Swift action to restore forests is critical for mitigating climate change and preserving biodiversity. Canada has an ambitious program to plant two billion trees to help exceed the country’s emissions targets while restoring forest habitat and providing social and economic benefits. We conducted a systematic analysis of where new tree cover can maximally achieve these benefits while minimizing implementation costs. Accounting for critiques of global restoration mapping that include the overestimation of mitigation potential and inadequate biodiversity and social safeguards, we find that 19.1 Mha are available, which is much more than the approximately 1.2 Mha needed to plant two billion trees. Optimization scenarios for 1.2 Mha revealed synergies and trade-offs. Scenarios prioritizing low costs, accessibility, and high growth are concentrated in temperate and coastal areas, overlapping partly with biodiversity scenarios, but with trade-offs of higher costs. A diverse portfolio of regionally restored sites, each tailored for specific attributes, is most likely to deliver multiple benefits at the pace demanded by the current crises.
Tag: biodiversity conservation
Effectiveness of farmer-managed natural regeneration as a restoration technique
Trees on farms as a nature-based solution for biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes
For the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, it will no longer be sufficient to seek to limit biodiversity loss through agriculture. Instead, agriculture must become an integral element of sustainable landscapes a force for conserving biodiversity and providing vital ecosystem services to local populations and securing livelihoods.
Trees on Farms for Biodiversity
Increasing both the number of trees and species on farms helps conserve and restore biodiversity and improves agricultural productivity. We work with communities, governments and NGOs to promote this approach in Honduras, Indonesia, Peru, Rwanda and Uganda.
A documentation strategy to develop the potential of NTFPs as a source of livelihood diversification for local communities in the Batang Toru Orangutan Conservation Program
A re-emerging paradigm in forestry regards forest as a multi-purpose, multi- benefit resource system serving multi-stakeholders that should be managed to enhance the welfare of local communiti es. This paradigm contends that non- timber forest products (NTFPs) have a high comparative advantage to address the needs of local communities, specific ally products for household consumption and/or market sale to enhance family incomes. NTFPs provide a substantial proportion of income to rural households, pa rticularly to meet seasonal regarding and other periodic needs. However, there is a shortage of information available regarding the sustainable management of these resources and the marketing their products. Look further towards the future there are few proven means of effective dissemination information regarding sustainable management and product management.
Biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihoods in tropical forest landscapes
In developing countries, much remains to be done to truly integrate the livelihoods of rural people and biodiversity conservation into land use decision-making and management processes. Yet, research institutions can support informed landscape management decisions by communities, conservation agencies and policy-makers. This can be accomplished by developing methods and instruments that facilitate coherent linkages between stakeholders across various spatial and decisional scales. Researchers need to facilitate equitable participation in the planning processes and provide information on the options that best integrate biodiversity conservation and livelihoods. This chapter aims to analyse how research has contributed to this objective and how it could be designed for future integrative activities at the landscape level. It identifies lessons from case studies that combine biodiversity conservation and livelihood aims in tropical regions and reviews methodological issues relevant to transdisciplinary research. In addition to the critical elements emerging from case studies, the article highlights the crucial role of institutions in helping to bridge the gaps between science, planning, decision-making and effective management. Finally, it describes an approach that two international research organizations are developing to promote the sustainable use of forests and trees and biodiversity conservation in fragmented tropical forest landscapes.
