
Petra BenyeiIEGD-CSIC
Petra Benyei
PhD Environmental Sciences. MSc Rural development
About
36
Publications
19,155
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360
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Researcher interested in the use of transdisciplinary approaches (including citizen science) to document, share, and protect indigenous and local knowledge.
Additional affiliations
January 2020 - January 2022
Education
January 2016 - January 2020
September 2013 - September 2015
September 2010 - June 2012
Publications
Publications (36)
Introduction:
In the quest to improve the understanding of climate change impacts on elements of the atmospheric, physical, and life systems, scientists are challenged by the scarcity and uneven distribution of grounded data. Through their long history of interaction with the environment, Indigenous Peoples and local communities have developed com...
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...
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...
Spanish biocultural diversity is very rich and varied due to its location, linguistic diversity, and the influence of the different peoples that have passed through the Iberian peninsula throughout history. Nonetheless, industrialization and economic development in Spain resulted in the depopulation of rural areas and the abandonment of most tradit...
Indigenous Peoples and local communities have implemented myriad responses to deal with and mitigate climate change impacts. However, little effort has been invested in compiling, aggregating, and systematizing such responses to assess global patterns in local adaptation. Drawing on a systematic review of 119 peer-reviewed publications with 1851 re...
Ethnopharmacological relevance:
The documentation and protection of traditional knowledge face new challenges in the era of open science. Focusing on medicinal and food uses, we discuss two innovative initiatives in Spain to document, protect and return to the society traditional knowledge.
Materials and methods:
The Spanish Inventory of Traditi...
The Convention on Biological Diversity is defining the goals that will frame future global biodiversity policy in a context of rapid biodiversity decline and under pressure to make transformative change. Drawing on the work of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, we argue that transformative change requires the foregrounding of Indigenous people...
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...
You can watch the session here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZxzdbg9yKQ&feature=youtu.be
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...
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...
The past three decades have seen the emergence of myriads of initiatives focused on conserving, revitalizing, and maintaining Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) as part of biocultural approaches to conservation. However, the extent to which these efforts have been participatory has been often overlooked. In this chapter, we focus on five prominen...
In the past decades, traditional agroecological knowledge (TAeK) has suffered a rapid process of erosion and privatization, especially in industrialized contexts. As a response to this situation, numerous TAeK conservation initiatives have emerged, including initiatives engaging in local TAeK revitalization (in situ o contextualized knowledge conse...
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...
Despite its relative adaptive capacity and its many values, indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) is rapidly eroding. Over the past decades a myriad of efforts have emerged to prevent this erosion. In this work, we reviewed and systematically coded 138 ILK conservation initiatives published in academic papers in order to explore trends in participat...
Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) is critical for conservation. Yet, gaps in published research on ILK might bias assessments that largely rely on it. Such fragmented documentation calls for alternative approaches to bring ILK into conservation.
Growing evidence indicates that the overall reduction of biodiversity in agricultural systems is concomitant to dietary simplification and related health effects, yet our understanding of the complex relationship between agrobiodiversity and health is still poor. This chapter explores pathways that could mediate this relationship at the local level...
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 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...
In the last decade, researchers have reported the erosion of Traditional Medicinal Plant Knowledge (TMPK), including declines in the knowledge about which plant species are medicines and in the practical skills for using these species. Among the various drivers explaining TMPK loss, the processes governing knowledge acquisition and transmission are...
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....
In the context of climate change, concern is raising about the negative effects of some pruning waste management practices. On the one hand, burning of pruning residue is seen as controversial regarding its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, chipping the wood and using it as mulch is seen as highly risky regarding pest and...
The price volatility of fossil resources, the uncertainty of their long-term availability and the environmental, climatic and societal problems posed by their operation lead to the need of an energy transition enabling the development and utilization of other alternative and sustainable resources. Acknowledging that indirect land-use change can inc...
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...
