State of the world’s plants and fungi 2020

Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi project provides assessments of our current knowledge of the diversity of plants and fungi on Earth, the global threats that they face, and the policies to safeguard them. Produced in conjunction with an international scientific symposium, Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi sets an important international standard from which we can annually track trends in the global status of plant and fungal diversity

Sustainability indicators, alternative strategies and trade-offs in peasant agroecosystems : analysing 15 case studies from Latin America

In view of the urgent need to improve agroecosystem sustainability, several efforts have been made to evaluate the effect of alternative strategies on key environmental and socioeconomic variables at the farm, community and regional levels. Most peasant farmers manage complex and diverse agroecosystems, and constantly adapt management strategies with multiple aims. A sustainability evaluation framework for peasant systems has been applied in over 40 case studies in Latin America, from which 15 were analysed, focusing on the choice of indicators, the effect of alternative strategies on agroecosystem sustainability and the trade-offs involved. Common indicators include yields, income, agrodiversity and external input dependence. Alternative strategies include crop/product diversification and soil conservation practices. Yields, income and agrodiversity improved in most cases, but in some cases the establishment costs increased external input use. Trade-offs observed include improved performance of a subsystem (i.e. crops) vs. decreased one in others (livestock, forestry) and increases in productivity vs. decreases in stability, resilience and reliability. The difficulty of assessing systems in transition towards alternative management was acknowledged by some evaluation teams. Applying the framework to such a vartiety of cases allowed making the sustainability concept operational, promoted alternatieve strategies and generated knowledge on agroecosystem processes among stakeholders

A review of environmental issues in the context of biofuel sustainability frameworks

With the rapid growth of biofuel production and consumption and the proliferation of policy decisions supporting this expansion, concerns about the biofuel sector’s environmental and social impacts are increasing. Consequently, a range of actors – among them governments, multilateral institutions, nongovernmental organisations and multistakeholder industry groups – have created sustainability frameworks, some mandatory, others voluntary. This report examines how the most developed sustainability frameworks for feedstock production (including biofuels) address key environmental issues. It identifies critical gaps in these frameworks and proposes areas for improvement. The main finding is that the frameworks share broad sustainability principles yet they differ greatly in terms of their comprehensiveness and how they apply specific indicators for environmental issues, particularly with respect to land use change (both direct and indirect), allocation of degraded land for feedstock cultivation, and related accounting of greenhouse gas emissions. In the absence of sufficient hard data with which to gauge the effectiveness of existing sustainability frameworks, the report notes that the standards of these frameworks are not sufficient to mitigate the effects of direct and indirect land use change and promote environmental conservation. A key recommendation is that such standards should be complemented by other policy instruments. Furthermore, as sustainability frameworks are only a means to an end, they must be supported by practical guidance, effective interpretation of standards, principles and criteria, and development of verifiable indicators, along with the provision of appropriate tools, approaches and capacity building activities

Modelling carbon sequestration in afforestation and forest magement projects: the CO2FIX V 2.0 approach

The paper describes the Version 2 of the CO2FIX (CO2FIX V.2) model, a user-friendly tool for dynamically estimating the carbon sequestration potential of forest management, agroforesty and afforestation projects. CO2FIX V.2 is a multi-cohort ecosystem-level model based on carbon accounting of forest stands, including forest biomass, soils and products. Carbon stored in living biomass is estimated with a forest cohort model that allows for competition, natural mortality, logging, and mortality due to logging damage. Soil carbon is modeled using five stock pools, three for litter and two for humus. The dynamics of carbon stored in wood products is simulated with a set of pools for short-, medium- and long-lived products, and includes processing efficiency, re-use of by-products, recycling, and disposal forms. The CO2FIX V.2 model estimates total carbon balance of alternative management regimes in both even and uneven-aged forests, and thus has a wide applicability for both temperate and tropical conditions. Results for the model testing and validation in selected temperate and tropical forest management systems are presented and discussed