Plant diversity and regeneration in a disturbed isolated dry Afromontane forest in northern Ethiopia
We studied the diversity, community composition and natural regeneration of woody species in an isolated but relatively large (> 1,000 ha) dry Afromontane forest in northern Ethiopia to assess its importance for regional forest biodiversity conservation. The principal human-induced disturbance regimes affecting this forest include logging and livestock grazing. Vegetation data were collected in 65 plots (50 m × 50 m); seedling species composition and density were determined in 10 m × 10 m nested plots. We used a cluster analysis to identify plant communities and non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) ordination to investigate environmental factors that influenced the distribution of the emergent plant communities. Three plant communities were identified: a Juniperus procera-Maytenus senegalensis community, which represented a phase of the potential natural dry Afromontane forest vegetation on steep slopes with shallow soils, a Pterolobium stellatum-Celtis africana community, found on more mesic sites, and a Cadia purpurea-Opuntia ficus-indica community, typically representing severely disturbed habitats. Altitude, slope, soil depth and distance to the nearest stream, which we collectively interpreted as a moisture gradient, and forest disturbance separated the plant communities. With only 39 of the 79 recorded woody species present in the seedling layer, the forest currently faces an extinction debt of 50 per cent of the total woody species pool. Human disturbance has clearly affected plant species diversity in this forest as degraded plant communities typically lacked the commercially interesting or otherwise valuable tree species, were encroached by shrubs and in areas severely invaded by alien species. Further disturbance will most likely result in additional declines in biodiversity through local extinction of indigenous tree species. Despite the problems associated with conserving plant species diversity in small and isolated populations, this relic forest is of particular importance for regional conservation of forest biodiversity, as species with high conservation value, such as Afrocarpus falcatus, Allophylus abyssinicus and Bersama abyssinica, are still present as mature trees, and as other forest fragments in the region are two orders of magnitude smaller, and therefore more heavily impacted by small population sizes and unfavourable edge effects. Forest management should focus on avoiding further degradation, increasing natural regeneration and improving stakeholder participation. © 2016, Institute of Botany, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
Decision-focused agricultural research
Agriculture provides most of our food and many other products. It also affects ecosystem services, such as water regulation, soil protection, and biodiversity conservation. Decision-makers on agricultural systems, from farmers to agricultural ministers, should consider all these functions and their trade-offs, but this rarely happens. Many of agriculture’s products and services are regularly ignored in decision-making, mainly because they are difficult to appraise. This easily leads to decisions with adverse side effects, such as land degradation, pollution, or loss of cultural heritage. ‘Holistic’ decision-making needs decision support approaches that consider factors that are difficult to quantify. Decision Analysis can potentially solve this problem. It recognizes that rational decisions do not normally require precise information on all factors of interest. Decision Analysis harnesses the knowledge of system experts to produce a high-level model of a decision, which reflects the best available information on plausible decision impacts. The model should include all factors experts consider relevant and all important decision impacts, regardless of data availability. Since most variables cannot be precisely quantified, experts estimate their state of uncertainty as confidence intervals or probability distributions. These allow an initial model run, in which these inputs are translated into decision impact forecasts. These are imprecise, but they allow estimating a plausible range of decision outcomes. Often, this is sufficient for selecting one of the decision alternatives. When no clear recommendation emerges, Value of Information analysis can identify key uncertainties that decision-supporting research should address. Decision Analysis solves the problem of data gaps, which has often prevented research from comprehensively and holistically forecasting decision impacts. It also allows explicit consideration of risks and variability. We present several applications of Decision Analysis in agricultural development, demonstrating its ability to convey a holistic understanding of likely decision impacts, in the face of risk and imperfect information.
Third Cross Border Stakeholder Dialogue Platform
Under the Auspices of the IGAD BMP project, ICRAF holds annual cross border meeting to foster cross border collaboration on biodiversity conservation. This year, ICRAF held the third cross border stakeholder dialogue platform which was well attended by the cross border participants and yielded insightful recommendation to the project steering committee.
Interacting regional-scale regime shifts for biodiversity and ecosystem services
Current trajectories of global change may lead to regime shifts at regional scales, driving coupled human-environment systems to highly degraded states in terms of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human well-being. For business-as-usual socioeconomic development pathways, regime shifts are projected to occur within the next several decades, to be difficult to reverse, and to have regional- to global-scale impacts on human society. We provide an overview of ecosystem, socioeconomic, and biophysical mechanisms mediating regime shifts and illustrate how these interact at regional scales by aggregation, synergy, and spreading processes. We give detailed examples of interactions for terrestrial ecosystems of central South America and for marine and coastal ecosystems of Southeast Asia. This analysis suggests that degradation of biodiversity and ecosystem services over the twenty-first century could be far greater than was previously predicted. We identify key policy and management opportunities at regional to global scales to avoid these shifts.