Luuk Fleskens

Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Department of Soil Physics and Land Management

The sustainability of the ongoing national Campaign-Based Watershed Management (CBWM) program of Ethiopia depends on active participation of farmers in the planning and implementation activities. This study analyzes farmers' participation level in CBWM program and factors that determine their participation, using mixed research methods. Key informa...

Reforestation is a potentially large-scale approach for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, thereby helping China achieve its goal of carbon neutrality by 2060. Although China has set ambitious national targets, the cost of mitigating climate change through reforestation has yet to be identified across space and time over the next 40 years. We constr...

The Grain to Green Project (GGP) has significantly transformed land use and cover in the Chinese Loess Plateau, thereby enhancing ecosystem services. This study evaluates the dynamics of ecosystem service values during and post-GGP implementation and assesses the project's net economic benefit to refine future land restoration policies. We integrat...

A potential change in climate and temperature could strongly affect weather-related crop losses. Using wastelands to grow crops in controlled greenhouse environments could improve global food security and preserve ecosystems. However, the impact of climate change on additional energy and water requirements of greenhouse-horticulture food production...

Water management and distribution rules in flood-based livelihood systems (FBLS) have a key role in enhancing system-wide productivity and livelihoods. While such potential has to a certain extent been harnessed in DG Khan FBLS in Pakistan, it has not yet been fulfilled in the Tana River and Fogera FBLS in Kenya and Ethiopia, respectively. These th...

Freshwater resources are uncertain in Palestine and their uncertainty is expected to intensify due to climate change and the political situation. Yet, in this region, a stable freshwater supply is vital for domestic and agricultural uses. Rainwater harvesting could help to increase freshwater availability. This study investigates the economic feasi...

Using panel data for the years 2013, 2015, and 2017 collected through field surveys in eight counties in the North China Plain, we examine the relationship between smallholdersÕ land rental behavior and their (agricultural) incomes with a particular focus on the heterogeneous specialization among smallholders. We find that farming-specialized house...

To combat land degradation and deterioration issues, the Grain to Green project (GGP) was implemented on the Chinese Loess Plateau in 1999 and substantially altered the land cover by converting slope farmland into forest and grassland. To effectively achieve sustainable land restoration management and avoid stakeholder conflicts, this study aimed t...

In many developing countries, with a Mediterranean climate, the olive sector forms an important source of income. Thus, the assessment of land and identification of the highly suitable areas for olive is a very important step toward sustainable olive cultivation. A land suitability assessment for olive tree plantation in the West Bank, Palestine, w...

Healthy soils are fundamental for sustainable agriculture. Soil Improving Cropping Systems (SICS) aim to make land use and food production more sustainable. To evaluate the effect of SICS at EU scale, a modelling approach was taken. This study simulated the effects of SICS on two principal indicators of soil health (Soil Organic Carbon stocks) and...

Soils form the basis for agricultural production and other ecosystem services, and soil management should aim at improving their quality and resilience. Within the SoilCare project, the concept of soil-improving cropping systems (SICS) was developed as a holistic approach to facilitate the adoption of soil management that is sustainable and profita...

Assessing agricultural sustainability is one of the most challenging tasks related to expertise and support methodologies because it entails multidisciplinary aspects and builds on cultural and value-based elements. Thus, agricultural sustainability should be considered a social concept, reliable enough to support decision makers and policy develop...

Water harvesting techniques (WHTs) are important climate change adaptation measures to better manage rainwater for domestic and agricultural purposes, but which WHT to plan where is subject to sustainability considerations. Moreover, suitability of different WHTs varies from one location to another, depending on physical and socio-economic conditio...

The recently released Farm to Fork Strategy of the European Union sets, for the first time, pesticide reduction goals at the EU level: 50% reduction in overall use and risk of chemical pesticides and a 50% use reduction of more hazardous pesticides. However, there is little guidance provided as to how to achieve these targets. In this study, we com...

Compensation of people affected by dam building can be unfair, leading to protests and delays. Several international guidelines exist for compensation procedures that aim at equitable and reasonable compensation. Different criteria and procedures have been proposed for valuation of lost assets and income. We investigated five dam-building projects...

Flood-based Agricultural Systems (FAS), which rely on temporary floods, provide livelihoods for nearly 50 million smallholder farmers across water-stressed African basins. This paper analyses the impact of externally driven agricultural production and productivity improvement interventions in FAS, taking the Ethiopian Fogera floodplain as a case st...

