Home Gardens for Improved Food Security and Livelihoods

Home Gardens for Improved Food Security and Livelihoods PDF Author: D. Hashini Galhena Dissanayake
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315471752
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Home Gardens for Improved Food Security and Livelihoods demonstrates how home gardens hold particular significance for resource-poor and marginalized communities in developing countries, and how they offer a versatile strategy toward building local and more resilient food systems. With food and nutritional security being a major global challenge, there is an urgent need to find innovative ways to increase food production and diversify food sources while increasing income-generating opportunities for communities faced with hunger and poverty. This book shows that when implemented properly, home gardens can become just such an innovative solution, as well as an integral part of sustainable food security programs. It provides a conceptual overview of social, economic, environmental and nutritional issues related to home gardening in diverse contexts, including gender issues and biodiversity conservation, and presents case studies from Africa, Asia and Latin America highlighting home gardening experiences and initiatives. The volume concludes with a synthesis of key lessons learned and ways forward for further enhancing home gardens for sustainable food security and development. This book will be a useful read for students and scholars working on local food systems, food security, sustainable development and more broadly development strategy.

Home Gardens for Improved Food Security and Livelihoods

Home Gardens for Improved Food Security and Livelihoods PDF Author: D. Hashini Galhena Dissanayake
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315471752
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Get Book Here

Book Description
Home Gardens for Improved Food Security and Livelihoods demonstrates how home gardens hold particular significance for resource-poor and marginalized communities in developing countries, and how they offer a versatile strategy toward building local and more resilient food systems. With food and nutritional security being a major global challenge, there is an urgent need to find innovative ways to increase food production and diversify food sources while increasing income-generating opportunities for communities faced with hunger and poverty. This book shows that when implemented properly, home gardens can become just such an innovative solution, as well as an integral part of sustainable food security programs. It provides a conceptual overview of social, economic, environmental and nutritional issues related to home gardening in diverse contexts, including gender issues and biodiversity conservation, and presents case studies from Africa, Asia and Latin America highlighting home gardening experiences and initiatives. The volume concludes with a synthesis of key lessons learned and ways forward for further enhancing home gardens for sustainable food security and development. This book will be a useful read for students and scholars working on local food systems, food security, sustainable development and more broadly development strategy.

Urban Soils

Urban Soils PDF Author: Rattan Lal
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 149877010X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
Globally, 30% of the world population lived in urban areas in 1950, 54% in 2016 and 66% projected by 2050. The most urbanized regions include North America, Latin America, and Europe. Urban encroachment depletes soil carbon and the aboveground biomass carbon pools, enhancing the flux of carbon from soil and vegetation into the atmosphere. Thus, urbanization has exacerbated ecological and environmental problems. Urban soils are composed of geological material that has been drastically disturbed by anthropogenic activities and compromised their role in the production of food, aesthetics of residential areas, and pollutant dynamics. Properties of urban soils are normally not favorable to plant growth—the soils are contaminated by heavy metals and are compacted and sealed. Therefore, the quality of urban soils must be restored to make use of this valuable resource for delivery of essential ecosystem services (e.g., food, water and air quality, carbon sequestration, temperature moderation, biodiversity). Part of the Advances in Soil Sciences Series, Urban Soils explains properties of urban soils; assesses the effects of urbanization on the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, and water and the impacts of management of urban soils, soil restoration, urban agriculture, and food security; evaluates ecosystem services provisioned by urban soils, and describes synthetic and artificial soils.

Tropical Homegardens

Tropical Homegardens PDF Author: B.M. Kumar
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 140204948X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
‘Homegardens’ are integrated tree–crop–animal production systems, often established on small parcels of land surrounding homesteads, and primarily found in tropical environments. This multi-authored volume contains peer-reviewed chapters from the world’s leading researchers and professionals in this topic. It summarizes the current state of knowledge on homegarden systems, with a view to using this knowledge as a basis for improving both homegardens and other similar multistrata agroforestry systems.

Vegetable Production Training Manual

Vegetable Production Training Manual PDF Author:
Publisher: Agribookstore/Winrock
ISBN:
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description


Agrobiodiversity

Agrobiodiversity PDF Author: Karl S. Zimmerer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262549697
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Experts discuss the challenges faced in agrobiodiversity and conservation, integrating disciplines that range from plant and biological sciences to economics and political science. Wide-ranging environmental phenomena—including climate change, extreme weather events, and soil and water availability—combine with such socioeconomic factors as food policies, dietary preferences, and market forces to affect agriculture and food production systems on local, national, and global scales. The increasing simplification of food systems, the continuing decline of plant species, and the ongoing spread of pests and disease threaten biodiversity in agriculture as well as the sustainability of food resources. Complicating the situation further, the multiple systems involved—cultural, economic, environmental, institutional, and technological—are driven by human decision making, which is inevitably informed by diverse knowledge systems. The interactions and linkages that emerge necessitate an integrated assessment if we are to make progress toward sustainable agriculture and food systems. This volume in the Strüngmann Forum Reports series offers insights into the challenges faced in agrobiodiversity and sustainability and proposes an integrative framework to guide future research, scholarship, policy, and practice. The contributors offer perspectives from a range of disciplines, including plant and biological sciences, food systems and nutrition, ecology, economics, plant and animal breeding, anthropology, political science, geography, law, and sociology. Topics covered include evolutionary ecology, food and human health, the governance of agrobiodiversity, and the interactions between agrobiodiversity and climate and demographic change.

