Conservation and restoration actions in a multifunctional landscape: Lessons from Tunisia
In Tunisia’s northwest, the land tells two stories at once. There are the olive groves, cereal fields, forested ridgelines, and grazing lands that have sustained livelihoods for generations.
- Conservation agriculture
By Bedru Balana, Aymen Frija, Zied Idoudi, Upeksha Hettiarachchi, and Wei ZhangAugust 17, 2026
Key takeaways
- Multifunctional landscapes deliver food, income, and environmental gains together. Across four sites in northwestern Tunisia, treating land, water, agriculture, and ecosystems as one system improved soil, water, biodiversity, productivity, and incomes at once.
- There is no single template for success—many models work. Farmer-led innovation, community action, public forest management, and public-private partnership each succeed; choosing the right one depends on local land tenure and governance.
- Evidence drives adoption—yet the full value of these landscapes has yet to be documented. Measurement converts skeptics into investors. An IFPRI-ICARDA effort to evaluate ecosystem services across these sites aims to close that gap.
In Tunisia’s northwest, the land tells two stories at once. There are the olive groves, cereal fields, forested ridgelines, and grazing lands that have sustained livelihoods for generations. Meanwhile, a more troubling tale runs below the surface: soils thinning under the plow, rainwater running off across bare lands washing away soil and degrading landscapes, and reservoirs silting up faster than they can be replaced.
Water erosion, Tunisia’s dominant form of land degradation, affects some 3 million hectares of the 10.4 million used for agriculture—1.5 million of them severely—while 46% of crops grow on soils of limited fertility. In Kef and Siliana governorates (provinces) in northwestern Tunisia, where smallholdings dominate and cereal-livestock systems press against the fragile, sloping terrain of the Tunisian Dorsal, the squeeze is acute: soil losses in the semi-arid region average 14.5 metric tons per hectare a year, and the hillside reservoirs built to capture runoff last only about 14 years before they are filled with sediments. Climate change is expected to further worsen these pressures.
These are nexus problems: land, water, agriculture, and ecosystems are so tightly coupled that a fix aimed at one in isolation tends to fail. Hence the need for a multifunctional landscape approach—treating a landscape as one interconnected system and seeking food, income, biodiversity, and resilience together rather than trading one against another.
From June 8-10, a team from IFPRI and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) visited four sites spanning the full range of land tenure and governance in northwestern Tunisia, from a private farm to a public-private partnership on state land, to lay the groundwork for an economic valuation of the ecosystem services generated by conservation and restoration landscape investments. The visits offer lessons on how landscape approaches provide nature-based solutions to reverse degraded natural environments.