A central challenge for sustainability is how to preserve forest ecosystems and the services that they provide us while enhancing food production. This challenge for developing countries confronts ...the force of economic globalization, which seeks cropland that is shrinking in availability and triggers deforestation. Four mechanisms--the displacement, rebound, cascade, and remittance effects--that are amplified by economic globalization accelerate land conversion. A few developing countries have managed a land use transition over the recent decades that simultaneously increased their forest cover and agricultural production. These countries have relied on various mixes of agricultural intensification, land use zoning, forest protection, increased reliance on imported food and wood products, the creation of off-farm jobs, foreign capital investments, and remittances. Sound policies and innovations can therefore reconcile forest preservation with food production. Globalization can be harnessed to increase land use efficiency rather than leading to uncontrolled land use expansion. To do so, land systems should be understood and modeled as open systems with large flows of goods, people, and capital that connect local land use with global-scale factors.
Although global rates of tropical deforestation remain alarmingly high, they have decreased over the period 2000-2010, and a handful of tropical developing countries have recently been through a ...forest transition-a shift from net deforestation to net reforestation. This review synthesizes existing knowledge on the occurrence, causes, and ecological impacts of forest transitions and examines the prospects and policy options for a global forest transition. The ecological quality of forest transitions depends on multiple factors, including the importance of natural forest regeneration versus plantations. Given an increased competition for productive land between different land uses, a global forest transition will require major technological and policy innovations to supply wood and agricultural products. In the globalization era, national strategies aimed at forest protection and sustainable use of forest resources may have unintended effects abroad owing to a displacement of land use across countries. Decisions by consumers combined with certification schemes and moratoriums have an increasing influence on the fate of forests.
New partnerships between governments, private companies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are reshaping global environmental governance. In particular, there has been a rise of voluntary ...sustainability standards in an attempt to manage social and environmental impacts of global supply chains. We analyze the large spectrum of interactions between private, public, and civil society actors around voluntary sustainability standards, primarily for tropical agriculture and forestry. This review uncovers a policy ecosystem dominated by a proliferation of standards that complement, substitute, or compete against each other, with coordination mechanisms beginning to arise. Contrary to widely held views, interactions between governments, NGOs, and private companies surrounding the adoption of sustainable practices are not generally antagonistic, and public and private environmental governance regimes rarely operate independently. The influence of these interactions on the effectiveness of sustainability standards needs more attention. Better understanding how private regulations interact with the policy ecosystem will help design more effective interventions.
The concept of land use transition highlights that land use change is non-linear and is associated with other societal and biophysical system changes. A transition in land use is not a fixed pattern, ...nor is it deterministic. Land use transitions can be caused by negative socio-ecological feedbacks that arise from a depletion of key resources or from socio-economic change and innovation that take place rather independently from the ecological system. Here, we explore whether the sources of land use transitions are mostly endogenous socio-ecological forces or exogenous socio-economic factors. We first review a few generic pathways of forest transition as identified in national case studies, and evaluate the varying ecological quality of expanding forests associated with these pathways. We then discuss possible explanatory frameworks of land use transitions. We use the case of the recent forest transition in Vietnam as an illustration. Socio-ecological feedbacks seem to better explain a slowing down of deforestation and stabilization of forest cover, while exogenous socio-economic factors better account for reforestation. We conclude by discussing the prospects of accelerating land use transitions in tropical forest countries.
Global supply chains play a critical role in many of the most pressing environmental stresses and social struggles identified by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Responding ...to calls from the global community, companies are adopting a variety of voluntary practices to improve the environmental and/or social management of their suppliers’ activities. We develop a global survey of 449 publicly listed companies in the food, textile, and wood-products sectors with annual reports in English to provide insight into how the private sector contributes to advancing the SDGs via such sustainable-sourcing practices. We find that while 52% of companies use at least one sustainable-sourcing practice, these practices are limited in scope; 71% relates to only one or a few input materials and 60.5% apply to only first-tier suppliers. We also find that sustainable-sourcing practices typically address a small subset of the sustainability challenges laid out by the SDGs, primarily focusing on labor rights and compliance with national laws. Consistent with existing hypotheses, companies that face consumer and civil society pressure are associated with a significantly higher probability of adopting sustainable-sourcing practices. Our findings highlight the opportunities and limitations of corporate sustainable-sourcing practices in addressing the myriad sustainability challenges facing our world today.
Cash for carbon Jayachandran, Seema; de Laat, Joost; Lambin, Eric F. ...
Science,
07/2017, Letnik:
357, Številka:
6348
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We evaluated a program of payments for ecosystem services in Uganda that offered forest-owning households annual payments of 70,000 Ugandan shillings per hectare if they conserved their forest. The ...program was implemented as a randomized controlled trial in 121 villages, 60 of which received the program for 2 years. The primary outcome was the change in land area covered by trees, measured by classifying high-resolution satellite imagery. We found that tree cover declined by 4.2% during the study period in treatment villages, compared to 9.1% in control villages. We found no evidence that enrollees shifted their deforestation to nearby land. We valued the delayed carbon dioxide emissions and found that this program benefit is 2.4 times as large as the program costs.