The Permaculture City

The Permaculture City PDF Author: Toby Hemenway
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603585273
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Permaculture is more than just the latest buzzword; it offers positive solutions for many of the environmental and social challenges confronting us. And nowhere are those remedies more needed and desired than in our cities. The Permaculture City provides a new way of thinking about urban living, with practical examples for creating abundant food, energy security, close-knit communities, local and meaningful livelihoods, and sustainable policies in our cities and towns. The same nature-based approach that works so beautifully for growing food—connecting the pieces of the landscape together in harmonious ways—applies perfectly to many of our other needs. Toby Hemenway, one of the leading practitioners and teachers of permaculture design, illuminates a new way forward through examples of edge-pushing innovations, along with a deeply holistic conceptual framework for our cities, towns, and suburbs. The Permaculture City begins in the garden but takes what we have learned there and applies it to a much broader range of human experience; we’re not just gardening plants but people, neighborhoods, and even cultures. Hemenway lays out how permaculture design can help towndwellers solve the challenges of meeting our needs for food, water, shelter, energy, community, and livelihood in sustainable, resilient ways. Readers will find new information on designing the urban home garden and strategies for gardening in community, rethinking our water and energy systems, learning the difference between a “job” and a “livelihood,” and the importance of placemaking and an empowered community. This important book documents the rise of a new sophistication, depth, and diversity in the approaches and thinking of permaculture designers and practitioners. Understanding nature can do more than improve how we grow, make, or consume things; it can also teach us how to cooperate, make decisions, and arrive at good solutions.

Organic Agriculture for Sustainable Livelihoods

Organic Agriculture for Sustainable Livelihoods PDF Author: Niels Halberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1849712956
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
In this volume the potential of organic agriculture (OA) for rural development and the improvement of livelihoods in analysed and assessed in detail. With socio-economic, environmental and agro-ecological perspectives, it includes an overview of the state of research and proposed strategies for harnessing the potential of OA.

Livelihoods Grow in Gardens

Livelihoods Grow in Gardens PDF Author: Chris Landon-Lane
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO)
ISBN:
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
There is, in principle, no difference between the farm and the garden - same crop care, the value of soil nutrients, the strategic use of water and the knowledge that comes farm planting, transplanting, pruning and harvesting that best suits the productivity of the plants. Gardens feed people and their livestock, and provide the basis for a regular and reliable source of goods for sales at local markets. Changing weather patterns help with rotations, with the control of pests and diseases, with nutrient recycling and with the provision of employment and income.

Sustainable Intensification

Sustainable Intensification PDF Author: Jules N. Pretty
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136529276
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Continued population growth, rapidly changing consumption patterns and the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation are driving limited resources of food, energy, water and materials towards critical thresholds worldwide. These pressures are likely to be substantial across Africa, where countries will have to find innovative ways to boost crop and livestock production to avoid becoming more reliant on imports and food aid. Sustainable agricultural intensification - producing more output from the same area of land while reducing the negative environmental impacts - represents a solution for millions of African farmers. This volume presents the lessons learned from 40 sustainable agricultural intensification programmes in 20 countries across Africa, commissioned as part of the UK Government's Foresight project. Through detailed case studies, the authors of each chapter examine how to develop productive and sustainable agricultural systems and how to scale up these systems to reach many more millions of people in the future. Themes covered include crop improvements, agroforestry and soil conservation, conservation agriculture, integrated pest management, horticulture, livestock and fodder crops, aquaculture, and novel policies and partnerships.

Urban Agroecology

Urban Agroecology PDF Author: Monika Egerer
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000259501
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
Today, 20 percent of the global food supply relies on urban agriculture: social-ecological systems shaped by both human and non-human interactions. This book shows how urban agroecologists measure flora and fauna that underpin the ecological dynamics of these systems, and how people manage and benefit from these systems. It explains how the sociopolitical landscape in which these systems are embedded can in turn shape the social, ecological, political, and economic dynamics within them. Synthesizing interdisciplinary approaches in urban agroecology in the natural and social sciences, the book explores methodologies and new directions in research that can be adopted by scholars and practitioners alike. With contributions from researchers utilizing both social and natural science approaches, Urban Agroecology describes the current social-environmental understandings of the science, the movement and the practices in urban agroecology. By investigating the role of agroecology in cities, the book calls for the creation of spaces for food to be sustainably grown in urban spaces: an Urban Agriculture (UA) movement. Essential reading for graduate students, practitioners, policy makers and researchers, this book charts the course for accelerating this movement.