The sustainability of the ongoing Campaign-Based Watershed Management (CBWM) program in Ethiopia is questionable due to poor planning and implementation of the Soil and Water Conservation (SWC) structures. This study uses an empirically based, agent-based model to explore the effect of six scenarios on both area of land covered by, as well as the q...

This research used a qualitative and quantitative approach to classify factors influencing wheat farmers' social, economic, and environmental vulnerability in Khorasan Razavi province, Iran, from the perspective of elite wheat farmers and agricultural specialists, and then to establish some recommendations based on the results. To achieve the study...

Context From 1999 onwards, China has initiated a large-scale landscape restoration project in the Chinese Loess Plateau, which has had profound but variable impacts on the local ecosystem services supply. The dynamics of ecosystem services throughout the restoration process remain poorly understood. Objectives To analyze the spatial and temporal d...

A study was carried out to assess if the visual soil assessment method (VSA) would allow recognizing differences between soils receiving organic matter (OM) amendments and similar control soils, by the observation of visual soil quality indicators' score. 36 practices were identified across 8 pedoclimatic zones. These fields/plots were paired with...

Non-point source pollution from excessive use of fertilizers in agriculture is a major cause of the eutrophication problem in China. Understanding farmers' decision-making concerning fertilization and identifying the influencing factors in this process are key to tackling overfertilization and related pollution issues. This paper reports a study on...

This paper analyses the effectiveness of traditional water governance in Flood-based Livelihood Systems (FBLS), which harness floods that could have caused environmental degradation. Ostrom’s Governing the Commons Principles, widely recognized for the effective management of shared resources, is used as a framework. The paper draws from discussions...

CONTEXT The sustainability of the ongoing national Campaign-Based Watershed Management (CBWM) program in Ethiopia is questionable due to poor planning and implementation practices. OBJECTIVE This study analyzes farmers' decision-making in the CBWM program, and mutual learning and collective decisions among local actors in Boset District - Ethiopia...

ContextFrom 1999 onwards, China has initiated a large-scale landscape restoration project on the Chinese Loess Plateau, which has had profound but variable impacts on the local ecosystem services supply. There was less understood of land restoration impacts on the ecosystem services and dynamics of ecosystem services thoroughout the restoration pro...

Reservoir construction projects are frequently met with fierce opposition. Consequently, to mitigate any potential negative impacts, environmental and social impact assessments are usually mandatory. Stakeholder perspectives are often only implicit in such assessments, and the medium-term effects of mitigating actions are assessed at the aggregate...

Sumário: O aumento da frequência, intensidade e recorrência dos fogos rurais nos países do Sul da Europa, e em particular em Portugal, tem evidenciado a necessidade de definir uma estrutura de gestão florestal pós-fogo, que atue no risco de degradação dos ecossistemas a nível local, na prevenção de potenciais danos nos valores em risco a jusante, n...

Although barley production is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, households in the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia rely on barley for their diet and allocate most of their highly-fragmented land to barley production. Moreover, farmers alter land management practices as a strategy to adjust to climate change and variability. However, to what ex...

In the context of rapid urbanization, changes in human demand and agricultural technology progress have deeply expanded the cultivated land attribute dimensions. Thus, evaluating the regional cultivated land quality with different attributes and studying its spatial mechanism is of great theoretical and practical significance. Based on the analytic...

Purpose This study examines the heterogeneous correlations between rural farmers' land renting behavior and their grain production when they experienced a significant price decline. Design/methodology/approach We used well-timed panel data obtained from a two-round survey held in 2013 and 2017 among 621 households in the North China Plain. The emp...

One of the most challenging issues in Mediterranean ecosystems to date has been to understand the emergence of discontinuous changes or catastrophic shifts. In the era of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, which encompass ideas around Land Degradation Neutrality, advancing this understanding has become even more critical and urgent. The aim of...

Environmental policies that aim to enhance nature conservation, biodiversity, and well-being of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) rely on knowledge integration and co-production processes that include both science and Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) systems. While these processes are expected to safeguard the diversity of knowled...

Climate change impacts are a serious threat to food provisioning, security and the economy. Thus, assessing agricultural suitability and yield reduction under climate change is crucial for sustainable agricultural production. In this study, we used two sub-models of the agro-ecological decision support system MicroLEIS (Terraza and Cervatana) to ev...

