Laura Calvet-Mir

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

The global agrifood system faces significant threats due to rapid and interconnected social‐ecological changes, including climate change, land‐use shifts, demographic changes and emerging diseases. Small‐scale farmers are among the most vulnerable groups to these changes due to their direct dependence on their environment. The resilience of small‐s...

Drawing on a global literature review describing and characterizing the use of landraces by Indigenous and Local Communities (IPLC) in the context of climate change, we found that economic factors seem more important than climate change in explaining the worldwide decline in landraces. We identified that structural agricultural policies lead to far...

In the face of ongoing crop homogenization, preserving crop diversity is crucial for maximizing ecological interactions and reducing the risk of total crop failure. This study focuses on remote European mountain agroecosystems, where significant crop diversity reservoirs still exist. Existing literature identifies market forces, policies, and clima...

Urban commons literature has grown in diversity and theoretical sophistication. Methodologically, however, it has consistently privileged in-depth case studies at the neighborhood or city scale. This approach reproduces bounded and administratively defined notions of the “urban” and risks neglecting the interconnections between “commons” initiative...

Indigenous Peoples and local communities with nature-dependent livelihoods are disproportionately affected by climate change impacts, but their experience, knowledge and needs receive inadequate attention in climate research and policy. Here, we discuss three key findings of a collaborative research consortium arising from the Local Indicators of C...

El objetivo del estudio es analizar, mediante investigación participativa, el conocimiento ecológico tradicional asociado al huerto familiar en tres localidades rurales del Estado de México. Diversos autores reconocen que los conocimientos de campesinos e indígenas contribuyen en la mitigación de la crisis socioambiental planetaria. Sin embargo, au...

Indigenous Peoples and local communities are heavily affected by climatic changes. Investigating local understandings of climate change impacts, and their patterned distribution, is essential to effectively support monitoring and adaptation strategies. In this study, we aimed to understand the consistency in climate change impact reports and factor...

Global polls have shown that people in high-income countries generally report being more satisfied with their lives than people in low-income countries. The persistence of this correlation, and its similarity to correlations between income and life satisfaction within countries, could lead to the impression that high levels of life satisfaction can...

The effects of climate change depend on specific local circumstances, posing a challenge for worldwide research to comprehensively encompass the diverse impacts on various local social-ecological systems. Here we use a place-specific but cross-culturally comparable protocol to document climate change indicators and impacts as locally experienced an...

In south-eastern Senegal, Bassari farmers have historically cultivated and consumed a wide diversity of varieties of sorghum, fonio, and Bambara groundnut, most of which thrive in poor soils, are nutritious, and withstand drought. These crops are now on the verge of disappearance from the fields of the Bassari despite their potential fit in the pre...

Current social-ecological changes affect territories and people's livelihoods worldwide. Many of these changes have detrimental effects on small-scale agricultural systems, with concomitant negative consequences on global and local food security and sovereignty. The objectives of this study were to explore (i) local knowledge on social-ecological c...

CONTEXT Agroecosystems' social-ecological resilience largely depends on the crop diversity generated and maintained by farmers, which provides insurance against changing environmental and socio-economic conditions. In turn, crop diversity generation, maintenance, and distribution is influenced by seed circulation networks. Thus, patterns of seed c...

Mainstream discourses frame anthropogenic climate change as a biophysical apolitical problem, thus privileging Western science and silencing other worldviews. Through a case study among the Bassari, an ethnic group in South-Eastern Senegal, we assess the local, embodied, and situated understandings of climate change and the tensions that arise when...

The global environmental and social-economic crises of industrialized agriculture have led to the emergence of agroecology as an alternative approach aiming to increase the ecological, social and economic sustainability of agri–food systems. The ‘multi-level perspective’ is now a widely used framework to understand and promote the upscaling of loca...

Urban commons have emerged within the latest mobilization cycle, and have developed forms of everyday politics. Marxist and social movement scholars tend to see the urban commons/local state interactions that assemble commons’ material infrastructure as the prelude to commons being co-opted. Governance scholars uphold that these interactions can br...

Most studies on climate change’s impacts on agriculture focus on modeling techniques based on large-scale meteorological data, while few have investigated how farmer’s perception of climate change’s impacts can affect crop diversity and crop management practices, especially in industrialized contexts. To fill this gap, we conducted 24 semi-structur...