Global markets for agricultural products, timber, and minerals are critically important drivers of deforestation. The supply chains driving land use change may also provide opportunities to halt ...deforestation. Market campaigns, moratoria, and certification schemes have been promoted as powerful tools to achieve conservation goals. Despite their promise, there have been few opportunities to rigorously quantify the ability of these nonstate, market-driven (NSMD) governance regimes to deliver conservation outcomes. This study analyzes the impacts of three NSMD governance systems that sought to end the conversion of natural forests to plantations in Chile at the start of the 21st century. Using a multilevel, panel dataset of land use changes in Chile, we identify the impact of participation within each of the governance regimes by implementing a series of matched difference-in-differences analyses. Taking advantage of the mosaic of different NSMD regimes adopted in Chile, we explore the relative effectiveness of different policies. NSMD governance regimes reduced deforestation on participating properties by 2–23%. The NSMD governance regimes we studied included collaborative and confrontational strategies between environmental and industry stakeholders. We find that the more collaborative governance systems studied achieved better environmental performance than more confrontational approaches. Whereas many government conservation programs have targeted regions with little likelihood of conversion, we demonstrate that NSMD governance has the potential to alter behavior on high-deforestation properties.
•Multi-stakeholder, multi-level zero-deforestation policy ecosystem is emerging.•Ambitious pledges stimulate supporting public and private sector initiatives.•Governments play key role in ...orchestrating actors at national level.•Public-private partnerships a policy mechanism to scale up impacts.•Illegality, land tenure, and enforcement challenge hybrid governance.
The rise of public and private zero-deforestation commitments is opening a new collaborative space in global forest governance. Governments seeking to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions by protecting and restoring forests are partnering with companies motivated to eliminate deforestation from supply chains. The proliferation of zero-deforestation initiatives is creating opportunities for policy synergies and scaling up impacts, but has led to a more complex regulatory landscape. Drawing on policy analysis and expert interviews, we explore public-private policy interactions in Colombia as a case study for tropical forested nations with interest in aligning climate, forest, and development goals. We consider how zero-deforestation priorities are set on the national agenda and scaled up through public-private partnerships. We identify zero-deforestation initiatives in three overlapping governance domains—domestic public policy, REDD+, sustainable supply chain initiatives—and highlight ten multi-stakeholder pledges that have catalyzed supporting initiatives at multiple scales. Emerging from decades of armed conflict, Colombia is pursuing a peace building model based on low-emissions rural development. The peace deal provided a focusing event for zero-deforestation that converged with political momentum and institutional capacity to open a policy window. A government pledge to eliminate deforestation in the Colombian Amazon by 2020 set the national agenda and stimulated international REDD+ cooperation. Lessons from Colombia show that governments provide important directionality among the proliferation of zero-deforestation initiatives. Public pledges and the orchestration of actors through public-private partnerships allow governments to scale up efforts by aligning transnational activities with national priorities. The case of Colombia serves as a potential zero-deforestation model for other nations, but challenges around equitable land tenure, illegality, and enforcement must be overcome for multi-stakeholder initiatives to produce long-term change.
In some countries across the globe, tropical forest cover is increasing. The national-scale reforestation of Vietnam since 1992 is assumed to contribute to this recovery. It is achieved, however, by ...the displacement of forest extraction to other countries on the order of 49 (34-70) M m³, or almost equal to39% of the regrowth of Vietnam's forests from 1987 to 2006. Approximately half of wood imports to Vietnam during this period were illegal. Leakage due to policies restricting forest exploitation and displacement due to growing domestic consumption and exports contributed respectively to an estimated 58% and 42% of total displacement. Exports of wood products from Vietnam also grew rapidly, amounting to 84% of the displacement, which is a remarkable feature of the forest transition in Vietnam. Attribution of the displacement and corresponding forest extraction to Vietnam, the source countries or the final consumers is thus debatable. Sixty-one percent of the regrowth in Vietnam was, thus, not associated with displacement abroad. Policies allocating credits to countries for reducing deforestation and forest degradation should monitor illegal timber trade and take into account the policy-induced leakage of wood extraction to other countries.
Reducing tropical deforestation is an international priority, given its impacts on carbon emissions and biodiversity. We examined whether recent forest transitions—a shift from net deforestation to ...net reforestation—involved a geographic displacement of forest clearing across countries through trade in agricultural and forest products. In most of the seven developing countries that recently experienced a forest transition, displacement of land use abroad accompanied local reforestation. Additional global land-use change embodied in their net wood trade offset 74% of their total reforested area. Because the reforesting countries continued to export more agricultural goods than they imported, this net displacement offset 22% of their total reforested area when both agriculture and forestry sectors are included. However, this net displacement increased to 52% during the last 5 y. These countries thus have contributed to a net global reforestation and/or decrease in the pressure on forests, but this global environmental benefit has been shrinking during recent years. The net decrease in the pressure on forests does not account for differences in their ecological quality. Assessments of the impacts of international policies aimed at reducing global deforestation should integrate international trade in agricultural and forest commodities.
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