Haileslassie, A.; Mekuria, W.; Schmitter, P.; Uhlenbrook, S.; Ludi, E. Changing Agricultural Landscapes in Ethiopia: Examining Application of Adaptive Management Approach. Sustainability2020, 12, 8939.
Haileslassie, A.; Mekuria, W.; Schmitter, P.; Uhlenbrook, S.; Ludi, E. Changing Agricultural Landscapes in Ethiopia: Examining Application of Adaptive Management Approach. Sustainability 2020, 12, 8939.
Haileslassie, A.; Mekuria, W.; Schmitter, P.; Uhlenbrook, S.; Ludi, E. Changing Agricultural Landscapes in Ethiopia: Examining Application of Adaptive Management Approach. Sustainability2020, 12, 8939.
Haileslassie, A.; Mekuria, W.; Schmitter, P.; Uhlenbrook, S.; Ludi, E. Changing Agricultural Landscapes in Ethiopia: Examining Application of Adaptive Management Approach. Sustainability 2020, 12, 8939.
Abstract
Ethiopia has decades of experience in implementing land and water management interventions. Nonetheless, there remains persisting challenges to follow an adaptive management (AM) approach in efforts of restoring and transforming agricultural landscapes. This review was carried out to synthesize evidences on the impact on agricultural landscapes following the implementation of land and water management practices and to evaluate the use of AM approaches. We explored how elements of the structures and functions of landscapes have been transformed, and how the components of AM, such as structured decision-making and learning processes, have been applied. Despite numerous environmental and economic benefits of land and water management interventions in Ethiopia, this review revealed gaps in AM approaches. These include: (i) insufficient efforts in relation to evidence based contextualization of interventions, (ii) insufficient efforts in monitoring of bio-physical and socio-economic processes and changes post implementation, (iii) lack of trade-off analyses, and (iv) inadequacy of local community engagement and provision of feedback. Given the many uncertainties we must deal with, efforts to restore and transform agricultural landscapes cannot follow a business-as-usual approach. Future investment, in AM approach, tailored to the needs and context would help to achieve the goals of sustainable agricultural landscape transformation. The success depends on three interdependent pillars of action: the ability to make a robust, co-developed plan of interventions, the ability to continuously monitor changes based on key variables, and to learn from the knowledge generated and apply the learning as implementation evolves.
Keywords
landscape; land and water management; restoration of ecosystem services; AM; Ethiopia
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Anatomy and Physiology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.