Trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and economic development in tropical forests
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: Zoology
Abstract
Biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation are two of humanity's most significant challenges. Historically these problems have been tackled in isolation, yet it is becoming increasingly clear that they are inextricably linked and need to be dealt with together. Human well-being depends not only on the provision of food and water, but also on the preservation of other ecosystem services, including the conservation of species and ecosystems and the many benefits we derive from them. Nevertheless, balancing environmental and economic goals is difficult, and win-win solutions (where economic development and biodiversity conservation can occur in the same place) are very rare. Progress towards a sustainable economy requires meeting two challenges; first that we stand up to the problem of combining development and conservation goals, and second that we maximise our efficiency in devising strategies that satisfy both goals. In areas where there is strong competition for land it is vital that we understand the social and economic cost of taking conservation action. By embracing the human dimension of land-use planning this project will help provide the piece of the jigsaw necessary to lift conservation away from being an academic exercise to address real-world issues. Arguably the greatest cost of conservation action is the cost to society when protecting wildlife means lost economic opportunities / what economists call 'opportunity costs'. Yet how incompatible are different economic land-uses with the protection of native species? How much more money could potentially be made in any given landscape? Providing answers to these questions is an urgent task in the Brazilian Amazon, where aggressive economic growth and high rates of deforestation threaten the chance of sustainable development in the remaining forest. Understanding the overlap between biodiversity and economic land value is therefore key to developing more sustainable forest management, and is the primary aim of this research. During my earlier work in the Brazilian Amazon I showed that dung beetles and birds were both excellent indicators of human disturbance in forest ecosystems. I shall combine existing data on these species with new field studies, to understand the conservation value of different agricultural (e.g. soybean, cattle pastures, perennial crops) and forestry (e.g. selective logging and plantation forestry) land-uses. Work will be conducted in five areas of the Amazon, and will help determine the importance of different ecological and social factors that may influence economic land-use choices. I will also collect information on the potential increase in profits that could be gained from each area of land if it was put to a more productive use. These potential improvements in income are the opportunity costs to society by interventions to conserve wildlife (e.g. reserves and parks) and/or inefficient land-uses. Comparing conservation value with the cost of foregoing economic opportunities (e.g. moving from shade to sun coffee plantations) will allow me to quantify the trade-offs between immediate human needs and nature conservation. A range of outcomes are possible: some forms of land-use may incur limited ecological losses but allow significant economic gains, while other forms of intensification may be less compatible with conservation goals. The results of this project will provide a very practical step in addressing the call by the international community, articulated in the Rio Convention on Biological Diversity, for a unified approach to managing entire ecosystems. Specifically I will develop a tool for guiding strategic land-use planning that is able to identify both inefficiencies in current and planned land-uses, as well as methods of income generation that require minimal additional deforestation or habitat degradation.
People |
ORCID iD |
Toby Gardner (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Ahmed SE
(2014)
Road networks predict human influence on Amazonian bird communities.
in Proceedings. Biological sciences
Alves-Martins F
(2019)
Metacommunity patterns of Amazonian Odonata: the role of environmental gradients and major rivers
in PeerJ
Alves-Martins F
(2018)
Drivers of regional and local diversity of Amazonian stream Odonata
in Insect Conservation and Diversity
Barlow J
(2012)
The critical importance of considering fire in REDD+ programs
in Biological Conservation
Barlow J
(2010)
Improving the design and management of forest strips in human-dominated tropical landscapes: a field test on Amazonian dung beetles
in Journal of Applied Ecology
Barlow J
(2011)
Using learning networks to understand complex systems: a case study of biological, geophysical and social research in the Amazon.
in Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society
Barlow J
(2012)
How pristine are tropical forests? An ecological perspective on the pre-Columbian human footprint in Amazonia and implications for contemporary conservation
in Biological Conservation
Barreto JR
(2021)
Assessing invertebrate herbivory in human-modified tropical forest canopies.