Review of: Sustainable Land Management (SLM) in Practice in the Kagera Basin: Lessons Learned for Scaling Up at Landscape Level. By FAO Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2017.

The intensification of agricultural practices to increase food and feed outputs is a pressing challenge causing deterioration of soil quality and soil functions. Such a challenge demands provision of empirical evidence to provide context‐sensitive guidance on agricultural management practices (AMPs) that may enhance soil quality. The objectives of...

The intensification of agricultural practices to increase food and feed outputs is a pressing challenge causing deterioration of soil quality and soil functions. Such challenge demands provision of empirical evidence to provide context-sensitive guidance on agricultural management practices (AMPs) that may enhance soil quality. The objectives of th...

Soil improvement measures need to be ecologically credible, socially acceptable and economically affordable if they are to enter widespread use. However, in real world decision contexts not all measures can sufficiently meet these criteria. As such, developing, selecting and using appropriate tools to support more systematic appraisal of soil impro...

Bayesian Belief networks (BBNs) are a useful tool to account for uncertainty and can be used to incorporate stakeholder understandings of how a system works. In this study, BBNs were applied to elicit and discuss local stakeholders’ concerns in conflicts over water resource planning in two cases in southern Thailand. One concerned the construction...

Despite formal recognition of the need to incorporate multiple values in the assessment of ecosystem services, the operationalisation of a consistent integration of different types of values is still limited. This article assesses stakeholders’ perception and monetary (economic) values of ecosystem services delivered by the Kilombero wetland in Tan...

Land use and climate change are recognized as two major drivers affecting surface streamflow. On the Chinese Loess Plateau, implementation of several land restoration projects has changed land cover in recent decades. The main objectives of this study were to understand how streamflow evolved on the Loess Plateau and how land use and climate change...

This study is focused on understanding sources and patterns of vulnerability of wheat smallholder farmers in Northeast Iran. We conducted a farm household survey and recorded multiple environmental and socio-economic attributes of 391 wheat smallholder farmers. A Vulnerability Scoping Diagram and Principal Component Analysis served to identify key...

The objective of this study is to assess the existence of gendered climate change adaptation practices of smallholder farmers in the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia. We hypothesized that smallholders’ adaptation practices are gendered because of land fragmentation and gendered division of labour. To explore this, we considered sustainable land managemen...

Household food security among smallholder farmers is sensitive to a variable and changing climate, requiring farmers in the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia to adopt new land management practices to improve food security. Agricultural land in the Gamo Highlands is highly fragmented. The extent to which land fragmentation moderates the food security effec...

This study assessed farmers' perceptions of the outcomes of the Campaign-Based Watershed Management (CBWM) program in Ethiopia, and how this influences their willingness to participate in the program. Key informant interviews, a household survey, and the Google Earth Engine were used to collect and analyze the relevant data. Results show that farme...

Addressing water scarcity in dryland areas requires identification of promising water-saving practices. This paper reviews the effect of land management and water use practices on Water Productivity (WP) in Uzbekistan and makes an inventory of strengths and constraints. Peer-reviewed articles were screened for various local practices including furr...

Context Traditionally soils have not received much attention in urban planning. For this, tools are needed that can both be understood both by soil scientists and urban planners. Purpose The purpose of this paper is to enhance the role of soil knowledge in urban planning practice, through the following objectives: (1) identifying the role soil pl...

People living in arid and semi-arid areas with highly variable rainfall and unforeseeable periods of droughts or floods are severely affected by water shortages and often have insecure livelihoods. The construction of dams in wadies to harvest rainwater from small watersheds and to induce artificial groundwater recharge is one of the solutions avai...

Download SQAPP, test it at your location, provide feedback. The iSQAPER project team has launched an Soil Quality app. SQAPP offers an easy-to-use tool that brings global soil data into the decision-making sphere of land users and other interested end users. SQAPP returns available soil quality information for any location in the world, simply pic...

Land fragmentation is high and increasing in the Gamo Highlands of southwest Ethiopia. We postulate that this substantial land fragmentation is obstructing the adoption of sustainable land management practices as climate adaptation measures. To explore this, a mixed method study was conducted with emphasis on a multivariate probit model. The result...

Substantive stakeholder engagement is increasingly recognized as essential for effective water resource development. Infrastructure development projects and strategies are however typically designed by engineers first before initiating discussions about impacts with stakeholders. In altering this sequence, designing meaningful participatory plannin...

