Dr Zareen Pervez Bharucha of Anglia Ruskin’s Global Sustainability Institute, and an expert in the sustainable intensification of agriculture, will be joined by Pavan Sukhdev, the President of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) International and a Special AgriFood Adviser for The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). Bharucha and Sukhdev will describe some of the recent findings of the first rounds of systematic research on the outcomes of ZBNF.
The other participants are Lakshmi Durga Chava, Senior Consultant for Health and Nutrition at Department of Agriculture of Government of Andhra Pradesh, and Vijay Kumar Thallam, State Advisor on agriculture and lead on the roll-out of ZBNF in Andhra Pradesh.
Through short presentations and interactive sessions the free online event, which runs from 09:30 to 12:00 (GMT) on Monday, 25 March, will explore themes including:
- The practical experiences and benefits of adopting ZBNF at scale
- The barriers and enablers to the widespread adoption of sustainable identification initiatives such as ZBNF in India
- Future challenges in ensuring sustainable agrarian livelihoods in the context of an ongoing agrarian crisis in India
- The co-benefits, beyond health yields, of the ZBNF for the well-being of rural communities and rural landscapes.
Dr Bharucha is a Senior Research Fellow at the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin, where she co-leads the institute’s Global Risk and Resilience research. She said: “Globally, some of those worst affected by climate change are those working on land under two hectares. There are around 475m of these small farms, cultivating around 12% of the world’s farmed land.
“However, many of these small farms are increasingly using innovative ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change. They are the true pioneers of climate-smart agriculture, using practices that maintain productivity while decreasing emissions. They are also producing a range of other benefits such as poverty alleviation, better nutrition and biodiversity conservation.
“ZBNF is a globally significant example of the sustainable intensification of agriculture and some 165,000 farmers have adopted it in the state of Andhra Pradesh since 2016. This online seminar will present some of the first findings on the farm-level impacts of ZBNF, and allow people to hear directly from those closely involved with ZBNF in Andhra Pradesh.”
Sign up to the free online seminar here