Inclusive business is hailed as a win-win scenario for the development of poor communities; yet there is little insight into how these inclusive businesses work and, more importantly, for whom. This book aims for a thorough understanding of the range of inclusive businesses in agriculture by examining: the structures they implement, the actors invo...
In a globalized world, environmental conflicts affecting indigenous communities (including hunter-gatherer groups) have intensified and grown in their transnational character. These changes have affected the choice of manners of contestation of these groups, favouring in some cases the emergence of alternative responses based on the use of new tech...
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...
http://www.redcimas.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/usoagua_municipioscmad.pdf
Projects
Projects (3)
Projections based on agroclimatic models envision a dramatic decrease in the agricultural production at the global scale, thus affecting the livelihoods of millions of peoples. However, these models focus on the major crops and are too coarse to represent the diversity of crop species and landraces responses to climate change. CITRON is a group of 20 researchers and student who developed a unified protocol for collecting local level data that will provide first-hand information on how climate change is affecting crop diversity around the world together with other drivers, and how farmers manage to adapt.
LICCI is an ERC funded project that aims to bring insights from indigenous and local knowledge to climate research.
People with a long history of interaction with the environment have developed complex knowledge systems that allow them to detect local impacts of climatic variability, but these insights are absent in climate change research and policy fora. The LICCI project will bring insights from local knowledge to climate research by
1) providing data on local climate change impacts on physical (e.g., shrinking glaciers) and biological systems (e.g., phenological changes) and on perceptions of climate change impacts on socioeconomic systems (e.g., crop failure due to rainfall patterns change) and
2) testing hypotheses on the global spatial, socioeconomic and demographic distribution of local climate change impacts indicators.
The LICCI project started in June 2018 and will end in May 2023.
The importance of traditional knowledge for the conservation of biodiversity conservation has attracted interest to preserve, maintain and promote this kind of knowledge, as reflected in Article 8 (j) of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Pursuant Trying to comply towith this agreement, the Spanish legislation incorporateding traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as one of the fundamental components of the Spanish Inventory of Natural Heritage and Biodiversity (Royal Decree 556/2011).
In this context, a group of researchers is developing the Spanish Inventory of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (IECTB), a public instrument which aims to collect traditional ecological knowledge, assess their its conservation status and vulnerability, and to make this knowledge accessible to managers, researchers, and citizens in general. In its current development, the IECTB only includes information collected by professional researchers, which limits the type of knowledge to documentdocumented, since as many of this knowledge is found only in oral form and is maintained by -mainlyprincipally- by elderly rural population.
This research e CONECT-e project will develop and validate a new methodology that willould broaden the basis on which the TEK is collected while about what toengaging citizenship. Specifically, we will have developed an interactive digital wiki-like platform (www.conecte.es) that allows any citizen to both contribute their elders’ TEK -following citizen science ideas- as well as accessing information provided by other citizens. The project, lasting three years, will be developed in three phases and will focus on the collection of agroecological practicestraditional knowledge on plants, landraces, ecosystems, animals, minerals, fungus and climate change indicators.
Project methodology
This project will be developed in three phases. During the preparatory phase, we will design, implement and test the platform and its information validating tools. During implementation, we will use three approaches to disseminate the platform. First, the platform will be disseminated among the general public through advertising media, social networks and circles of potentially interested people. Second, we will work with a targeted group of citizens who, a priori, we consider may have already collected traditional knowledge (the Spanish seed network, Red de Semillas Resembrando e Intercambiando). Third, we will try to access elderly rural people through the younger generations. Specifically, we will work with students from agricultural technical schools (16-20 years old) in Catalonia, a region with an important rural population but also an important agricultural extension system. Comparing the quantity and quality of the data obtained by the three approaches, and the impact on the students’ perception on the value of TEK (measured with pre and post activity surveys), we will be able to evaluate this innovative tool. Finally, in the third phase we will also evaluate this methodology in terms of its ability to contribute to the IECTB and protect through a digital common’s approach this important body of knowledge.