World Biodiversity Symposium

[Schöb Christian]

Estimad@s compañer@s,

os escribo para anunciar nuestra sesión “Enhancing biodiversity to support sustainable crop production” en el primer World Biodiversity Forum (https://www.worldbiodiversityforum.org/index.html) del 23 al 28 de Febrero 2020 en Davos, Suiza. Es un congreso con una gran variedad de sesiones relacionadas con la biodiversidad. El congreso destaca con un formato particular con muchas posibilidades de discusión entre investigadores y stakeholders, y con una gran variedad de participantes y plenary speakers (https://www.worldbiodiversityforum.org/en/speakers).   

 

El plazo para presentar abstracts termina el 10 de Noviembre. Espero ver algun@s de vosotr@s en Davos!

 

Aquí os dejo más información sobre nuestra sesión:

 

135S | Enhancing biodiversity to support sustainable crop production–

 

Session Convenors: Christian Schöb, ETH Zurich, Johan Six, ETH Zurich and Rob W. Brooker, The James Hutton Institute

 

In areas dominated by modern intensive farming practice, arable crop fields are highly impoverished in biological diversity. Current mainstream agricultural practices focus on monocultures of single cultivars. These highly depauperate systems are susceptible to pests and diseases and become zones of intense competition between plants for available resources. Such crop production systems therefore often require costly and environmentally harmful external inputs to sustain production, thereby aggravating the damage to wider biodiversity within these ecosystems and making them unsustainable from both a production and environmental perspective.

At the heart of the problem is that this type of crop production suffers from a lock-in effect, with farmers being trapped into these detrimental practices by issues arising from a range of sources including markets, technologies, and policy. Agroecological research however provides potential solutions to overcome at least some of the lock-ins by means of biodiversity. Increasing crop diversity through intercropping has been demonstrated to enable increased production with less external inputs, higher resilience against environmental perturbations, and improved livelihoods. In other words, biodiversity in cropping systems can increase environmental, social and economic sustainability. Nevertheless, the land dedicated to intercropping in comparison with monoculture cropping is marginal, e.g. less than 0.5% in Switzerland. Stakeholder surveys demonstrate that the barriers against the uptake of intercropping are manifold (demonstrating the lock-in effect), including the practical challenges associated with the complexity of production and harvest, as well as the lack of markets, information, and advice. In this session, we aim at bringing together researchers covering ecological and socioeconomic aspects of intercropping with practitioners and policy makers from around the world. This session will provide insight into the latest developments concerning intercropping from across these fields. It will discuss current and future challenges and potential ways forward, exploring the possibility that intercropping systems might deliver a genuine win-win by which we can promote biodiversity conservation in farmed landscapes while helping to support (and possibly also improve) rural livelihoods and wellbeing.

 

Saludos,

Christian

 

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Prof. Christian Schöb
ETH Zurich

Agricultural Ecology

LFH B8.2
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christia...@usys.ethz.ch

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