Rachel Bezner Kerr

Cornell University | CU · Department of Development Sociology

Land-use and local field management affect pollinators, pest damage and ultimately crop yields. Agroecology is implemented as a sustainable alternative to conventional agricultural practices, but little is known about its potential for pollination and pest management. Sub-Saharan Africa is underrepresented in studies investigating the relative impo...

Background Effective social and behavior change strategies for exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) rely on understanding how families interpret infant behavior and provide care. Little research thoroughly explores household use of non-prescribed medicine for infants under 6 months in rural Tanzania, which can interrupt EBF and may have other harmful unin...

Background: Bolstering farm-level crop diversity is one strategy to strengthen food system resilience and achieve global food security. Women who live in rural areas play an essential role in food production; therefore, we aimed to assess the associations between women's empowerment and crop diversity. Methods: In this secondary analysis of cros...

Declining wild food use has been reported around the world for decades, with important implications for nutrition and wellbeing. Commonly listed threats include land-use change and overharvesting. Climate change acts to compound these. Herein, we examine the importance of wild foods around the world and the impact of climate change on wild food spe...

New approaches to generating knowledge are needed to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Participatory action research (PAR) builds on and expands the scientific process through engagement of scientists (ecological, agricultural, and social) with stakeholders in a systematic manner. To illustrate iterative co‐learning cycles, we re...

Within the last decade, there has been a growing interest in merging community-based knowledge with scholarly voices to understand how food systems can be used to create or maintain sustainable, just models of social change (Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Millner 2017; Schipanski et al. 2016).

The conversion of biodiversity‐rich woodland to farmland and subsequent management has strong, often negative, impacts on biodiversity. In tropical smallholder agricultural landscapes, the impacts of agriculture on insect communities, both through habitat change and subsequent farmland management, is understudied. The use of agroecological practice...

Background: Participation is key to the successful implementation of nutrition-related interventions, but it has been relatively overlooked. Objective: We sought to describe participation intensity among smallholder farmers in a randomized nutrition-sensitive agroecology study in rural Tanzania. We explored the association between baseline chara...

Agroecology (AE) has been proposed as a transformative approach to climate change mitigation and adaptation that reduces climate risk while supporting long-term productivity and resilience of food systems by applying ecological and humanistic principles. Agroecology is a holistic systems approach to producing food, which incorporates social, econom...

Farming systems that support locally diverse agricultural production and high levels of biodiversity are in rapid decline, despite evidence of their benefits for climate, environmental health, and food security. Yet, agricultural policies, financial incentives, and market concentration increasingly constrain the viability of diversified farming sys...

In the tropics, smallholder farming characterizes some of the world's most biodiverse landscapes. Agroecology as a pathway to sustainable agriculture has been proposed and implemented in sub‐Saharan Africa, but the effects of agricultural practices in smallholder agriculture on biodiversity and ecosystem services are understudied. Similarly, the co...

In the context of food insecurity in resource-poor settings, agroecology (AE) has emerged as an important approach promoted for improving crop productivity, yet few studies have demonstrated how a combination of agroecological methods can improve crop health and thereby crop productivity. Using a geospatial approach, this study investigated whether...

Climate change affects the functioning of all of the components of food systems, often in ways that exacerbate existing predicaments and inequalities among regions of the world and groups in society. At the same time, food systems are a major cause of climate change, accounting for a third of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Therefore, food syst...

This paper discusses severe risks to food security and nutrition that are linked to ongoing and projected climate change, particularly climate and weather extremes in global warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation. We specifically consider the impacts on populations vulnerable to food insecurity and malnutrition due to lower income, lower acc...

Within the last decade, there has been a growing interest in merging community-based knowledge with scholarly voices to understand how food systems can be used to create or maintain sustainable, just models of social change. As an example of such eff orts, Patricia Allen’s publication in this journal, “Mining for Justice in the Food System: percept...

How to engage farmers that have limited formal education is at the foundation of environmentally-sound and equitable agricultural development. Yet there are few examples of curricula that support the co-development of knowledge with farmers. While transdisciplinary and participatory techniques are considered key components of agroecology, how to do...

