Landscape approaches mobilize stakeholders across sectors and scales to negotiate development–conservation trade-offs and land-use allocation. Building on the concept of earth system justice, we examine how efforts to operationalize such approaches in Ghana, Zambia and Indonesia advance landscape justice. We observed contributions to procedural, recognitional and intergenerational justice, while interspecies justice remains overlooked. Yet, power asymmetries, exclusionary practices and institutional constraints hinder progress towards intragenerational and substantive—distributive, corrective, restorative and transformative justice. In contexts lacking commitment to transformative change, trade-offs are inevitable. Pursuing incremental change rather than ‘perfect’ justice may represent a second-best but more realistic pathway towards just landscape governance.
Tag: conservation
Spatial analysis of human–wildlife conflict reveals a need for mitigation beyond protected area buffer zones in the Nepal Terai
Increasing human-wildlife conflict (HWC) is a global concern in the tropical lowlands of Nepal (the Terai), where megafauna populations have been increasing. Despite several site-specific studies quantifying HWC losses and modeling risk, landscape-scale distribution of incidents and the environmental factors shaping conflict risk remain poorly understood. We conducted a landscape-level assessment of HWC from 2018 to 2022 across 2803 Terai wards (smallest administrative units), in which we quantified species-specific patterns of human attacks and livestock depredation, mapped incident densities to identify conflict hotspots, and examined key environmental predictors of conflict occurrence and frequency. Of the 584 human attacks in 187 wards, 67% were caused by elephants, wild boars, and rhinos. Of the 4267 livestock depredation incidents in 211 wards, 99% were caused by leopards and tigers. Hotspots of HWC incidents were concentrated around protected areas (PAs), although they did extend into distant settlements. Of 12 pre-defined environmental predictors, proximity to wildlife habitats (PAs, biological corridors, and larger forest patches) consistently predicted both the occurrence and frequency of incidents, indicating that conflict risk is influenced by habitat connectivity. There is a need to extend conflict mitigation beyond buffer zones to high-risk settlements where wildlife frequently interacts with people, including settlements adjacent to transboundary PAs. Expanding spatially targeted mitigation, wildlife-resilient infrastructure, and awareness into these high-risk settlements will promote human–wildlife coexistence across the broader landscape.
Agroforestry Module 2: Managing selected agroforestry systems and practices
Agroforestry provides an integrated land management strategy that brings together trees, crops, and sometimes livestock to improve productivity, strengthen ecological resilience, and support long-term sustainability. This module introduces participants to key and selected agroforestry systems and the principles that guide their effective management, including species selection, spatial arrangement, soil fertility improvement and conservation-oriented practices. By exploring and practicing the tree management skills under diverse agroecological zones, participants will gain the knowledge and skills needed to optimize tree–crop interactions, improve land productivity and support climate-resilient agriculture. Additionally, the module draws attention to agroforestry’s role in reducing land degradation, enhancing biodiversity, as well as strengthening the livelihoods of smallholder farming households.
Strong floristic distinctiveness across Neotropical successional forests
Forests that naturally regenerate on abandoned fields play a crucial role in restoring biodiversity and ecosystem services, but their ability to preserve distinct regional tree floras remains a key question. A study analyzing the floristic composition of 1,215 early successional forests (≤20 years old) across 75 human-modified landscapes in the Neotropic realm identified 14 distinct floristic groups, with a high between-group dissimilarity of 0.97. These groups were strongly influenced by location, bioregions, soil pH, temperature seasonality, and water availability, highlighting the large-scale continental variation in species composition. Interestingly, human disturbance indicators did not significantly shape these floristic patterns, suggesting that biogeographic and environmental factors are the primary drivers of species distribution in early secondary forests. The distinctiveness of these forests is partly maintained by regionally restricted species within widespread genera, reinforcing their ecological importance. Given their role in conserving bioregional uniqueness, forest restoration efforts should prioritize the use of local species to ensure the preservation of these distinct floras.
