The farmers, fishers and herders who live on less than US$1.25 per day live complex, highly adaptive lives where individual technical solutions in and of themselves have limited impact. Recognizing this complexity and the importance of working with stakeholders to understand and design solutions that work for them, a diversity of approaches founded in participatory action research have been developed including notably the concept of Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D).

The problems being addressed in this session are related to ensuring global food and nutrition security, as well as promoting resilience in production systems and delivering ecosystem services through agricultural biodiversity. Whole landscape management approaches embody biodiversity management, use and conservation across landscapes and ecosystems, while also harbouring biodiversity at species and intra-species dimensions.