We describe the concept, strategy, and initial results of the Millennium Villages Project and implications regarding sustainability and scalability. Our underlying hypothesis is that the interacting crises of agriculture, health, and infrastructure in rural Africa can be overcome through targeted public-sector investments to raise rural productivity and, thereby, to increased private-sector saving and investments. This is carried out by empowering impoverished communities with science-based interventions. Seventy-eight Millennium Villages have been initiated in 12 sites in 10 African countries, each representing a major agroecological zone. In early results, the research villages in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Malawi have reduced malaria prevalence, met caloric requirements, generated crop surpluses, enabled school feeding programs, and provided cash earnings for farm families.

No abstract

The relevance of traditional land-use systems in Asia is under threat from externally influenced drivers such as the use of modern agricultural technologies, urbanization, rapid industrialization, overexploitation, and underutilization. The impacts of these changes in land use are contributing to a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) in social-ecological production landscapes and seascapes (SEPLS). Societal actors operating from multiple scales create and implement place-based solutions in SEPLS in response to landscape-specific challenges and opportunities for achieving biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. This study aims to identify and demonstrate the abundance of place-based solutions for solving challenges to sustainable use and management of natural resources in SEPLS, and to better inform the existing suite of conservation and restoration solutions. We review a set of 88 case studies from The International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI) in the South, East and Southeast Asian regions using a societal-based solution scanning approach to systematically identify these solutions for conservation and restoration at local scales and to categorize them by solution type. Societal actors demonstrate preferences for solution types to reversing the loss 118 of BES in SEPLS while embracing a mix of all solution types across ecosystems. Institutional and governance solutions are the most common type across Asia. Technological solutions are preferred in East Asia, while knowledge and cognitive solutions are preferred in Southeast Asia. Economic and incentive-based solutions are found most often in South Asia as livelihood investments for local residents, and to balance trade-offs among food production and biodiversity conservation. Sharing the knowledge of various place-based solution types in different social-ecological contexts helps improve more purposeful and deliberate design of SEPLS for multiple benefits.

No abstract