Crop yield is related to household food security and community resilience, especially in smallholder agricultural systems. As such, it is crucial to accurately estimate within-season yield in order to provide critical information for farm management and decision making. Therefore, the primary objective of this paper is to assess the most appropriat...

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the cultivation of local crop varieties persists despite a political environment that favours commercial seed system development to address seed and food insecurity. Community seed banks (CSBs) are emergent alternative/complementary development initiatives, yet there remains limited empirical research on their role in farmers...

Background: Agroecological methods have the potential to impact nutrition and food security, however, to date there is limited research evaluating this approach. Objective: A 5-year participatory research project with farming households in north and central Malawi was designed to train farmers on agroecological practices, alongside raising aware...

This Cross-Chapter Box highlights the intersecting issues of gender, climate change adaptation, climate justice and transformative pathways. A gender perspective does not centre only on women or men but examines structures, processes and relationships of power between and among groups of men and women and how gender, particularly in its non-binary...

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19, emerged in late 2019, halfway through the preparation of the IPCC WGII Sixth Assessment Report. This Cross-Chapter Box assesses how the massive shock of the pandemic and response measures interact with climate-related impacts and risks as well as its significan...

The Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a comprehensive assessment of the scientific literature relevant to climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The report recognizes the interactions of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societie...

Organic agriculture outperforms conventional agriculture across several sustainability metrics due, in part, to more widespread use of agroecological practices. However, increased entry of large-scale farms into the organic sector has prompted concerns about ‘conventionalization’ through input substitution, agroecosystem simplification and other ch...

Climate change impacts are being felt across sectors in all regions of the world, and adaptation projects are being implemented to reduce climate risks and existing vulnerabilities. Climate adaptation actions also have significant synergies and tradeoffs with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG 5 on gender equality. Questions ar...

The Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a comprehensive assessment of the scientific literature relevant to climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The report recognizes the interactions of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societie...

Nature-based solutions provide adaptation and mitigation benefits for climate change as well as contributing to other sustainable development goals (high confidence). Effective nature-based climate change mitigation stems from inclusive decision-making and adaptive management pathways that deliver climate-resilient systems serving multiple sustaina...

Addressing human and social values is a core element of agroecology, including questions of equity and social justice in food systems, supporting autonomy and well-being of food producers, fostering meaningful, dignified forms of food systems work, and reshaping ways of interacting with nonhuman species and ecosystems. In this article, we review pe...

Purpose of Review This review aims to identify the evidence for the assessment of the effectiveness and feasibility of multi-sectoral climate adaptation for food security and malnutrition. This review and the assessments of the evidence inform the contents and confidence statements in section “multi-sectoral adaptation for malnutrition” and in the...

The Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a comprehensive assessment of the scientific literature relevant to climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The report recognizes the interactions of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societie...

The floodplain of the Black Volta River traverses the Ghana-Burkina Faso international border and offers considerable potential for agriculture. Yet, it is a risk-filled landscape with acute vulnerability to flooding. This paper seeks to explain why agriculture in the floodplain remains so popular when it manifestly causes more problems. Data for t...

How can agroecological research methods effectively engage smallholder farmers, who provide over half of the world's food supply, and whose farm management activities have significant impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services? This question is highly relevant in Malawi where the research took place, but in other low-income countries in Africa...

Climate change scenarios have significant implications for the livelihoods and food security of particular groups in society and will necessitate a range of adaptation actions. While there is a significant literature on the social as well as biophysical factors and limits to adaptation, less is known about the interactions between these, and what s...

Deforestation drives climate change and reinforces food insecurity in forest‐dependent communities. What drives deforestation varies by location and is shaped by livelihood systems. But how locals perceive restoration is crucial for developing restoration policies. Evidence suggests that applying sustainable farming strategies can potentially resto...

This report represents a second step in structuring existing knowledge about agroecology as farming and food system in support of the EC Knowledge Centre on Food and Nutrition Security (https://ec.europa.eu/knowledge4policy/global-food-nutrition-security_en). It complements the report “Agroecological practices supporting food production and reducin...

