Mesurer l'importance de la biodiversité pour les sociétés forestières des pays du Sud. Une méthode d'investigation pluridisciplinaire

Les méthodes d'investigation rapide sont souvent critiquées par la communauté scientifique, mais il est crucial de proposer des méthodes rigoureuses, au-delà des enquêtes académiques de longue durée, permettant de répondre aux attentes des institutions de développement et des décideurs. Dans le contexte de recherches sur la biodiversité, le CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research) a développé un jeu de méthodes permettant d'étudier l'importance des ressources et des paysages pour les communautés forestières, et les implications des perceptions locales pour la biodiversité et la conservation. Il s'inspire d'idées venant à la fois des sciences sociales (socioéconomie, anthropologie, ethnobotanique) et des sciences naturelles (écologie, botanique, pédologie). À travers des expériences de terrain en Afrique et en Asie, nous analysons comment le Multidisciplinary Landscape Assessment (MLA) peut répondre aux attentes sans céder à la superficialité des méthodes rapides classiques. (Résumé d'auteur

Multi-factor, multi-state, multi-model scenarios: Exploring food and climate futures for Southeast Asia

Decision-makers aiming to improve food security, livelihoods and resilience are faced with an uncertain future. To develop robust policies they need tools to explore the potential effects of uncertain climatic, socioeconomic, and environmental changes. Methods have been developed to use scenarios to present alternative futures to inform policy. Nevertheless, many of these can limit the possibility space with which decision-makers engage. This paper will present a participatory scenario process that maintains a large possibility space through the use of multiple factors and factor-states and a multi-model ensemble to create and quantify four regional scenarios for Southeast Asia. To do this we will explain 1) the process of multi-factor, multi-state building was done in a stakeholder workshop in Vietnam, 2) the scenario quantification and model results from GLOBIOM and IMPACT, two economic models, and 3) how the scenarios have already been applied to diverse policy processes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam

Identifying opportunity areas for cocoa agroforestry in Ghana to meet policy objectives

Ghana is one of the world’s leading cocoa producers. Between 1994 and 2018, the area under cocoa production has nearly ripled. This has increased income, but it has also imposed costs. As rainforests have been converted into land for cocoa farming, habitat for species has decreased and become increasingly fragmented in one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. Rainforest loss also has huge implications for the ability of land to capture carbon and mitigate climate change globally. Expansion of cocoa farming is expected to aggravate these issues further. To increase income from cocoa, Ghana could expand cocoa plantations but increasing yields on the plantations that it already has would be better for both farmers and the environment. Cocoa yields in Ghana are low and the prices that the crop gets on the global market are poor. This is because most plantations in Ghana are small and run by farmers who often lack the right knowledge, resources and credit to apply management practices, like pruning, pest control and managing soil fertility, that would help them to increase the quality and size of their yields. Climate change is also expected to make lives harder and put the cocoa supply chain at risk by making yields lower than they already are. Agroforestry farming systems are increasingly being proposed as a solution to address these problems and a potential way for the small-holder cocoa farmers of Ghana to improve their livelihoods and for the cocoa sector to maintain a sustainable cocoa supply. Cocoa can be grown in direct sunlight or under shade provided by taller trees. Farmers in Ghana have been advised over the years that shade would harm their cocoa production, but evidence shows that well-managed shade can also benefit it. Shade trees suppress weed growth and provide habitats for predatory species that control insect pests. Growing cocoa under shade trees also helps to create a stable microclimate beneath the canopy. It can also enhance soil fertility and provide farmers with supplemental income when these other trees produce commercially valuable fruits and timber. Most importantly, well-shaded cocoa plantations will experience lower maximum temperatures than are expected from climate change, can store up to 2.5 times more carbon than those that are unshaded and support higher levels of biodiversity that help protect valuable ecosystem services. The types and magnitude of benefits from agroforestry systems for different beneficiaries depend highly on their design and the local context. Shade trees can harbour pests. They can also compete with cocoa for resources like water. This is particularly true in drier areas. High humidity levels under canopies created by other plant species can also foster fungal diseases. These challenges are not to be ignored but, when agroforestry systems are well designed, they are outweighed by the overall benefits in smallholder production systems. Indeed, Ghana is now promoting cocoa agroforestry through national level policies such as the Cocoa and Forests Implementation plan, the Ghana Cocoa Forest REDD+ Programme (GCFRP) and the National Climate-Smart Agriculture and Food Security Action Plan. It is not realistic to establish shaded plantations throughout the southwestern regions of Ghana all at once. The process will need to be staged as there are 2.3 million hectares of plantations and 1.9 million of them currently have little to no shade. Areas where benefits from increased shading will be highest need to be identified and prioritised. This new work looked at the locations of all cocoa plantations in the country and applied cocoa and forest national policy objectives as well as spatially explicit climate change adaptation strategies to implement a transition towards more shaded cocoa farming. Using modelling approaches, the work sought to understand the biodiversity, carbon sequestration and erosion control benefits granted by increased shading being implemented in different locations. Combined, this information generated a map that reveals the areas where the implementation of shading would be most beneficial for achieving a combination of benefits for people, nature and climate. The work shows that establishing appropriately shaded and well-managed plantations in the proposed areas has the potential to protect at least 4,000 tonnes of sediment from erosion each year and store an additional 52 million tonnes of carbon in trees. While shifting to this sort of farming will have some implementation costs and not yield the immediate financial gains that would be expected from more forests being converted into plantations, such a transition can yield significant long-term benefits as smallholder farmers face the challenges presented by a changing climate. When implemented appropriately, it will also enhance ecosystem services that benefit cocoa production, conserve biodiversity and support the livelihoods of farmers. Above and beyond all else, the carbon sequestration benefits granted by shaded plantations have the potential to play a pivotal part in combating climate change. For this to be fully realised, farmers need to be incentivised to adopt agroforestry practices by giving them ownership of the land that they are farming and the trees that grow there. Paying them for the ecosystem services that their land provides would further these incentives by strengthening and diversifying their income too. Beyond the specific situation faced by cocoa farmers in Ghana, this study demonstrates the potential for decision-makers to use spatial planning to understand where, and (partly) how, to implement cocoa agroforestry at scale to meet different objectives