Current social-environmental changes such as climate change and biodiversity loss are interconnected and affecting people's livelihoods worldwide. Peasants are some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of these changes, but their knowledge and needs are rarely considered in public policy. The aim of this study was to document the (i) observed soci...

Climate change is an indisputable reality, but it seems that we still consider that it does not concern us directly, as if it only affected the melting ice in the Arctic, the polar bears or the glaciers of the Himalayas. We intend to show, through interviews with elderly people who live in rural areas and who have worked in activities in close cont...

El cambio climático, fenómeno de carácter global, afecta todos los rincones y comunidades humanas y no-humanas a escala local. Uno de los medios de vida más afectados, de manera negativa por el cambio climático, es la agricultura familiar campesina (AFC). La AFC es principalmente practicada por comunidades locales (i.e., campesinos indígenas y no-i...

One of the factors threatening the sustainability of rural territories is the hegemonic agro-industrial model, whose environmental and social impacts strongly limit rural life. Here, we want to call attention to the opportunities provided by alternative agri-food systems, based on agroecology and food sovereignty, as a cultural heritage to support...

Research into the relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being, including poverty alleviation, has blossomed. However, little is known about who has produced this knowledge, what collaborative patterns and institutional and funding conditions have underpinned it, or what implications these matters may have. To investigate the potent...

Homogenization of crop portfolios from the field to the global scale is raising concerns about agricultural adaptation to climate change. Assessing whether such trends threaten farmers’ long-term adaptive capacity requires a thorough understanding of changes in their crop portfolios, identification of the drivers of change, and the implications suc...

Citizen science (CS) is growing quickly, given its potential to enhance knowledge coproduction by diverse participants, generating large and global data sets. However, uneven participation in CS is still an important concern. This work aims to understand (1) participation dynamics in CS and (2) how they are shaped by participation barriers and driv...

This paper explores the relations of centrality and hierarchy between cities and firms implementing Smart City strategies in the context of the Spanish Network of Smart Cities (RECI). While the literature has usually focused on the global dimension of cities and firms networks, exploring a national case offers interesting insights about the presenc...

Understanding valuation of and access to traditional agroecological knowledge (TAeK) in industrialized countries is key to designing initiatives that can reverse the erosion of TAeK. We explored these issues using a quasi-experimental design. We measured valuation and access to TAeK with a survey before and after an intervention based on a citizen...

This work explores the actors and reasons behind Traditional Agroecological Knowledge (TAeK) conservation initiatives in industrialized contexts. Results come from interviews to key informants and social network analyses of TAeK conservation projects conducted in central Catalonia. Actors used contrasting discourses to refer to TAeK conservation, b...

Una forma de superar algunas de las limitaciones de las políticas tradicionales de desarrollo rural es la apuesta por modelos agroalimentarios alternativos basados en la agroecología y la soberanía alimentaria. Los procesos de transición agroecológica pretenden, entre otras cosas, activar dos dinámicas fundamentales, la recuperación de conocimiento...

The global environmental and social-economic crises of industrialized agriculture have led to the emergence of agroecology as an alternative approach aiming to increase the ecological, social and economic sustainability of agri–food systems. The ‘multi-level perspective’ is now a widely used framework to understand and promote the upscaling of loca...

Soilless crops are commonly used in rooftop agriculture (RA) because they easily adapt to building constraints. However, acceptance of the produce derived from this system may be controversial. This paper evaluates consumers’ acceptance of food from RA in Mediterranean cities, focusing on the quality of the product, production system, and consumers...

In this chapter we explore the governance of traditional agricultural knowledge (TAK) under the commons framework, or the idea that knowledge can be governed as a commons, i.e., as a resource used by a group of people who have self-developed a set of rules to manage the social dilemmas derived from the resource collective use. To illustrate the gov...

El presente artículo, buenas prácticas de desarrollo sostenible: el huerto familiar en el Altiplano Central Mexicano, analiza en tres localidades rurales de México los conocimientos agroecológicos tradicionales asociados a esta práctica, para ofrecer evidencia de su importancia para el desarrollo local. Diversos estudios constatan que los huertos f...

El conocimiento agroecológico tradicional (CAeT) incluye los conocimientos, prácticas o cosmovisiones relativos a la agrobiodiversidad y los agroecosistemas. Estos conocimientos están adaptados localmente y han sido desarrollados por las comunidades rurales de todo el mundo a través de su interacción con el entorno. Estos sistemas de conocimiento h...