The COVID-19 pandemic and anthropogenic climate change are global crises. We show how strongly these crises are connected, including the underlying societal inequities and problems of poverty, substandard housing, and infrastructure including clean water supplies. The origins of all these crises are related to modern consumptive industrialisation,...

Assessing global progress on human adaptation to climate change is an urgent priority. Although the literature on adaptation to climate change is rapidly expanding, little is known about the actual extent of implementation. We systematically screened >48,000 articles using machine learning methods and a global network of 126 researchers. Our synthe...

Growing evidence suggests that climate adaptation responses that do not incorporate equity considerations may worsen inequality and increase vulnerability. Using data from a systematic review of peer-reviewed empirical research on adaptation responses to climate change (n = 1,682), we present an assessment of how social equity is considered in adap...

This systematic review assembles evidence for rights-based approaches–the right to food and food sovereignty–for achieving food security and adequate nutrition (FSN). We evaluated peer-reviewed and gray literature produced between 1992 and 2018 that documents empirical relationships between the right to food or food sovereignty and FSN. We classifi...

Human-induced land degradation currently threatens the livelihoods of over 3 billion people globally. While Sustainable Land Management (SLM) has emerged as a widely accepted approach for addressing land degradation in agroecosystems, the use of SLM practices remains low among smallholder farmers. Empirical research points to the potentially benefi...

Climate change is a severe global threat. Research on climate change and vulnerability to natural hazards has made significant progress over the last decades. Most of the research has been devoted to improving the quality of climate information and hazard data, including exposure to specific phenomena, such as flooding or sea-level rise. Less atten...

In Tanzania, suboptimal complementary feeding practices contribute to high stunting rates. Fathers influence complementary feeding practices, and effective strategies are needed to engage them. The objectives of this research were to examine the acceptability and feasibility of (1) tailored complementary feeding recommendations and (2) engaging fat...

L'agroécologie fait l’objet d’un intérêt grandissant comme moyen de progresser vers une agriculture et des systèmes alimentaires plus durables. Cependant, les preuves de la contribution de l'agroécologie à la durabilité restent fragmentées en raison de méthodes et de données hétérogènes, d'échelles différentes et de lacunes dans la recherche. Pour...

Agroecology increasingly has gained scientific and policy recognition as having potential to address environmental and social issues within food production, but concerns have been raised about its implications for food security and nutrition, particularly in low-income countries. This review paper examines recent evidence (1998–2019) for whether ag...

Fod Systems Summit Brief Prepared by Research Partners of the Scientific Group for the Food Systems Summit, May 2021

Background There are urgent calls for the transformation of agriculture and food systems to address human and planetary health issues. Nutrition-sensitive agriculture and agroecology promise interconnected solutions to these challenges, but evidence of their impact has been limited. Objectives In a cluster-randomized trial (NCT02761876), we examin...

How does agroecology influence household food security? While previous studies have found that adopting agroecological practices can have a positive effect on smallholder household food security, there is limited understanding of how this transition occurs. This mixed-methods study draws on data from an ongoing agroecology project in Malawi to enga...

A transdisciplinary project examining agroecological management alternatives in Malawi utilized mixed methods to learn from and about farmer knowledge of biodiversity. Wild biodiversity was assessed on 96 farms within a study area of 16 villages. Forty-two farmers from the 96 farms were involved in the photovoice sub-study discussed here. They rece...

Objective To investigate if food security mediated the impact of a nutrition-sensitive agroecology intervention on women’s depressive symptoms. Design We used annual longitudinal data (4 time points) from a cluster-randomized effectiveness trial of a participatory nutrition-sensitive agroecology intervention, the Singida Nutrition and Agroecology...

Mapping crop types and land cover in smallholder farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa remains a challenge due to data costs, high cloud cover, and poor temporal resolution of satellite data. With improvement in satellite technology and image processing techniques, there is a potential for integrating data from sensors with different spectral chara...

Indigenous families are overrepresented among those within Canada who experience food insecurity. Studies have largely focused on northern populations, with less attention paid to southern and urban communities, including the social, cultural, and geographic processes that challenge food security. In this study, we present findings from a decade‐lo...

We present the first systematic, global stocktake of the academic literature on human adaptation. We screen 48,316 documents and identify 1,682 articles that present empirical research documenting human efforts to reduce risk from climate change and associated hazards. Coding and synthesizing this literature highlights that the overall extent of ad...