Ground Zero? Let’s get real on regeneration! Report 1: State of the art and indicator selection

The urgency with which the world needs to combat climate change has led to ambitious commitments by leading food companies such as Nestlé. Given that a large proportion of emissions in supply chains occur during the production of commodities, focus has converged on Regenerative Agriculture as a key strategy to achieve those goals. The Regenerative Agriculture agenda coalesces around three main goals: • Reduce the Carbon Footprint • Enhance Soil Health • Enhance and safeguard Biodiversity alongside commitments to enhance smallholder producers’ incomes, to avoid child labour and to ensure a sustainable supply. The Ground Zero project aims to provide a framework of robust, easily measurable and verifiable indicators and methods for the assessment of the carbon footprint, soil health and biodiversity in cocoa and coffee production systems. The project is organised around four work packages (WPs): WP1 – Coordination; WP2 – Carbon Footprints; WP3 – Soil Health; WP4 – Biodiversity. Here we report on the state-of-the-art for each of these topics and in a final chapter we indicate the next steps that will be taken in the project

The Global Forest Transition as a Human Affair

Peer reviewe

Scenarios of land use and land cover change and their multiple impacts on natural capital in Tanzania

REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation, and forest degradation, plus the conservation of forest carbon stocks, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks, in developing countries) requires information on land use and land cover changes (LULCC) and carbon emissions trends from the past to the present and into the future. Here we use the results of participatory scenario development in Tanzania, to assess the potential interacting impacts on carbon stock, biodiversity and water yield of alternative scenarios where REDD+ is effectively implemented or not by 2025, the green economy (GE) and the business as usual (BAU) respectively. Under the BAU scenario, land use and land cover changes causes 296 MtC national stock loss by 2025, reduces the extent of suitable habitats for endemic and rare species, mainly in encroached protected mountain forests, and produce changes of water yields. In the GE scenario, national stock loss decreases to 133 MtC. In this scenario, consistent LULCC impacts occur within small forest patches with high carbon density, water catchment capacity and biodiversity richness. Opportunities for maximising carbon emissions reductions nationally are largely related to sustainable woodland management but also contain trade-offs with biodiversity conservation and changes in water availability

Fuelwood collection and its impacts on a protected tropical mountain forest in Uganda

Local communities who live close to protected tropical forests often depend on them for woodfuel, their main source of energy. The impacts of fuelwood extraction in humid forests are rarely studied, yet the extraction of wood for fuel can impact forest structure, function and biodiversity. We assessed the effects of fuelwood collection on the forest of Mt Elgon National Park (Uganda). We interviewed 192 households about fuelwood use and surveyed dead wood in 81 plots inside the park. Forest was the most important source of fuelwood. People collected on average between 1.1 and 2.0 m3 of fuelwood per capita per year. Other activities involving wood fuel extraction from the forest included illegal commercial fuelwood harvesting and charcoal making. Quantities of dead wood were affected by fuelwood collection up to at least 1000 m inside the boundary of the park. Depletion of dead wood inside the park was greater in the sites where the population was most dense. Nevertheless, people who planted more trees on their own land perceived land outside the park to be important and valued old growth forest less as a source of fuelwood. Highly-preferred tree species were most depleted, particularly when they were also valued timber trees, such as Prunus africana, Popocarpus milianjianus, Allophylus abyssinicus and Olea spp. Locally dominant species were less affected. Impacts varied among sites depending on the history of agricultural encroachment and locally-specific forest uses, e.g. harvesting of trees for poles or use of the forest land for grazing. Allowing the collection of dead wood in forests is double-edged as it creates opportunities for other activities that are more damaging. Demand for wood fuel from tropical forests is still likely to grow in the foreseeable future. Our results indicate that the forest may become more degraded as a result, with negative consequences for the people who depend on the forest and for conservation. Research into local ecological and cultural contexts and perceptions concerning costs and benefits can help devise more sustainable management options, including alternative sources of fuel

Patterns of (future) environmental risks from cocoa expansion and intensification in West Africa call for context specific responses

Cocoa is an important historical driver and direct cause of forest loss and degradation in the West African Upper Guinean biodiversity hotspot. To inform efforts to prevent further cocoa-driven deforestation in the West African cocoa zone, we mapped areas that are important for biodiversity and ecosystem services (carbon, water, forest products) and potentially most at risk from further cocoa expansion based on climatic suitability, a continuation of past deforestation trends and the potential role of cocoa therein. We found that cocoa expansion and intensification risks further impacting ecologically important areas in West Africa, but that patterns vary in space, may be compounded by climate change and demand context specific responses. In Ghana and Côte d′Ivoire, remaining forests should be better protected, degraded forests should be restored, and agroforestry systems should be supported where possible to maintain or enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services provision in cocoa landscapes. In countries with large areas of remaining forests (e.g., Liberia and Cameroon) that are highly suitable for cocoa and where cocoa is expanding, the approach used in this study can help identify areas with the highest biodiversity and ecosystem services values and inform planning of future cocoa development to maximise cocoa system productivity potential, biodiversity and ecosystem services from the national to local scale. Adaptation strategies are required to avoid the loss but also improve the conservation of biodiversity and provision of ecosystem services across the region