in Ecology and evolution
BENETTI C
(2020)
Hydrodessus ducke sp. n. and new records of other species of the genus (Coleoptera, Dytiscidae, Bidessini)
in Zootaxa
Description | Poverty alleviation and the desire for material wealth mean that economic development stands at the forefront of the social and political agenda of all tropical forest nations. With rare exceptions development activities commonly translate into the conversion of native forests and a subsequent process of land-use intensification. Science can help this process by identifying the problems that need to be addressed first, and assessing the long-term social and ecological implications of land-use alternatives in planning for both regional development and ecological conservation. During my NERC Postdoctoral Fellowship position at the University of Cambridge I led the development of the Sustainable Amazon Network (www.redeamazoniasustentavel.org) which expands upon the core research of my Fellowship on conservation-development trade-offs to help address this research need. The Sustainable Amazon Network (RAS in Portuguese) is a multi-disciplinary research initiative involving more than 30 research institutions and partner organisations. Building on the work of a number of earlier and groundbreaking interdisciplinary assessments in the Amazon, RAS seeks to address some of the limitations listed above by assessing the sustainability of land-use systems in two dynamic regions of eastern Brazilian Amazonia. During an intensive field campaign in two regions of the eastern Brazilian Amazon in 2010 and 2011 project members collected standardised and comparative data on spatial patterns of biodiversity (including both terrestrial and aquatic systems), ecosystem services (carbon sequestration, soil fertility, water quality), land value (opportunity costs from agriculture and forest management) and human well-being (health, education, recreation) across multiple land-use systems. This comprehensive assessment has delivered invaluable scientific insights regarding both the social and ecological drivers and consequences of land-use change. Work to analyse and synthesise this massive body of evidence is ongoing but a number of key findings have already been reported. Our work provides probably the most comprehensive assessment of the potentially devastating effects of forest degradation from logging and fire on the biodiversity and ecosystem service production of tropical forests. Hitherto much of the conservation and policy debate regarding tropical forest conservation has focussed on the loss and fragmentation of forest area, but our research has shown that the often synergistic impacts of fire and logging can result in severe impoverishment of the forest ecosystem and a potential transformation towards an impoverished secondary scrub-like habitat. We have also demonstrated how the extent of remaining forest at landscape scales can have an often over-riding effect on the local patterns of biodiversity, underpinning the urgent need for collective action across entire catchments and regions to ensure the effectiveness of conservation strategies. From a socioeconomic perspective our work has demonstrated the extent to which many farming areas are grossly underutilized with the potential for increases in production of two orders of magnitude. We have also, however, identified the critical importance of understanding and managing connections between smallholders and large-scale mechanised farmers, with the potential for both positive (e.g. loaning of machinery to reduce fire dependence) and negative effects (e.g. through rapid increases in the price of land following mechanization and potential for rapid impoverishment of communities that have migrated to urban centres). By integrating our findings on ecological and socioeconomic values our work has been able to inform more cost-effective approaches to conservation planning, highlighting the critical need to invest in avoided degradation efforts over and above restoration of already cleared land. |
Description | The work developed during my NERC Fellowship, has led to particularly strong partnerships with the government, NGO and farming sectors. We are a lead scientific partner of the Pará state government Municipio Verde (Green County) program that is an attempt to integrate efforts across all relevant government departments in Pará to improve the environmental and social sustainability of land-use. We work very closely with the NGO sector, and indeed the two study regions of Santarém and Paragominas were specifically chosen for the project because they represent a focus of efforts by TNC and IMAZON (our lead NGO partners, and co-funders of the work), alongside other organisations, to support a shift towards more sustainable land-use practices. . We have continued to work closely with farmers associations, and in particular the Sindicato de Produtores Rurais de Paragominas (Paragominas Farmer's Union) who has been a staunch supporter of our research and primary facilitator of our access to, and influence with, the state government Municipio Verde program. At the international level our results have already had an impact at the highest level. My work on developing a biodiversity framework for REDD+ (see Publications), drawing extensively on experiences within Brazil in the last four years, was distributed as an official Information Document for the Convention on Biological diversity in Montreal May 2012.In addition, my work for the Global Forest Expert Panel on REDD+ and forest management (see Publications) was presented at the Rio Conventions Pavilion in October 2012, at the 11th COP of the Convention of Biological Diversity in Hydrobad, India, and in November 2012 at the COP 18 of the UNFCCC in Doha where it received widespread and positive coverage from the conservation community |
Description | Creation of Sustainable Amazon Network |
Organisation | East African Great Lakes Observatory (EAGLO) |
Country | Kenya |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | My NERC Fellowship inspired the creation of what is now called Rede Amazonia Sustentavel (RAS or Sustainable Amazon Network in Portuguese) bringing together a network of nearly 100 researchers and students (the vast majority in Brazil) from more than 30 institutions. The RAS network is currently very active and hosts its own website (www.redeamazoniasustentavel.org). I led a recent publication currently in press at the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that summarises the conceptual and methodological basis of our work, as well as shared progress to date: Gardner, T.A., Ferreira, J.F., Parry, L., Barlow, J., and 84 collaborators of the Sustainable Amazon Network. (in press). A social and ecological assessment of tropical land-uses at multiple scales: the Sustainable Amazon Network. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society (Series B). |
Start Year | 2009 |