Synergies for Improving Oil Palm Production and Forest Conservation in Floodplain Landscapes

Lowland tropical forests are increasingly threatened with conversion to oil palm as global demand and high profit drives crop expansion throughout the world’s tropical regions. Yet, landscapes are not homogeneous and regional constraints dictate land suitability for this crop. We conducted a regional study to investigate spatial and economic components of forest conversion to oil palm within a tropical floodplain in the Lower Kinabatangan, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. The Kinabatangan ecosystem harbours significant biodiversity with globally threatened species but has suffered forest loss and fragmentation. We mapped the oil palm and forested landscapes (using object-based-image analysis, classification and regression tree analysis and on-screen digitising of high-resolution imagery) and undertook economic modelling. Within the study region (520,269 ha), 250,617 ha is cultivated with oil palm with 77% having high Net-Present-Value (NPV) estimates ($413/ha?yr–$637/ha?yr); but 20.5% is under-producing. In fact 6.3% (15,810 ha) of oil palm is commercially redundant (with negative NPV of $-299/ha?yr-$-65/ha?yr) due to palm mortality from flood inundation. These areas would have been important riparian or flooded forest types. Moreover, 30,173 ha of unprotected forest remain and despite its value for connectivity and biodiversity 64% is allocated for future oil palm. However, we estimate that at minimum 54% of these forests are unsuitable for this crop due to inundation events. If conversion to oil palm occurs, we predict a further 16,207 ha will become commercially redundant. This means that over 32,000 ha of forest within the floodplain would have been converted for little or no financial gain yet with significant cost to the ecosystem. Our findings have globally relevant implications for similar floodplain landscapes undergoing forest transformation to agriculture such as oil palm. Understanding landscape level constraints to this crop, and transferring these into policy and practice, may provide conservation and economic opportunities within these seemingly high opportunity cost landscapes

Understanding and Integrating Local Perceptions of Trees and Forests into Incentives for Sustainable Landscape Management

We examine five forested landscapes in Africa (Cameroon, Madagascar, and Tanzania) and Asia (Indonesia and Laos) at different stages of landscape change. In all five areas, forest cover (outside of protected areas) continues to decrease despite local people’s recognition of the importance of forest products and services. After forest conversion, agroforestry systems and fallows provide multiple functions and valued products, and retain significant biodiversity. But there are indications that such land use is transitory, with gradual simplification and loss of complex agroforests and fallows as land use becomes increasingly individualistic and profit driven. In Indonesia and Tanzania, farmers favor monocultures (rubber and oil palm, and sugarcane, respectively) for their high financial returns, with these systems replacing existing complex agroforests. In the study sites in Madagascar and Laos, investments in agroforests and new crops remain rare, despite government attempts to eradicate swidden systems and their multifunctional fallows. We discuss approaches to assessing local values related to landscape cover and associated goods and services. We highlight discrepancies between individual and collective responses in characterizing land use tendencies, and discuss the effects of accessibility on land management. We conclude that a combination of social, economic, and spatially explicit assessment methods is necessary to inform land use planning. Furthermore, any efforts to modify current trends will require clear incentives, such as through carbon finance. We speculate on the nature of such incentive schemes and the possibility of rewarding the provision of ecosystem services at a landscape scale and in a socially equitable manner

Identifying Where REDD+ Financially Out Competes Oil Palm in Floodplain Landscapes Using a Fine-Scale Approach

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) aims to avoid forest conversion to alternative land-uses through financial incentives. Oil-palm has high opportunity costs, which according to current literature questions the financial competitiveness of REDD+ in tropical lowlands. To understand this more, we undertook regional finescale and coarse-scale analyses (through carbon mapping and economic modelling) to assess the financial viability of REDD+ in safeguarding unprotected forest (30,173 ha) in the Lower Kinabatangan floodplain in Malaysian Borneo. Results estimate 4.7 million metric tons of carbon (MgC) in unprotected forest, with 64% allocated for oil-palm cultivations. Through fine-scale mapping and carbon accounting, we demonstrated that REDD+ can outcompete oil-palm in regions with low suitability, with low carbon prices and low carbon stock. In areas with medium oil-palm suitability, REDD+ could outcompete oil palm in areas with: very high carbon and lower carbon price; medium carbon price and average carbon stock; or, low carbon stock and high carbon price. Areas with high oil palm suitability, REDD + could only outcompete with higher carbon price and higher carbon stock. In the coarse-scale model, oil-palm outcompeted REDD+ in all cases. For the fine-scale models at the landscape level, low carbon offset prices (US $3 MgCO2e) would enable REDD+ to outcompete oil-palm in 55$27 million to secure these areas for 25 years. Higher carbon offset price (US $30 MgCO2e) would increase the competitiveness of REDD+ within the landscape but would still only capture between 69$380–416 million in carbon financing. REDD+ has been identified as a strategy to mitigate climate change by many countries (including Malaysia). Although REDD+ in certain scenarios cannot outcompete oil palm, this research contributes to the global REDD+ debate by: highlighting REDD+ competitiveness in tropical floodplain landscapes; and, providing a robust approach for identifying and targeting limited REDD+ funds

