Uganda leads in integrating agriculture and biodiversity conservation

As global leaders prepare to meet in October to assess progress on conserving Earth’s biological diversity, Uganda is taking the lead on a particularly thorny issue: How to make farming and forests compatible.

Almost half the planet’s potentially productive land has been harnessed for food production. As more and more natural ecosystems are turned into farmland, agriculture has come to be seen as biodiversity’s greatest enemy. But many scientists consider that view outdated. To slow biodiversity loss, they say, farmland must be viewed as part of a mosaic of interconnected ecosystems that support countries’ goals for biodiversity conservation. 

“It is incredibly important to conserve biodiversity in agricultural landscapes,” says Philip Dobie, senior fellow at the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry Centre (CIFOR-ICRAF) in Nairobi, Kenya. “The challenge is to make agriculture part of the solution,  rather than the enemy. That means radically rethinking the concept of biodiversity conservation and agriculture.”

The need to focus on the interdependence of food systems and wild biodiversity has become increasingly clear in discussions of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the global treaty that guides both national and international policies and efforts to conserve the planet’s biodiversity.

The CBD, which was opened for signatures at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and came into force a year later, addresses biodiversity conservation, the sustainable use of the elements of biodiversity, and fair and equitable sharing of benefits resulting from the use of genetic resources.

With studies showing accelerating rates of extinction of species, the CBD set 20 goals, known as the Aichi Targets, to guide countries’ policies and actions on biodiversity conservation from 2011 through 2020. But while the convention recognized the need for agriculture to be sustainable and the importance of protecting the plant varieties and animal breeds on which food systems depend, there was little in the Aichi Targets that addressed the massive amount of biodiversity that can co-exist in agricultural landscapes, Dobie says.

In 2022, the Aichi Targets were replaced by the Kumming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which draws a close relationship between food production systems and biodiversity targets. Among other things, the framework encourages biodiversity-friendly practices in food production, as well as the sustainable use of biodiversity in agricultural areas.

“The Global Biodiversity Framework made a huge leap forward in recognizing the importance of all landscapes, including agricultural landscapes, for biodiversity conservation,” Dobie says.

But while the international convention and the global framework set overall goals, their implementation depends on the local and national policies that each country outlines in its National Biodiversity Strategy Action Plan (NBSAP), which sets targets for meeting those goals. A key task for countries now is to review the national targets in their NBSAPs and determine how well they align with the new targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework. Bringing their national policies into line with the global framework will enable them to fully integrate agriculture into their biodiversity conservation actions.

The first developing country to have successfully completed this task is Uganda. In doing so, it has made a world-leading policy shift in its approach to agroforestry. 

“For some time now, Uganda has recognized the importance of agroforestry as an approach to sustainable agriculture,” Dobie says. “Now it has linked its agroforestry targets with goals set under international biodiversity conservation agreements. In doing so, it has recognized the potential of sound agricultural landscape management for the conservation of wild biodiversity.”

Even before the global framework was developed, Uganda began grappling with the challenge under the leadership of Francis Ogwal, who is now senior manager for environment planning and coordination in the country’s National Environment Management Authority. 

Under the Aichi Targets, Uganda recognized the importance of agroforestry as an approach to sustainable agriculture. In its new strategy, it has linked its agroforestry targets with the first goal of the global framework, which calls for planning and management of all areas of a country to reduce biodiversity loss. This goal brings agricultural landscapes fully into biodiversity conservation. 

“Uganda has recognized the potential of sound agricultural landscape management for the conservation of wild biodiversity,” Dobie says. “If this small but significant step is replicated globally, there will be an important and significant shift towards agricultural management that is friendly to, and which benefits from, extensive biodiversity. As a result, the half of the planet’s land that is currently used for food production can become a biodiversity reserve rather than a biodiversity desert.”

Uganda has been shifiting in this direction for many years, through both visionary national policies and its leadership in international debates. Uganda was one of just a few countries to develop a National Agroforestry Strategy, which will now be seen as an important instrument for biodiversity conservation.

Besides leading national policy reform, Ogwal has been active in the CBD for more than a decade and co-chaired the CBD working group that hammered out the Global Biodiversity Framework. Negotiations for that framework, which was meant to replace the Aichi Targets in 2020, were interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which also delayed for two years the COP15 at which the framework was adopted.

“Francis Ogwal worked tirelessly as co-chair of the group that engaged in the long and complex negotiations that led to the adoption of the Global Biodiversity Framework,” Dobie says. “He is a true world leader for biodiversity.”

Source: CIFOR