Traditional agroecological knowledge (TAeK) refers to the cumulative and evolving body of knowledge, practices, beliefs, institutions, and worldviews about the relationships between a society or cultural group and their agroecosystems. These knowledge systems contribute to maintaining environmental and culturally sensitive food systems and have bee...

The joint challenges of population increase, food security and conservation of agrobiodiversity demand a rethink of plant breeding and agricultural research from a different perspective. While more food is undeniably needed, the key question is rather about how to produce it in a way that sustains biological diversity and mitigates climate change....

The restructuring of biodiversity governance in Europe during the last two decades has been, inter alia, based on the argument that effective conservation hinges on consensual decision-making involving all relevant stakeholders. This has given rise to various network-based forms of governance and participatory arrangements in protected areas reinfo...

Throughout the 20th century, urban gardening in central and northern Europe as well as in North America has received a great deal of academic attention. However, the recent proliferation of urban gardening in other geographies, such as southern Europe in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2007–2008, remains underexplored. The economic crisis p...

Despite the increasing recognition of the need to conserve mangroves, degradation has continued during the last two decades due to ineffective and non-inclusive decision-making processes exclusively based on economic factors. The purpose of the present study is to give tools to mangrove conservation management and policy, exploring the sociocultura...

Debates sobre quién, cómo y con qué implicaciones sociales, económicas y ecológicas alimentará el mundo. Las variedades tradicionales o variedades locales son bienes comunales, ya que han sido creadas y mantenidas por las comunidades campesinas. Sin embargo, la apropiación privada de las variedades tradicionales amenaza los derechos de uso colectiv...

In recent years, Social Network Analysis (SNA) has increasingly been applied to the study of complex human-plant relations. This quantitative approach has enabled a better understanding of (1) how social networks help explain agrobiodiversity management, and (2) how social relations infl uence the transmission of local ecological knowledge (LEK) re...

Ecosystem services have become a critical issue in the environmental literature, however knowledge on whether women and men similarly value ecosystem services is still nascent. We aim at advancing the understanding of the relation between gender and environmental perceptions through the analysis of values assigned by women and men to ecosystem serv...

Desde tiempos lejanos la especie humana se ha servido de la naturaleza de la cual forma parte, de aquí nace una ciencia encargada de estudiar el conocimiento tradicional de las plantas, la etnobotánica. Un botánico norteamericano, fue el primero en utilizar este término a finales del siglo XIX (Harshberger, 1896) y le siguieron botánicos y antropól...

A Matter of Taste: Local Explanations for the Consumption of Wild Food Plants in the Catalan Pyrenees and the Balearic Islands. Previous research has documented different trends in the consumption of wild food plants but has rarely analyzed the motivations behind their continued (or lack of) consumption. In this article, we use empirical data to ex...

The last decades have witnessed a growing research interest of local ecological knowledge (LEK), with some research focusing on its effective transmission for natural resource management. Here we contribute to this body of research by focusing on an understudied agroecosystem: home gardens in rural areas of developed countries. We characterize home...

Local participation of stakeholders in governance of protected areas is considered to be important to natural resource management and biodiversity conservation. Social network analysis (SNA) is a useful tool for analysis because it allows the understanding of stakeholders’ relationships, interactions, and influences through communication networks....

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has completed its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). Here, we explore the social scientific networks informing Working Group III (WGIII) assessment of mitigation for the AR5. Identifying authors’ institutional pathways, we highlight the persistence and extent of North–South inequalities in the author...

Urban gardens have been observed to multiply in response to crises. However, the meaning and motivations behind the emergence of gardening movements varies greatly over space and time. In this paper we argue that bottom up urban gardening initiatives taking place in Southern European countries in form of land occupation and communalization represen...

La Dinamización Local Agroecológica (DLAe) forma parte del paradigma agroecológico, un paradigma alternativo de desarrollo rural que se despliega en tres frentes: como disciplina científica, como conjunto de prácticas de manejo agrario y como movimiento social transformador. La triple propuesta ofrecida por la DLAe cuestiona el sistema agroalimenta...

The notion of ecosystem services is considered useful for integrating perceptions and values into decision-making on environment and nature. Sociocultural factors have been suggested to explain perceptions and values assigned to ecosystem services. We examine this by undertaking a sociocultural valuation of ecosystem services provided by the natura...

Research on landrace in situ conservation has examined the socio-economic characteristics of landrace custodians and the social organizations where landrace diversity occurs. However, researchers have paid less attention to the distinctive features that result in landraces of some crops being preserved while others are abandoned. In this work, we a...