Integrating biodiversity goals with community needs in Wallacea, Indonesia
We studied conservation initiatives in Wallacea, a global biodiversity hotspot where numerous endemic plant and animal species are threatened by agricultural and industrial expansion. Seventy per cent of Wallacea’s 391 recognized Key Biodiversity Areas lie outside legally protected habitats. Our research explores biodiversity conservation options in six highly biodiverse landscapes where local farmers actively manage production systems subject to overlapping administrative jurisdictions and exposed to intensifying development pressures. For the past decade we have engaged with local communities in these landscapes to identify scenarios that could meet their development needs and also maintain the region’s biodiversity. Conservation management will need local institutions able to influence the behaviour of numerous local stakeholders. We conclude that there is a need to provide financial incentives to local people for conservation either through profitable nature-based enterprises adapted to local community skills or by providing conditional cash payments linked to conservation goals. Ecosystem boundaries do not align well with administrative jurisdictions and new institutional arrangements will be needed to meet the goals of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Cost-effective global conservation spending is robust to taxonomic group
Priorities for conservation investment at a global scale that are based on a single taxon have been criticized because geographic richness patterns vary taxonomically. However, these concerns focused only on biodiversity patterns and did not consider the importance of socioeconomic factors, which must also be included if conservation funding is to be allocated efficiently. In this article, we create efficient global funding schedules that use information about conservation costs, predicted habitat loss rates, and the endemicity of seven different taxonomic groups. We discover that these funding allocation schedules are less sensitive to variation in taxon assessed than to variation in cost and threat. Two-thirds of funding is allocated to the same regions regardless of the taxon, compared with only one-fifth if threat and cost are not included in allocation decisions. Hence, if socioeconomic factors are considered, we can be more confident about global-scale decisions guided by single taxonomic groups.
One hundred questions of importance to the conservation of global biological diversity
We identified 100 scientific questions that, if answered, would have the greatest impact on conservation practice and policy. Representatives from 21 international organizations, regional sections and working groups of the Society for Conservation Biology, and 12 academics, from all continents except Antarctica, compiled 2291 questions of relevance to conservation of biological diversity worldwide. The questions were gathered from 761 individuals through workshops, email requests, and discussions. Voting by email to short-list questions, followed by a 2-day workshop, was used to derive the final list of 100 questions. Most of the final questions were derived through a process of modification and combination as the workshop progressed. The questions are divided into 12 sections: ecosystem functions and services, climate change, technological change, protected areas, ecosystem management and restoration, terrestrial ecosystems, marine ecosystems, freshwater ecosystems, species management, organizational systems and processes, societal context and change, and impacts of conservation interventions. We anticipate that these questions will help identify new directions for researchers and assist funders in directing funds.
Carbon rights, REDD+ and payments for environmental services
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) has become a central dimension of the contemporary international forest regime. The mechanism seeks to reward actors for keeping or restoring forests as a means to reduce carbon emissions. Carbon rights, here understood as title to carbon credits, have an odd status in the REDD+ debate. They are closely associated with the belief that REDD+ will generate (economic) “rents” – i.e. revenues exceeding the full cost of the corresponding effort – which means framing the discussion in terms of entitlement to revenues beyond mere financial compensations. We suggest that, in an “ideal” REDD+ scheme, the possibility of obtaining rents in REDD+ would be very limited. In the real world, rent could be created by strategic behaviours by setting a reference emission level (what would occur under a business-as-usual scenario) and by possible acceptance, for political reasons, of inappropriate rules such as being remunerated for the full stock of carbon. The carbon rights rhetoric leads to rent-seeking since remunerations could be disconnected from the active contribution to the production of emission reductions, which is a public good by nature. Another interpretation of carbon rights is the right to benefit from the sale of carbon credits, a framework within which what is at stake is sharing the benefits deriving from the human production and the sale of these benefits, a traditional social issue. In this case, we argue, the concept of carbon rights is useless and even misleading. Compensating for easements would be a more appropriate framework for designing incentive schemes such as payments for environmental services (PES). Reforming land tenure codes to allow individuals, families and communities to claim property or collective tenure rights on the land and the trees is the issue that matters in order to start tackling fairness in REDD+ and PES initiatives.
Who represents the collective?: Authority and the recognition of forest rights
New Rights for forest-based communities?: understanding processes of forest tenure reform
This article reports on findings from a research project, in more than 30 sites in 10 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, aimed at analyzing cases where changes in formal tenure rights for forest-based communities had recently occurred or were in process. Though by far largest proportion of the world’s forests are owned by the state, over a quarter of forests in developing countries are now owned by or assigned to communities. This suggests, at least in some ways, a marked departure from the historic trend towards centralizing. The project, led by the Center for International Forestry Research in coordination with the Rights and Resources Initiative in 2006-2008, sought to identify issues and concerns from the perspective of socially and economically vulnerable groups that were seeking rights reforms. The objectives were to understand reform processes, particularly the extent to which community rights had improved in practice. This article reports on the analysis of three aspects of the reforms: the broad global trends shaping them, challenges in implementation and outcomes for livelihoods and forests.