This recently published paper by Cruz-Garcia et al. presents an overview of the scientific literature on ecosystem services and food security, with a major focus on case studies of farming communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The review paper was co-authored by scientists affiliated with CIAT and could be of interest to ES researchers working on the interface with food security.
The main findings of the paper are:
- Food utilization, access and stability, which are the major food security challenges in the world, remained under-investigated in ecosystem services research.
- There is a major bias on food availability in relation to crop production, and the role played by genetic resource diversity for ensuring food security has been overlooked in ecosystem services research.
- Most studies assumed that food security would improve by increasing crop productivity, but this hypothesis remained largely untested.
- The co-production, trade-offs and off-site effects of ecosystem services in relation to food security, as well as gender and cultural services, were overlooked in research.
- Ecosystem services research needs to improve efforts in order to generate knowledge that helps to address the main imperatives of food security in the developing world.
The paper was published in the Elsevier journal Ecosystem Services, you can find the full text here.
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