In common with many regions of the world, Africa is grappling with ways to address different needs at the same time - from industrial development and agriculture to biodiversity and poverty alleviation. A challenge remains that these are often dealt with in silos, with poor results; rather, we should be taking a more integrated ‘Iandscape’ approach to land use, which encourages systems-level thinking.
A landscape approach offers a valuable frame-work to integrate policy and practice for multiple land uses within a given area, with the aim of ensuring equitable and sustainable use of land while strengthening measures to mitigate and adapt to
climate change. As competition for land increases with population growth and economic progress, such an approach becomes even more urgent.
There is already considerable institutional momentum behind this drive - as witnessed in a range of international conventions. In 1992, 150 government leaders signed the Convention on Biological Diversity at the Rio Earth Summit to promote sustainable development. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) was established in 1994 to link environment and development to sustainable land management. As the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is working to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere - in a timeframe that will allow ecosystems to adapt.
Synergies to leverage
Conventions like these clearly have synergies that can be leveraged in pursuit of a more integrated outcome in terms of land use and land transformation.
There are various fields in which the landscape approach is relevant. Among the challenges facing water-scarce countries in Southern Africa, for example, is the need to be better stewards of our precious water resources. Currently, we find that
the sectors relying on the finite water resource in any particular catchment area - such as forestry, agriculture, industry and urban development - often have very little interaction with each other.
