The Flourishing Landscapes Programme

The Flourishing Landscapes Programme (FLP) addresses the triple challenge of livelihoods, climate change, and biodiversity loss at tropical forest frontiers. It will develop novel landscape-scale transdisciplinary research, via a new network of scientists and practitioners, to investigate strategies to both biodiversity and the climate resilience of smallholder farmers. By investigating agroforestry and community-led reforestation as nature-based solutions (NbS), the FLP addresses key knowledge gaps regarding the role of biodiversity in maximising nature’s contributions to people (NCPs) in agricultural landscapes. Building on this, via a human-centred design approach applied in Ghana, Ecuador and Viet Nam in coffee and cocoa production landscapes, the FLP will co-design, with rural communities, a citizen-led biodiversity monitoring toolkit to empower communities to utilise adaptive management to harness NCPs in their production. To showcase the value of the research data sets and citizen-science approaches, we will lead a co-design process with farmers, value chain actors and the insurance industry to explore risk sharing mechanisms that incentivise value chain investments in nature.

Target landscapes

The FLP focuses on landscapes with agricultural land-use dominated, to varying extents by, by coffee or cocoa production. In particular, we will focus on agricultural-forest matrix landscapes in three biodiversity hotspots: 1) Napa Province, Ecuador (the Tropical Andes hotspot), 2) Ashanti Region, Ghana, (Guinean Forests of West Africa) and 3) Central Highlands, Viet Nam (Indo-Burma). These landscapes represent forest-frontier areas where agricultural production, particularly cocoa (Ghana and Ecuador) and coffee cultivation (Viet Nam), intersects with severe fragmentation of natural forests.

Consortium and stakeholders

The Flourishing Landscapes Programme is driven by a novel global consortium of research, civil society and industry collaborators. We are motivated by a shared desire to deliver transformative change in the food system, by enhancing smallholder farmer climate resilience through the scaling of biodiversity’s benefits across topical agricultural landscapes. The consortium was built on the backbone of several longer-term collaborations between the Nature-based Solutions Initiative, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Tay Nguyen University and PanNature. The FLP brings together a consortium of research (Oxford, KNUST, TNU, Universidad Regional Amazónica Ikiam), finance (WTW), technology (NatureMetrics), NGO (PanNature, WWF) and community (YAKUM).

Funding

The Flourishing Landscapes Programme (FLP) is one of thirteen recipients of the first round of research grants awarded by the Global Centre on Biodiversity for Climate (GCBC) – a UK Official Development Assistance (ODA) research and development programme that funds research to unlock the potential of nature to provide climate solutions and improve livelihoods. It is funded by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs working in partnership with DAI Global as the Fund Manager Lead and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew as the Strategic Science Lead. Learn more about GCBC and this grant.