Biodiversity loss, agricultural development, and sustainability
Research by the Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn (ASB) Consortium in Sumatra provides little support for the original perception ‘poverty causes people to migrate to the forests, but they don’t know how to manage the soils, which forces them to move on and open new forest, leaving a trail of degraded lands behind’. However, ASB research also shows that the land use systems that follow forest conversion differ significantly in the profitability and impacts on biodiversity. For example, farmers have developed agroforests, based on rubber, damar and other local or introduced trees, as sustainable and profitable alternatives to shifting cultivation, but these opportunities have stimulated rather than slowed down forest conversion in the absence of active boundary enforcement mechanisms for natural areas. Although agroforests can maintain part of the biodiversity of the originsl forests, they are no substitute for full protection of biodiversity in dedicated natural areas and conservation reserves.
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Authors
Tomich T P,van Noordwijk, M.
Publication year
2022
