INVESTING IN TREES AND LANDSCAPE ... - PROFOR

INTRODUCTION
WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LANDSCAPES
AND LANDSCAPE RESTORATION?
In the past few years, the term “landscape” has increasingly permeated discussions
regarding rural development. A landscape is often defined as a cluster of local
ecosystems with a particular configuration of topography, vegetation, land use, and
settlement. Maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services, managing agricultural
production sustainably, and contributing to improved rural livelihoods cannot be
achieved at just the farm or plot level, but are linked at the landscape scale. To
make an impact, we must consider all the elements of a landscape as a whole.
How a landscape is defined depends on the local context (natural, historical,
and cultural processes, activities, or values), and landscapes vary greatly by size.
Landscapes can incorporate many different features; all the features have some
influence or effect on the others.
At one end of the spectrum, trees in landscapes can occupy specialized niches
at the farm level, producing commodities for sale or for home consumption and
increasing the resilience of crop production systems. They can help even out the
household’s use of seasonal labor or create reserves of capital for new investment
and can contribute to clarifying who has tenure over land demarcated by trees.
At the other end of the spectrum, forest landscapes can range from large, contiguous
tracts of forest used for multiple purposes (production; cultural, recreational, or
environmental services; and the like) to mosaics of forests and blocks of trees
within the rural landscape. They can be managed with varying degrees of intensity
and may become integrated into mixed agro-silvicultural systems. In drier parts
of Africa, woodland and woodland mosaics produce valuable inputs into farming
systems, including leaf litter for cropping systems and livestock browse and fodder.
In Southeast Asia, forest landscapes spread throughout rural farming systems and
enable people to exploit mountain slopes in ways that yield a diversity of crops,
maintain soil fertility and watershed functions, and retain indigenous biodiversity.
Forest landscapes typically go through a transition as populations increase, with
increasingly anthropomorphic influences on forests and trees, resulting first in
forest degradation and deforestation but eventually transitioning into landscapes
where planted and managed trees and forest patches are fully integrated into
productive farming systems and agricultural landscapes.
INTRODUCTION
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