Climate change mitigation and adaptation in the land use sector: from complementarity to synergy

Currently, mitigation and adaptation measures are handled separately, due to differences in priorities for the measures and segregated planning and implementation policies at international and national levels. There is a growing argument that synergistic approaches to adaptation and mitigation could bring substantial benefits at multiple scales in the land use sector. Nonetheless, efforts to implement synergies between adaptation and mitigation measures are rare due to the weak conceptual framing of the approach and constraining policy issues. In this paper, we explore the attributes of synergy and the necessary enabling conditions and discuss, as an example, experience with the Ngitili system in Tanzania that serves both adaptation and mitigation functions. An in-depth look into the current practices suggests that more emphasis is laid on complementarity—i.e., mitigation projects providing adaptation co-benefits and vice versa rather than on synergy. Unlike complementarity, synergy should emphasize functionally sustainable landscape systems in which adaptation and mitigation are optimized as part of multiple functions. We argue that the current practice of seeking co-benefits (complementarity) is a necessary but insufficient step toward addressing synergy. Moving forward from complementarity will require a paradigm shift from current compartmentalization between mitigation and adaptation to systems thinking at landscape scale. However, enabling policy, institutional, and investment conditions need to be developed at global, national, and local levels to achieve synergistic goals

The ‘Missing Middle’: Landscape Restoration’s Greatest Challenge

The world urgently needs to restore huge swaths of land to meet the demand for ecosystem services and is targeting 350 M Ha by 2030 under the New York Declaration on Forests and the Bonn Challenge. Tremendous resources - financial, human and other - are needed at international, national, sub-national and local levels. International mobilization has been great so far. National awareness and commitments are also robust. Many excellent local success stories have also been reported. However, for scaling up and implementing restoration, a critical mass of involvement of sub-national governments, local NGOs, CBOs, academia, and enterprise is needed. So far, evidence of engagement of this key cohort is thin, and this missing meso level engagement may well be restoration’s number one challenge. This is what this policy brief seeks to address

Simple incentives and group dependence for successful payments for ecosystem services programs: evidence from an experimental game in rural Lao PDR

In this paper, we use a new game-based tool to evaluate the immediate and longer-term behavioral change potential of three different payment for environmental services (PES) delivery mechanisms: direct payments for individual performance, direct payments for group performance and insurance. Results from four rural shifting-cultivation dependent communities in Lao PDR suggest that easily understood group-oriented incentives yield the greatest immediate resource-use reduction and experience less free-riding. Group-based incentives may succeed because they motivate participants to communicate about strategies and coordinate their actions and are perceived as fair. No incentive had a lasting effect after it ceased, but neither did any crowd out the participants’ baseline behavior. Temporary reductions in resource dependence may provide a buffer for development of new livelihoods and longer-term change. Games like the one developed here can help policymakers appropriately target environmental incentive programs to local contexts and teach program participants how incentive schemes work

Social Ecology, Climate Resilience and Sustainability in the Tropics: Special Issue

This Special Issue addresses the wide knowledge gap in how social ecology could influence both the resilience agenda and sustainability at local and global scales. It covers the missing link on how people at multiple scales could play a crucial role in addressing climate change from multiple angles through nurturing ecosystems

An Exploratory Study of Cost-Benefit Analysis of Landscape Restoration

Owing to the increasing demand for restoration globally and limited resources available, there is a need for economic analysis of landscape restoration to help prioritize investment of the scarce resources. Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is a commonly applied approach in the economic analysis of landscape restoration as well as for strategizing and prioritizing resource allocation. However, despite the growing number of studies and projects on restoration globally, studies on cost-benefit analysis of landscape restoration are relatively few. A systematic review of the cost-benefit analysis of landscape restoration was conducted to understand the extent and coverage of existing studies, as well as gaps. After a comprehensive search and filtering of the studies, 31 that met the various guidelines of CBA of landscape restoration were identified. These are distributed across different regions globally, with the majority of them in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. The CBA studies reviewed were conducted for different types of restoration options/strategies including; reforestation and afforestation, agroforestry, biofuel agroforestry, participatory forest management, establishment of woodlots, sustainable land management practices, natural regeneration, assisted natural regeneration, mangrove restoration, clearing of invasive alien species, and restoration of urban and buffer areas. A larger proportion of the studies focused on agroforestry, reforestation and afforestation. For some restoration options, all the studies conducted reported positive net present value (NPV); agroforestry (8), soil and water conservation (5), mangrove restoration (3) and alien vegetation clearing (3). However, for some of the restoration strategies, several studies reported negative NPV: in reforestation and afforestation, the number of studies that reported positive NPV (4) was equal to those that reported negative NPV (4). In terms of accounting for benefits accruing from restoration, majority of the studies accounted for the use values only (either direct use or indirect use or both), and only around 16% accounted for non-use values. This is because non-use values and some of the indirect use values are not easy to quantify since they do not have a market price. Accounting for the total economic value of a project is particularly useful for large-scale restoration initiatives where the benefits accrue to the broader public beyond the targeted stakeholders. Similarly, for cost components, relatively few studies accounted for the opportunity cost component. This is probably because it is often difficult to estimate this cost since it is not a direct cost and for some land uses the opportunity cost may be negligible, especially if the land is highly degraded. Further still, some restoration projects fail to account for maintenance and monitoring costs since they view restoration as a one-time cost activity, as opposed to a continuous activity where maintenance and monitoring costs are significant. Future costbenefit analysis studies ought to account for all the benefits and cost components attributable to restoration; otherwise, profitability of restoration projects could either be over- or understated. Similarly, lack of reliable data owing to poor data-keeping during the restoration period also affects CBA results. This requires data over several years, and most projects do not keep such records. Hence, even for ex-post CBA evaluations, a lot of predictions and assumptions are involved in data generation. Thus, there is need to adopt standardized methods of data prediction if the results are to be comparable across different restoration projects that would guide decisions in the allocation of funds. An ongoing project, ‘The Economics of Ecosystem Restoration (TEER)’ aims to “offer a reference point for the estimation of costs and benefits of future ER projects in all major biomes, based on information from comparable initiatives on which data are collected through a standardized framework”

Climate change mitigation and adaptation in the land use sector: from complementarity to synergy

Currently, mitigation and adaptation measures are handled separately, due to differences in priorities for the measures and segregated planning and implementation policies at international and national levels. There is a growing argument that synergistic approaches to adaptation and mitigation could bring substantial benefits at multiple scales in the land use sector. Nonetheless, efforts to implement synergies between adaptation and mitigation measures are rare due to the weak conceptual framing of the approach and constraining policy issues. In this paper, we explore the attributes of synergy and the necessary enabling conditions and discuss, as an example, experience with the Ngitili system in Tanzania that serves both adaptation and mitigation functions. An in-depth look into the current practices suggests that more emphasis is laid on complementarity—i.e., mitigation projects providing adaptation co-benefits and vice versa rather than on synergy. Unlike complementarity, synergy should emphasize functionally sustainable landscape systems in which adaptation and mitigation are optimized as part of multiple functions. We argue that the current practice of seeking co-benefits (complementarity) is a necessary but insufficient step toward addressing synergy. Moving forward from complementarity will require a paradigm shift from current compartmentalization between mitigation and adaptation to systems thinking at landscape scale. However, enabling policy, institutional, and investment conditions need to be developed at global, national, and local levels to achieve synergistic goals