Les polítiques de conservació de la biodiversitat estan sent substituïdes per polítiques centrades a potenciar la provisió de serveis ambientals, entesos com els beneficis que la natura proveeix als éssers humans. El nostre estudi parteix de la hipòtesi que la millora del coneixement sobre aquesta relació ajudarà a dissenyar estratègies i polítique...

Contemporary industrial societies typically rely on engineering and technological means to control variability threatening food production or other aspects of survival. But before the advent of industrial mechanization and fuel-driven agriculture, societies had other types of adaptation strategies often oriented to spread risk across space (mobilit...

The idea that knowledge flows through social networks is implicit in research on traditional knowledge, but researchers have paid scant attention to the role of social networks in shaping its distribution. We bridge those two bodies of research and investigate a) the structure of network of exchange of plant propagation material (germplasm) and b)...

We explore the relationship between biodiversity, ecosystem services and conservation policy. A framework for studying their interdependence is proposed. We argue that a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for making a transition to a truly sustainable economy is that biodiversity conservation and its analysis take into account unwanted and...

Interest in landraces conservation has grown in the last decades with research on the topic focusing on in situ conservation of agrobiodiversity in the tropics. Researchers agree that home gardens play a key role in the maintenance of in situ agrobiodiversity, but few studies have analyzed how farmers actually maintain agrobiodiversity in home gard...

Previous research on tropical home gardens stresses their ecological, economic, and social functions. This article a) describes home gardens (n = 252) in three rural areas of the Iberian Peninsula, b) explores motivations for gardening, and c) computes the gross financial benefits of crops in home gardens. Different from tropical gardens, the studi...

Interest in ecosystem services provided by agroecosystems has grown over the last decades with research focusing on the type of environmental, economic and social benefits delivered by agroecosystems. Researchers suggest that, besides the provisioning of food, fuel, and fiber, agroecosystems provide habitat, cultural, and regulating services. One t...

Because of its potential role in providing ecosystem services and private benefits (food security), the concern about the loss of agrobiodiversity has grown. We explore the links between agrobiodiversity and farm financial benefits in small-scale agroecosystems. We measured crop diversity in a subsistence-oriented agricultural production system: ho...

Ethnoecology studies the relations of human beings with their environment aiming at understanding several current socio-ecological problems such as ecological degradation and loss of cultural diversity, mainly from a local point of view. Since 2006, the research team of the Ethnoecology Laboratory (Autonomous University of Barcelona) is conducting...

Ethnoecology studies human beings’ relation with their environment aiming at understanding several current social-ecological problems such as ecological degradation and loss of cultural diversity, mainly from a local point of view. Since 2006, the research team of the Ethnoecology Laboratory (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) is conducting resea...

Landraces in situ Conservation: A Case Study in High-Mountain Home Gardens in Vall Fosca, Catalan Pyrenees, Iberian Peninsula. Interest in landrace conservation has grown over the last few decades with much research focusing on the maintenance of on-farm crop genetic diversity in the tropics. Research on landraces is less abundant in temperate clim...

Gendered Homegardens: A Study in Three Mountain Areas of the Iberian Peninsula. As an example of the importance of gender relations in the use of natural resources, several authors have analyzed the role of women in homegardens. Gendered differences in homegarden management have been difficult to disentangle due to the often-shared nature of garden...

Researchers and conservation managers largely agree on the relevance of traditional ecological knowledge for natural resource management in indigenous communities, but its prevalence and role as societies modernize are contested. We analyzed the transmission of traditional knowledge among rural local people in communities linked to protected areas...

The modeling of cultural transmission is of great importance for understanding the maintenance, erosion, and spread of cultural traits and innovations. Researchers have hypothesized that, unlike biological transmission, cultural transmission occurs through at least three different, non-mutually exclusive paths: (1) from parents (vertical); (2) from...

Interest in ethnomedicine has grown in the last decades, with much research focusing on how local medicinal knowledge can contribute to Western medicine. Researchers have emphasized the divide between practices used by local medical practitioners and Western doctors. However, researchers have also suggested that merging concepts and practices from...

The propensity to imitation over other forms of learning is one of the major differences between humans and other species and one that has allowed for cumulative cultural evolution. However, imitation alone cannot explain increases of average fitness in human populations. Anthropologists have hypothesized that people do not imitate behaviors from r...