The rapidity and extent of today's technological, cultural and economic changes threaten many of these agricultural heritage systems, including the biodiversity on which they are based, as well as their societies. The focus over recent decades on agricultural productivity, specialisation and global markets, and associated disregard of externalities and adaptive management strategies, has led to a relative and generalised neglect of research and development support for diversified, ingenious systems. Pressures are constraining farmer innovation and leading to the adoption of unsustainable practices, overexploitation of resources and declining productivity, as well as agricultural specialisation and adoption of exotic domesticated species.

This poses a severe risk of genetic erosion, loss of associated knowledge systems and cultures and gaps in transmission of the important global heritage, and can drive the communities into a vicious cycle of poverty and socio-economic destabilisation.

Unless these agricultural systems are assisted to counteract these threats, GIAHS will meet the fate of numerous rural communities which have been disintegrating all over the world in the wake of industrialisation, modernisation and globalisation.