landscapes of South America

Sustainability assessments to inform the design of multifunctional grazing landscapes need to look beyond greenhouse gas emissions to simultaneously embrace other social and environmental criteria. Here I briefly examine trade-offs and synergies between the productivity of graze-based livestock systems and the environment, and share a few generic guidelines to design pathways for the ecological intensification of livestock systems following agroecological principles. I draw from experience on livestock farming in the Rio de la Plata Grassland Biome of South America (Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil). Livestock systems based on native grasslands in this region may have greater carbon footprints (13–29 kg CO2 eq. kg LW−1) than intensive grass-feedlot systems in the region (9–14 kg CO2 eq. kg LW−1) or the average range reported for OECD countries (c. 10–20 kg CO2 eq. kg LW−1) when calculated per unit product, but only 20% greater when expressed on an area basis. Yet they use less external energy (10x) or nitrogen inputs (5x) per kg live weight (LW) produced, provide ecosystem services of local and global importance, such as carbon storage, habitat protection for biodiversity, watershed regulation, clean water, food and textiles, livelihoods and local cultures, and provide better living conditions for grazing animals. Traditional graze-based systems are less economically attractive than intensive livestock or grain production and they are being replaced by such activities, with negative social and environmental consequences. An ecological intensification (EI) of graze-based livestock systems is urgently needed to ensure economic profits while minimising social-ecological trade-offs on multifunctional landscapes. Examples of such EI systems exist in the region that exhibit synergies between economic and environmental goals, but a broad and lasting transition towards sustainable multifunctional landscapes based on agroecological principles requires (co-)innovation at both technical and institutional levels.

Governance, Values, and Conservation Processes in Multifunctional Landscapes

Landscape-scale conservation provides a suitable spatial extent for identifying impactful ecological and social processes while providing the necessary granularity to understand local context [...]