The legacy of the land - Storymap

An inextricable bond

Cereals, vegetables, citrus fruits, olive orchards and vines. The fertile grounds of the Mediterranean have been harvested for centuries, feeding civilisations, shaping landscapes, cultures and societies. With their practices, farmers, shepherds and fishermen have built agricultural wisdom across generations, influencing the unique biodiversity of the Mediterranean region.

Today, the Mediterranean is under intense pressure from a variety of human activities and has become a priority for conservation. Mediterranean biodiversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate, and one of the primary drivers of this decline, particularly in terrestrial environments, is known to be agricultureⁱ.
However, could agriculture also be part of the solution?

If biodiversity thrives, so does agriculture: biodiversity generates multiple ecosystem services - the direct and indirect benefits that people obtain from ecosystems - of which agriculture, as many other fields, is reliant upon. Biodiversity is the source of all crops and domesticated livestock as well as the varieties within them.

From vertebrates to microorganisms, agricultural landscapes hold a tremendous range of species that have a profound and positive impact on Earth’s habitability^iv. Henceforth, sustainable and well-managed agriculture landscapes can actually play a key role in improving biodiversity conservation, besides maintaining the well-being of local communities. We can see many examples of the potential of these cultural landscapes today.

The cultural landscapes of the Mediterranean region are the legacy of thousands of years of action and interaction of natural and/or human factors. The experience and knowledge of the Mediterranean people have led to a myriad of agricultural systems and local breeds/crops through the adaptation to local environments. These traditional landscapes have proved to achieve a balanced, sustainable productivity in harmony with nature, preserving species, ecosystems and genetic diversity and human well-being, preserving religious, artistic or cultural diversity.

It is worth mentioning that in the Mediterranean there are also countless cultural and sustainable practices with structural elements such as field margins, hedgerows, stonewalls, patches of woodland or scrub and small rivers which enhance biodiversity. There is still more research needed to better understand the relationships between biodiversity, human well-being, practices and structural elements .

The threat and the opportunity

Nowadays, cultural landscapes are evolving in two opposite directions: abandonment or intensification. Traditional farming practices are giving way to a more profitable, intensive agriculture, which is provoking the loss of biodiversity which previously thrived in these landscapes, and is causing the disappearance of traditional knowledge, practices and cultural identity of the local communities.

In the Mediterranean basin, as in many other parts of the world, the lack of crop diversity is quite concerning: over 85% of the total agricultural production focuses only on cereals, vegetables, and citrus fruits^vi. As the following map shows, olive orchards and vines are also important crops.

All in all, the current trends are reducing the resilience of agricultural systems to adapt to variations, causing instability. In addition, they are threatening numerous wild species of plants and animals that depend on agro silvopastoral practices in different ways, in an often complex and multidirectional relation.

A pledge for a more holistic approach

The benefits and values that healthy ecosystems and biodiversity provide are countless. This bond is particularly present in cultural landscapes, but not always apparent. Agricultural productivity is typically measured by yield per hectare, a simplistic metric that does not account for the costs to our health, livelihoods, soils, water and climate^viii. According to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, “the precise link between diversity and the capacity of an ecosystem to provide services is a complex one, and an area in which science is still developing.” Some initiatives, like The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Agriculture and Food (TEEBAgriFood), are focusing on making these benefits more visible and demonstrating their value in economic terms. Inextricably linked to the economic values of these landscapes are also their social, spiritual and cultural values, that are way harder to measure.

With 10 billion people to feed by 2050 and 40 percent of available land already growing food^ix, new frameworks and models are very much needed to rethink the way food arrives on our plates.Traditional cultural landscapes may contribute to shine a light on the positive linkages of food systems to the environment and society.

When managed sustainably and knowledgeably, cultural landscapes provides the necessary resources for local communities to thrive while having a minimal negative impact on the environment^ix. Many traditional cultural landscapes have proved to be sustainable benefiting biodiversity and human well-being at a large and the Mediterranean basin offers many examples of it. Unfortunately, this invaluable heritage is being lost for different social and economic reasons, often influenced by lower productivity and profitability. To stop the loss of these landscapes, it is decisive to recognize the benefits they provide, and develop mechanisms to enhance them.

