Consult the background document: GIS: A Window on Tropical Agriculture and Natural Resources
For further information contact: Communications Unit GIS

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The Challenge

Though often a source of destruction, land use also holds the key for combating the very conditions of rural poverty that help perpetuate the loss of natural resources. The region's agricultural frontiers hold many untapped opportunities to achieve sustainable production of food and fiber without environmental degradation.

In order to identify these opportunities and design effective policies, strategies, and technologies for taking advantage of them, decision makers at all levels need information about the dynamics of land use. Since this involves complex interactions between numerous environmental and socioeconomic factors, a major challenge is to develop and provide geographic information systems (GIS) that offer data in forms that decision makers can easily understand and use.

Objective

To promote policy and decision making that is conducive to sustainable land and environmental management by conducting scientific analysis of the patterns and dynamics of land use and by developing environmental and sustainability indicators.

Outputs

• Baseline and time-series information for analysis of land use and environmental management in CIAT's target agroecosystems (forest margins, hillsides, and savannas)
• Analysis of the limitations and potential of land use in these target agroecosystems
• Frameworks for analyzing the dynamics of land use and for using sustainability indicators
• Environmental and sustainability indicators that are relevant to land-use policy
• Scenarios and options for sustainable land use in Latin America generally and in target agroecosystems
• Networks of stakeholders established at various scales for dialog on land use scenarios and options
• Training in the use of decision-support tools and methods for building scenarios

Benefits

More appropriate land-use policies and strategies can improve the well-being of the rural poor and benefit all of society by contributing to environmental sustainability. The immediate recipients of products from this project fall into two groups. One includes policy makers at the international, national, and local levels; development and planning agencies; and nongovernment organizations. The second group includes institutions engaged in the development of agricultural technology.

Strategy

The project's strategy consists of the following key tasks:

• Maintain and update strategic databases on agricultural, environmental, social, and economic issues.
• Distribute environmental and sustainability indicators to decision makers at different levels.
• Collect and disseminate remote-sensing information on changes in land use.
• Carry out studies and develop recommendations on land management, based on analysis of data obtained through remote sensing, surveys, censuses, and other means.
• Develop GIS/mathematical models to support decision making about land management in national institutions.
• Strengthen the capacity of national and local institutions to use data, analysis, and decision-making tools.
• Disseminate data, analysis, and decision-making tools within tropical America and beyond.

Project Partners

International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Cali, Colombia

In recent years the Center has greatly expanded its land use databases and its capacity to analyze this information.

World development organizations

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) all have wide experience in the development of environmental and sustainability indicators. The World Resources Institute (WRI) and World Conservation Monitoring Centre also have considerable expertise.

Government and nongovernment agencies and universities

There is a growing emphasis on environmental issues within government institutions, such as the Brazilian Agricultural Research Enterprise (Embrapa) and Peru's National Institute of Agricultural Research (INIA), together with numerous nongovernment organizations, universities in the developing and developed countries (e.g., Canada's University of Guelph), as well as ministries of agriculture and the environment.

Other CGIAR centers

The International Potato Center (CIP) in Peru, the International Wheat and Maize Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico, the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) in Kenya, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in the USA, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Kenya, and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA) in Costa Rica work on important aspects of environmental sustainability.

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