Increasing global demand for food and feed production causes a wide variety of pressures resulting in severe environmental impacts, including deterioration of soil quality. To manage the use of agricultural soils well, innovative agricultural management practices (AMPs) are needed. The iSQAPER project-Interactive Soil Quality Assessment in Europe a...

Sampling and analysis or visual examination of soil to assess its status and use potential is widely practiced from plot to national scales. However, the choice of relevant soil attributes and interpretation of measurements are not straightforward, because of the complexity and site-specificity of soils, legacy effects of previous land use, and tra...

Farmers possess a wealth of knowledge regarding soil erosion and soil and water conservation (SWC), and there is a great demand to access it. However, there has been little effort to systematically document farmers' experiences and perceptions of SWC measures. Sustainable Land Management (SLM) has largely evolved through local traditional practices...

p>Substantive stakeholder engagement is increasingly recognized as essential for effective water resource development. Infrastructure development projects and strategies are however typically designed by engineers first before initiating discussions about impacts with stakeholders. In altering this sequence, designing meaningful participatory plann...

Land Degradation Neutrality is one of the Sustainable Development Goal targets, requiring on-going degradation to be balanced by restoration and sustainable land management. However, restoration and efforts to prevent degradation have often failed to deliver expected benefits, despite enormous investments. Better acknowledging the close relationshi...

Prolonged soil drying and severe moisture stress during the dry season, and soil saturation and erosion during the short rainy season are critical problems in the Ethiopian highlands. Large-scale implementation of bund structures has been used as soil and water conservation (SWC) measures to fight these problems and establish a sustainable land man...

Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) approaches can potentially be used to protect and enhance the provision of ecosystem services. However, there is a need to assess the costs and effectiveness of such voluntary schemes. In particular there is a need for PES schemes to enhance climate regulating services in agricultural systems. In this paper we c...

Drylands cover about 31% of the European landmass, and are the home of around 25% of its population, thereby making the lives of a substantial part of the European population directly or indirectly dependent on the wellbeing of these drylands. Research done by the European Environmental Agency (EEA), shows that especially the area around the Medite...

This paper applies multiple analytical and empirical methods to evaluate the sustainability impacts of climate change and prospective adaptation measures based on water harvesting techniques (WHTs) at the regional level. We developed a sustainability composite index (SCI) for an arid zone in Tunisia, specifically the south-eastern Province of Meden...

Despite broad interest in use of water harvesting techniques (WHTs) to reduce pressure on natural resources in arid zones, few ex post assessments are available on how WHTs impact livelihood sustainability. This paper assesses the impact of WHTs on the livelihood conditions of inhabitants in the Oum Zessar watershed in south-east Tunisia. We used a...

Agricultural land suitability evaluation is a good way to distinguish soil suitability in order to improve the soils by addressing major limitations. This study investigated the influence of soil factors variability on the suitability of 12 Mediterranean crops in southern Spain. To represent the variability in elevation, lithology, and soil, two la...

Environmental assessment techniques comprise a range of analytical and practical tools of varying level of complexity to assess, monitor, or interpret environmental changes: expert judgment, checklist matrices, environmental risk assessment, mapping and spatial analysis, impact prediction, impact evaluation, remote sensing, natural resource account...

Global drylands face a host of urgent human and environmental challenges with far-reaching impacts. Improving smallholder agriculture remains a key development pathway to tackle these challenges. The Dryland Development Paradigm (DDP), introduced in 2007, presented a highly influential framework for dryland development based on systems research. Th...

Land Degradation Neutrality is one of the Sustainable Development Goal targets, requiring on-going degradation to be balanced by restoration of land ecosystems. However, land degradation cannot be easily decreased everywhere at acceptable cost requiring decisions on where and when best to invest in restoration. Although Land Degradation Neutrality...

In this paper we present a novel methodology for identifying stakeholders for the purpose of engaging with them in transdisciplinary, sustainability research projects. In transdisciplinary research, it is important to identify a range of stakeholders prior to the problem-focussed stages of research. Early engagement with diverse stakeholders create...

Despite numerous research efforts over the last decades, integrating the concept of ecosystem services into land management decision-making continues to pose considerable challenges. Researchers have developed many different frameworks to operationalize the concept, but these are often specific to a certain issue and each has their own definitions...