Local Ecosystem Service Use and Assessment Vary with Socio-ecological Conditions: A Case of Native Coffee-Forests in Southwestern Ethiopia

Ecosystem-based management requires the promotion and integration of locally relevant ecosystem services. This needs an understanding of which ecosystem services local people value and how local valuation varies with socio-cultural and market factors. We convened ten focus group discussions and performed 105 household surveys from major indigenous groups and recent settlers about local values of various forest-based ecosystem services in changing landscapes of southwest Ethiopia. We found that the extent of ecosystem service use and assessment depends on socio-cultural background and gender of the informants, as well as income and cultural contributions of these services. Ecosystem service values vary in space and time where local people reported that they increasingly value services as they become scarce or in response to increased demands due to emerging markets or changes in production systems. Local people mostly appreciated a few services of high market value while most ecosystem services are not traded in local markets and hence not highly valued. Some low-rated ecosystem services such as fodder and medicinal plants were nonetheless widely used demonstrating the need to also conserve low rated ecosystem services that are used universally. We suggest promoting socio-cultural and other non-marketable ecosystem services to reduce the over-exploitation or exclusion of specific biodiversity components in conservation activities

Trade-offs between multifunctionality and profit in tropical smallholder landscapes

Land-use transitions can enhance the livelihoods of smallholder farmers but potential economic-ecological trade-offs remain poorly understood. Here, we present an interdisciplinary study of the environmental, social and economic consequences of land-use transitions in a tropical smallholder landscape on Sumatra, Indonesia. We find widespread biodiversity-profit trade-offs resulting from land-use transitions from forest and agroforestry systems to rubber and oil palm monocultures, for 26,894 aboveground and belowground species and whole-ecosystem multidiversity. Despite variation between ecosystem functions, profit gains come at the expense of ecosystem multifunctionality, indicating far-reaching ecosystem deterioration. We identify landscape compositions that can mitigate trade-offs under optimal land-use allocation but also show that intensive monocultures always lead to higher profits. These findings suggest that, to reduce losses in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, changes in economic incentive structures through well-designed policies are urgently needed

Sumatra’s rubber agroforests: advent, rise and fall of a sustainable cropping system

Until the end of the nineteenth century primary forests covered nearly all the island of Sumatra. The first valorisation of this natural resource was hunting and gathering activities, followed by and later associated with swidden cultivation of upland rice. The industrial revolution in Europe and North America in the 1950s created increasing demand for rubber. Answering this new market opportunity, farmers introduced rubber seedlings in their swiddens amidst the upland rice. By doing so, they invented a new cropping system, i.e. rubber agroforests. Thanks to the continuously increasing demand for rubber by the developing industry, rubber agroforests spread over Sumatra’s eastern peneplains until the 1990s. Forest conversion to rubber agroforests conserves a high level of forest biodiversity and the agroforests act as a buffer zone around national parks. But with growing demographic pressure, market integration and household monetary needs, agroforests are increasingly endangered. New cropping systems have appeared and challenge agroforests’ dominance in the landscape. Since the mid-twentieth century, rubber monospecific plantations have been competing for land, with an undoubtedly higher profitability than agroforests. More recently, oil palm plantations have spread over the island, quickly becoming the new challenger to rubber agroforestry. Nevertheless, the international community shows more and more interest in forest and biodiversity conservation. Forest cover in Jambi province has nearly disappeared over the past 30 years. The only way to save the remnants of forests and agroforests seems to be the creation of market incentives through conservation programs such as reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation