Speaker Class C
Social-ecological sustainability challenges for the traditional farming landscapes
Traditional farming landscapes occurs all over the world. They evolved as tightly connected and co-adapted social-ecological systems. Traditional farming landscapes are often biodiversity hotspots and represents biocultural refugia for rare and protected species, which directly depends on the local ecological knowledge, management practices and life philosophies. In the presentation I will use the leverage points framework and the human-nature connections framework to illustrate the social-ecological systems challenges these landscapes face. It is showed that the rich traditional ecological knowledge and local practices, which are directly relevant to the persistence of wildlife species and ecologically resilient farming landscapes are the most visible and easily quantifiable layers of a complex social-ecological systems. Deeper, less obvious levels such as the land stewardship forms, local identities, socio-cultural and economic aspirations, cultural dilution, externally imposed rules and paradigms as well as corrupt intentionality are threatening the persistence and quality of local ecological knowledge and practices which are directly relevant for the maintenance of the entire biocultural systems. At the end of the presentation research hypotheses are presented towards generating socially and politically robust and reliable knowledge for the maintenance of the traditional farming landscapes. The presentation draws on a recent review published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution (Hartel et al., 2023).
Biography
Tibor is Associate Professor at Babes-Bolyai University, Faculty of Environmental Science and Engineering. With a strong ecological research background, Tibor's interests cover the sustainability challenges of complex social-ecological systems in Eastern Europe. His model systems are the ancient and modern wood-pastures, large carnivores, and urban systems. Tibor received an Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship (2012-2014) and was awarded with Peregrinus Prize of Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2019) for his research achievements. Since 2021 Tibor is also elected member of the Academy of Europe – Academia Europaea