The following map shows a compilation of different scientific papers documenting cultural landscapes in the Mediterranean region that benefit either or both biological and cultural diversity for human well-being. There is more specific information on 70 Mediterranean cultural landscapes, including 8 cultural landscapes that form part of the Alliance for Mediterranean Culture & Nature (AMNC). The Alliance for Mediterranean Nature and Culture (AMNC) is a partnership between several NGOs that joined forces in 2021, and works on strengthening awareness and understanding of cultural landscapes.

Taking action

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) has been very active mainstreaming biodiversity across sectors of agriculture: launching a Biodiversity Mainstreaming Platform, spreading awareness and mobilizing resources. The FAO strategy on mainstreaming biodiversity, approved in 2019, is the result of several regional dialogues with key stakeholders, and constitutes a significant effort to gather key knowledge to catalyse actions on this subject.

The Centre for Mediterranean Cooperation of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN-Med) has become part of the Alliance of Mediterranean Nature and Culture, which aims to enable positive feedbacks between agriculture and biodiversity, and to ensure that practitioners receive sufficient socio-economic support to maintain the positive practices for biodiversity.

The MAVA Foundation - a major funding partner of conservation projects - has created a programme to promote “cultural practices that shape the cultural landscapes which in turn, harbour biodiversity and preserve natural capital” in the Mediterranean basin. IUCN-Med participates in this programme with several partners, developing actions that will improve the knowledge and monitoring of biological and cultural diversity.

Activities are held in three different kinds of landscapes:

• Mountain/high altitude sites characterised by traditional farming, grazing, agroforestry and water management practices (the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, the Al-Shouf Biosphere Reserve, West Bekaa and Mount Lebanon in Lebanon, and the Taurus mountains in Central and Southern Anatolia, Turkey).
• Traditional agro-silvo-pastoral systems in lowland areas (the corridor with dehesas/montados stretching from Extremadura and Córdoba, Spain, to Coruche in Santarém, Portugal, and Kroumirie Mogod in North-western Tunisia).
• Island sites characterised by a mosaic of traditional farming, livestock breeding and water management (the islands of Lemnos, Greece and Menorca, Spain).

Do you want to learn more?

• M6 MAVA-Promoting sustainable land use practices
• Biodiversity Knowledge and Monitoring-IUCN Med
• UNESCO Cultural landscapes
• FAO Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS)
• FAO Biodiversity Mainstreaming Platform
• FAO strategy on mainstreaming biodiversity

References

1. IUCN Centre for Mediterranean Cooperation. The Mediterranean, a global priority for conservation. Infographic, November 2018.
2. Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2008). Biodiversity and Agriculture: Safeguarding Biodiversity and Securing Food for the World. Montreal, 56 pages
3. https://www.globalsoilbiodiversity.org/
4. Ed. Hamilton S, Doll J & Robertson G. “The ecology of agricultural landscapes: long term research on the path to sustainability” 2015, Oxford University press.
5. FAO (2018). Biodiversity for Sustainable Agriculture: FAO’s Work on Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture.
6. UNEP/MAP-Plan Bleu: State of the Environment and Development in the Mediterranean, UNEP/MAP-Plan Bleu, Athens, 2009
7. Aryal S., Maraseni T., Cockfield G., de Bruyn L.L. (2018) Transhumance, Livestock Mobility and Mutual Benefits Between Crop and Livestock Production. In: Lichtfouse E. (eds) Sustainable Agriculture Reviews 31. Sustainable Agriculture Reviews, vol 31. Springer, Cham
8. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) (2018). Measuring what matters in agriculture and food systems: a synthesis of the results and recommendations of TEEB for Agriculture and Food’s Scientific and Economic Foundations report. Geneva: UN Environment.
9. Biodiversity International, 2017. Mainstreaming Agrobiodiversity in Sustainable Food Systems: Scientific Foundations for an Agrobiodiversity Index. Biodiversity International, Rome, Italy.
10. FAO (2018). Sustainable Agriculture for Biodiversity: Biodiversity for Sustainable Agriculture