This study identified characteristics of stingless bees and meliponicultures that make them excellent mediators for biocultural conservation and agroecological education: the complex, deep, and beautiful relation between humans and bees; meliponiculture's ecological and cultural importance; stingless bees as pollinators par excellence, landscape connectors, and charismatic species; the association of bees...

Agroecology is a process-based agriculture that implements agrobiodiversification to stabilize ecosystem processes and crop yield, leading to sustainable food systems. Traditionally, agrobiodiversification focused on increasing within-farm plant richness, which may increase local species richness of higher trophic levels. However, it is increasingly recognized that stabilizing ecosystem processes involving plant-animal interactions –e.g., pollination- requires practices...

The international conference 'Agriculture, biodiversity and food security: from commitments to actions' co-organized by Laval University (UL), the Ministry of International Relations and La Francophonie (MRIF) of Quebec, the FAO and the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD) was held in Quebec, Canada, from April 30 to May...

Food systems are facing major constraints, notably climate change and societal expectations, and are at an historic crossroads. Given the accelerating impact of global warming on resources such as water, as well as extreme weather events that ravage crops or destroy homes and infrastructure, and the depletion of soils and...

If agroecology is to gain ground, young people must be educated and inspired. Not enough development initiatives target youth, and it is often said that young people are not interested in agriculture, the stories in this book reveal that young people can and do inspire each other. This book showcases just a few...

Agricultural simplification continues to expand at the expense of more diverse forms of agriculture. This simplification, for example, in the form of intensively managed monocultures, poses a risk to keeping the world within safe and just Earth system boundaries. Here, this study estimated how agricultural diversification simultaneously affects social and...