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Book (series)Farms, family farms, farmland distribution and farm labour: What do we know today? 2019
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No results found.A better and more complete understanding of family farms is urgently needed to guide policy makers’ efforts towards achieving a number of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper takes stock of the number of farms worldwide, and their distribution and that of farmland, on the basis of agricultural censuses and survey data. Thus, it shows that there are more than 608 million farms in the world. Rough estimates also indicate that more than 90 percent of these farms are family farms (by our definition) occupying around 70–80 percent of farmland and producing about 80 percent of the world’s food in value terms. We underscore the importance of not referring to family farms and small farms (i.e., those of less than 2 hectares) interchangeably: the latter account for 84 percent of all farms worldwide, but operate only around 12 percent of all agricultural land, and produce roughly 36 percent of the world’s food. The largest 1 percent of farms in the world operate more than 70 percent of the world’s farmland. The stark differences between family farms, in terms of size, their share in farmland distribution, and their patterns across income groups and regions, make clear the importance of properly defining different types of farms and distinguishing their differences when engaging in policy discourse and decision making towards the SDGs. The paper also considers evidence on labour and age provided by the censuses. There is a need to improve agricultural censuses if we want to deepen our understanding of farms. -
Book (series)How to mainstream sustainability and circularity into the bioeconomy?
A compendium of bioeconomy good practices and policies
2021Also available in:
No results found.In its 2020 communiqué, the International Advisory Council on Global Bioeconomy has urged to strengthen good practices and policies to advance the global bioeconomy. The transition from a fossil-based economy to a bioeconomy happens at three levels: technological, organizational and social. In particular, agri-food systems are key to achieve a shift to sustainable and circular production and consumption patterns, since they occupy the biggest share of the bioeconomy from an economic, value-added perspective as well as having potential for discovery and innovation. This Compendium outlines 250 sources of good practices and policies. It covers the entire continuum of economic sectors that have a stake in biological knowledge and resources. The Compendium, therefore, highlights the wide range of aspects that are included in the concept of the bioeconomy. Being an inherently multisectoral process that involves potential synergies and trade-offs among different sustainability objectives, the implementation of bioeconomy strategies presents greater challenges than activities that are focused on a single sector. The report also shows how good practices and policies contribute to the translation of bioeconomy strategies into coordinated actions for the achievement of local priorities and sustainability goals, while also addressing global issues. Overall, the review identifies a knowledge gap: Assessments do not always indicate if practices and policies have enough evidence of impact to be recommended as models that contribute to sustainability objectives of the bioeconomy. To address this, a context-specific approach described in Chapter 5, provides support for countries to make evidence-based decisions on policies and investments for the bioeconomy. The approach helps to identify good practices and policies ex-ante, which can help achieve common sustainability objectives of bioeconomy strategies that were presented in the 2019 FAO report, Towards sustainable bioeconomy - Lessons learned from case studies. Taken together, this Compendium and the 2019 report, provide practical guidelines and resources that can support decision-makers and stakeholders in bioeconomy systems to make progress towards reaching sustainable outcomes. -
Book (stand-alone)The road to restoration: A guide to identifying priorities and indicators for monitoring forest and landscape restoration.
Revised version
2019This guide walks practitioners through seven questions to help them make decisions regarding restoration monitoring. First, practitioners are asked to determine their restoration goals, land use and barriers to sustainability. These choices are filtered by constraints and priorities, so the practitioner will develop the indicators needed to setup their monitoring framework. It provides a framework for identifying indicators. Indicators are value laden measures of development performance designed to measure and calibrate progress. Environmental indicators are used to provide synthesized knowledge on environmental issues, and to highlight the extent of environmental trends. They also help to reduce complexity, provide important links between science and policy, and help decision-makers to provide guidance on environmental governance. An indicator framework can provide a management tool to help countries develop implementation strategies and allocate resources accordingly to reach restoration goals. Tracking progress with indicators can act as a report card to measure progress towards restoration and help ensure the accountability of all stakeholders for achieving the goals. The guide uses country case studies to show how a practitioner could answer the questions, offering a menu of potential indicators for measuring progress that other monitoring practitioners might find useful. Next, it highlights the different types of data that can feed into creating an indicator framework, depending on resource constraints and information needs. Some restoration programs may require fewer, cost-effective indicators that are collected locally. Other programs, may be able to integrate small, locally collected data with big data from satellite imagery and social media.
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