Interest in green infrastructure (GI) has grown in research, policy and planning in recent decades. The central idea behind GI is the understanding of the physical non-built-up environment as an infrastructure capable of delivering a wide variety of benefits to society, including the ability to preserve biodiversity; to provide food, feed, fuel and fibre; to adapt to and mitigate climate change and to contribute to enhanced human health and quality of life.

The promotion of farm innovations, such as mineral fertiliser, is one of the strategies for attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of zero hunger and poverty alleviation in developing countries. However, the adoption of mineral fertilisers has been low in Africa, particularly in Ghana. The present study not only analyses the impact of mineral fertiliser on the land productivity of rice farmers in northern Ghana but also determines factors that are associated with the adoption of mineral fertilisers using a primary dataset from 470 rice farmers.

The ongoing expansion of agro-industrial food systems is associated with severe socio-ecological problems. For a closer look at the socio-ecological impacts, we analyze the capacity of six food systems to provide farm-based agroecosystem services with the Agroecosystem Service Capacity (ASC) approach. At the same time, we analyze how food systems affect the management of common pool resources (CPR). Our findings show that indigenous peoples and agroecological food systems can have up to three times the ASC-index of agro-industrial food systems.