What's Next for Permaculture Research in the Philippines?

The first step is always the hardest. When our team first started researching on permaculture in 2015 there was almost no scientific literature that we can refer to about this topic, especially in the Philippines. If permaculture is what it says it is, surely there should be local studies to back this up. 

Fast forward to the present, we now know who the practitioners are, where they are, what kind of projects they are doing, what kind of landscapes they are designing, and what perspectives they have on food, sustainability, and the environment. Our research produced baseline data from 12 sites all over the country in 2018. But it should not stop there. 

We need to know how permaculture designs change and evolve according to challenges such as market demands, labor shortage, and climate change. We need to know which time of the year designs are most vulnerable and when they are optimal. How does crop diversity vary across the year? What role does biodiversity play in the long term? We only gathered data once in each site. How does the designer respond? What skills and knowledge are added as challenges accumulate? How resilient is a permaculture design and its designer?

Permaculture is such an interesting topic because of its complex nature. It's learning how to design how we do agriculture in a way that will also benefit the natural landscape. It's a design toolkit that's made available to everyone who has access to land regardless of scale (urban garden or farm). In a way, permaculture can be a gateway to more understanding to better improve nature-based solutions and designs. 

Our hope that our research grant program with University of the Philippines Los Banos undergraduate students will help fulfill these two objectives:

1) To continue the detailed documentation of permaculture projects in the country

2) and to map, measure, and monitor changes in the landscape as well as changes in innovations, challenges, and perspectives in documented sites.

By achieving these two objectives, we can understand and visualize how small networks of permaculture designs contribute to food security, ecosystem restoration, and sustainable development at a larger scale.  

If our research grant program for undergrad students of the University of the Philippines Los Banos becomes successful, we can get more funding to support more students in other colleges and universities. This will be our contribution to the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030). And this will be our way of healing the planet.