Explore the ecosystem services within a given landscape that can contribute to nutrition

1. Integrating nutrition to systems research:
through Nutrition sensitive landscapes

2. Diets to Landscapes

3. Adequate
dietary
intake
Disease
Supporting services
Nutrient cycling
Soil formation
Primary production
Ecosystems
and their
biodiversity
Provisioning services
Food: macronutrients,
micronutrients, anti-nutritional
factors
Medicinal products
Fresh water
Fuel wood
Regulatory services
Climate regulation
Water purification
Disease regulation
Pollinators
Cultural services
Culinary traditions
Recreational
Spiritual
Human
nutrition
outcomes
FOOD
CARE
HEALTH
Human selection, marketing and
consumption and
the impact of dietary choices on
ecosystem functioning and
services

4. “The most important route to improved nutrition is, however, the
diversification of diets – and delivering this outcome will require
CGIAR to adopt new approaches.
It will be vital to increase our understanding of food systems from the
consumers’ point of view and to place more emphasis on the
development of value chains that can deliver nutrient-rich foods to
poor consumers efficiently, at the same time as providing new
opportunities for producers and processors.”
CO SRF, February, 2015

5. Addressing nutrition with
diversified agriculture
Food-related causes
IMPROVED quality
HIGH diet diversity
UNDERNUTRITION
DIVERSIFIED AGRICULTURE PRACTICES
• Diet diversity has been
shown to be a good
predictor of dietary quality
in young children
• Diet diversity is associated
with stunting
(Moursi et al., 2008; Arimond and Ruel, 2004)Slide:Fanzo, J.
“Increased
availability of diverse
nutrient-rich foods
can be achieved by
introducing fruits,
vegetables, livestock
and fish into the
farming system” CO
SRF, 2015

6. BioversityInternationalY.Wachira
Nutrition Sensitive Landscapes

7. Working at the interaction between sustainability goals
– also important in view of the SDGs and post 2015
development agenda
Improved natural
resource systems &
ecosystem services
Improved Food &
Nutrition Security for
human health
Reducing poverty

8. Nutrition Sensitive Landscapes
Approach: Seasonal year-round
access to diverse foods
Spatial, Temporal and gender
analysis
Modeling scenarios
Participatory selection of
interventions
Scaling out of methods and
tools
Zambia, Kenya and Vietnam

9. Central NSL hypotheses
• Diverse diets can lead to diverse landscapes
• Environmental management and restoration of agricultural
landscapes can be a critical pathway to improving human
nutrition and health
• Markets and value chains provide a means to trigger or
accelerate such change
Environment
farming & food
systems
Human nutrition
& health

10. NSL approach and integration with AASDiet module
Using exis ng data from AAS biodiversity assessment
and value chain surveys
To what extent do diets meet
nutrient requirements of women
and children in different seasons?
How and why is the landscape used
by # groups for their diets?
Capturing temporal and spa al variability
Seasonal calendars and land use maps are developed
together with the communi es
What is the poten al of the
landscape to improve diets?
Landscape monitoring
A combina on of remote sensing and par cipatory
plot, farm & market sampling creates nutri onal
poten al maps and helps iden fying where and how
diversifica on is possible
What are environmental and
economic benefits and costs of
different op ons?
Integrated modeling
Landscape IMAGES, Farm DESIGN, and Cost of Diet
are being applied to Barotse data to help iden fy
best-bet solu ons. Op ons are discussed in view of
community planning and dreaming synergies and
How can successful op ons be
adopted at scale ?
Opera onal par cipatory research
Research ques ons Methodology work packages
How to select and implement best-
bet op ons for transforma ve
change?
Link to research on policies and market incen ves
Theory of change development, par cipatory ac on
research and impact evalua on, re-run integrated
modeling
What is the impact of interven ons
on nutri on, environment and the
interac on?

11. THANK YOU

12. GOAL: meet human nutrient requirements through
FOOD and DIET while also protecting the
environment from where those foods are sourced.
Approach tries to optimize the multiple goals of
food and nutrition security, sustainable use of
natural resources and conservation of biodiversity,
both for human health as well as environmental
health.
Nutrition sensitive landscapes

13. ESS and Nutrition
• In what way can we look at current
communities of species that form an
ecosystem for the “provision of food”
– Farm
– Forest
– Communal land spaces
• And how does provision of food (through ag
practices) alter current ecosystem services
(+/-)

14. • Explore the ecosystem services within a given
landscape that can contribute to nutrition
• Identify trade-offs and synergies between
agricultural practices, nutrition and environment
• Promote solutions that are both environmentally
sustainable and improve nutrition
Purpose of the research theme

15. Levels of information for the model
1. Requirements of household members
Use: Compare hh nutrient requirements to food acquisition
(own production + purchase) and simulate scenarios and
assess trade offs
2. Dietary diversity of all or selected HH members
Use: Assess trade-offs and develop best-bet scenarios *also
key monitoring indicator for diet quality
3. Quantitative dietary intakes
Use: Quantify amount of food/food group currently
consumed (in grams) and compare to requirements to assess
gaps between current consumption and requirements and set
upper and lower limits for modelling tradeoffs