关键词: 农业文化遗产, 基于自然的解决方案（NbS）, 全球重要农业文化遗产（GIAHS）, 农业可持续发展, 生态系统服务

Abstract:

【Background】Agricultural heritage systems are agroecosystems and knowledge systems co-evolved by humans and nature. At a time when global food systems are being challenged by climate change, land degradation, and declining ecosystem service functions, their multifunctional values have attracted growing attention as a key resource for safeguarding food security and advancing sustainable agricultural development. Since 2023, China’s No. 1 Central Documents have incorporated the “conservation and utilization of agricultural cultural heritage” into the national strategy, laying a policy foundation for its institutionalized development. Meanwhile, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has rapidly promoted the concept of nature-based solutions (NbS) in the fields of agriculture and ecological governance, emphasizing the use of ecosystem processes to address societal challenges.【Objective】Using NbS as an analytical framework could enable a deeper, more systematic, and more comprehensive examination of agricultural heritage systems, help establish an interdisciplinary research paradigm, and provide an internationally applicable indicator system for the conservation, monitoring, management, evaluation, utilization, and research of agricultural heritage systems.【Method】Employing conceptual comparative analysis, this paper proposes that agricultural heritage systems constitute a prototypical form of NbS and could effectively address challenges, such as food security, ecosystem degradation, and rural social vulnerability. Drawing on the eight criteria and 28 indicators of the IUCN Global Standard for NbS, an indicator-based evaluation method was applied to conduct a systematic empirical analysis of representative cases selected from Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) and from China’s list of Important Agricultural Cultural Heritage.【Result】Within each category of the eight NbS criteria, three GIAHS cases and three Chinese cases were selected, aiming to cover a wider range of regions, more diverse ecosystems, and more heterogeneous livelihood types, for a total of 16 GIAHS cases and 18 Chinese cases. These cases substantiated all relevant components of the 28 indicators, demonstrating that agricultural heritage systems align closely with the NbS Standard in terms of ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, farmland governance, climate resilience, community participation, and related dimensions. The NbS indicator system also proved feasible for the evaluation and policy planning of agricultural heritage systems.【Conclusion】In terms of conceptual structure, value objectives, and system attributes, agricultural heritage systems exhibited a high degree of congruence with NbS; agricultural heritage systems could be regarded as a subset of NbS. Accordingly, NbS principles, criteria, and indicators could be adopted to analyze and discuss agricultural heritage systems, providing a globally applicable analytical framework for their conservation, monitoring, management, utilization, and evaluation. This study offers a research paradigm and an empirical pathway for integrating agricultural heritage systems into the global NbS policy architecture and for promoting green transformation in agriculture.

Key words: agricultural heritage, nature-based solutions (NbS), Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS), sustainable agriculture, ecosystem services