There is increasing interest in agroecology as a way to move toward more sustainable agriculture and food systems. However, the evidence of agroecology's contribution to sustainability remains fragmented because of heterogeneous methods and data, differing scales and timeframes, and knowledge gaps. Facing these challenges, 70 representatives of ag...

Following a decade of declining food insecurity, the global undernourished population has increased successively in the last three years. This increasing trend highlights the challenge of meeting the zero hunger and nutrition targets of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2. Malawi is one of the most food insecure countries in Africa, with a signifi...

Despite increasing land degradation in sub-Saharan Africa, investment in sustainable land management (SLM) remains low. Empirical evidence shows that smallholder farmers tend to prioritize investing in SLM practices with short-term turnover—e.g., composting and crop residue integration—in order to improve soil fertility and yields to the neglect of...

There is consensus that the global food system is not delivering good nutrition for all and is causing environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity, such that a profound transformation is needed to meet the challenges of persistent malnutrition and rural poverty, aggravated by the growing consequences of climate change. Agroecological approac...

Context : It is now widely accepted that the climate is changing, and that societal responses will need to be rapid and comprehensive to prevent the most severe impacts. A key milestone in global climate governance is to assess progress on adaptation. To-date, however, there has been negligible robust, systematic synthesis of progress on adaptation...

Amid climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity, there is the growing need to draw synergies between micro-scale environmental processes and practices, and macro-level ecosystem dynamics to facilitate conservation decision-making. Adopting this synergistic approach can improve crop yields and profitability more sustainably, enhance livel...

This publication is a Technical report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service. It aims to provide evidence-based scientific support to the European policymaking process.

The role of agroecological practices in addressing food security has had limited investigation, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Quasi-experimental methods were used to assess the role of agroecological practices in reducing food insecurity in smallholder households in Malawi. Two key practices – crop diversification and the incorporation of org...

Background: In Canada, few studies have examined how place shapes Indigenous food environments, particularly among Indigenous people living in southern regions of Ontario. Objective: This paper examines and compares circumstances of food insecurity that impact food access and dietary quality between reserve-based and urban-based Indigenous peopl...

Objectives In 2015, depressive disorders led to over 50 million disability-adjusted life years lost globally, with more than 80% occurring in low- and middle-income countries. Depressive disorders are also risk factors of a number of adverse maternal and child health outcomes. To our knowledge, the Singida Nutrition and Agroecology Project (SNAP-Tz...

Objectives Nutrition-sensitive agricultural interventions are theorized to improve child's diet through asset provision and program participation. Although some programs measure participation, predictors of participation are understudied. We therefore investigated predictors of men's and women's program participation in Singida Nutrition and Agroec...

The contemporary international development agenda addresses several important gender issues, including the contribution of unpaid care work (UCW) to human well-being. The inclusion of UCW into the mainstream policy debate is undoubtedly a major milestone in the history of feminist scholarship and activism. However, we argue that the universalistic...

How to engage farmers that have limited formal education is at the foundation of environmentally-sound and equitable agricultural development. Yet there are few examples of curricula that support the co-development of knowledge with farmers. While transdisciplinary and participatory techniques are considered key components of agroecology, how to do...

The pivotal role of social capital in smallholder agriculture is widely acknowledged. The growth effect of social capital manifests in how networks and trust facilitate access to productive resources and knowledge sharing among farmers. While sub-Saharan Africa is considered a storehouse of rich social capital, recent literature indicates its rapid...

Women's empowerment has gained attention as critical for child nutrition during the first 1000 days of life. However, the ways in which various women's empowerment measures are applied and the evidence for how they are differentially related to child nutrition is unclear. In this systematic review, therefore, we 1) systematically parse the many way...

Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualiz...

Objectives: Production diversity and women's empowerment are two ways by which nutrition-sensitive agriculture interventions are thought to improve children's diet, but, few empirical studies have tested these pathways. We therefore investigated the impact of the Singida Nutrition and Agroecology Project (SNAP-Tz; NCT02761876) on child's dietary d...