KE Fellowship: Facilitating sustainable reforestation in tropical agricultural landscapes as a nature-based solution - HARP

Reforestation has been identified as a potentially powerful Nature-based solution (NbS) to climate mitigation and adaptation challenges, whilst supporting biodiversity and other sustainable development goals. However, many potential risks with reforestation have also been identified, including trade-offs with food security and biodiversity. Despite these concerns, multiple actors are already pursuing reforestation strategies in tropical agricultural landscapes. In particular, actors in commodity value chains, such as cocoa and coffee, are making commitments to agroforest-based reforestation. These actors have stated that they are facing challenges in the sustainable delivery of these pledges. Here we identify a knowledge exchange (KE) gap between practitioners and scientists: how to implement successful and sustainable reforestation as an NbS in tropical agricultural landscapes.

To fill this gap, this fellowship would facilitate KE between scientists, conservation practitioners and industry, in cocoa and coffee value chains, building on relationships already established by the applicant William Thompson and the host, the Nature-based Solutions Initiative (NbSI), U. Oxford. State-of-the-art knowledge regarding agroforestry and reforestation, as well as new knowledge generated from the KE process, will be packaged under the umbrella of the High Agricultural Reforestation Potential (HARP) Toolkit. The KE process will also lead to establishing a set of best practice principles for reforestation in smallholder agriculture contexts.

We propose a dual case study of cocoa in Ghana and coffee in Vietnam, two leading commodity producing countries with high deforestation risk but also high reforestation potential. These complementary cases are selected to maximise the usability of the toolkit across geographies and commodities. Overall, we will adopt a transdisciplinary approach, whereby the framing of challenges in reforestation and the development of the toolkit will be performed jointly between stakeholders, including; chocolate companies (Lindt), certifiers (Rainforest Alliance, 4C), project developers (Plan Vivo), NGOs (IDH), farmer organisations, finance (Green Finance Institute) and scientists (NbSI, Oxford, KE fellows, NERC researchers), as well as international collaborators (ETH Zurich, Queensland). Phase 1 of the fellowship will convene an "Agroforestry and Reforestation" KE network consisting i) Overarching cross-commodity platform (semi-virtual/UK), ii) Cocoa value chain platform (Ghana w/ KNUST, IITA) and iii) Coffee value chain platform (Vietnam w/ CIAT, IDH). Phase 2 will co-design and test the HARP toolkit with stakeholders. Phase 3 will synthesise a set of best practice principles for reforestation in smallholder agricultural landscapes.

The HARP toolkit will enable planning of agroforest-based reforestation interventions at a landscape scale by a consortium of actors. The toolkit will allow for the evaluation of different agroforest and reforestation (e.g. patch enrichment, riparian buffers) configurations against user defined criteria (e.g. farmer income, carbon sequestration). Network members have already been identified as HARP Toolkit testers (IDH, Rainforest Alliance, Plan Vivo). A key impact of this fellowship, therefore, would be to translate NERC and NERC remit science to enhance the sustainability of reforestation interventions in cocoa and coffee value chains. More widely, the "best practice principles" can inform the creation of reforestation commitments by supply chain companies (e.g. Lindt), as well as policies by producing and consuming country governments (e.g. via UK Global Resources Initiative). In addition, NERC researchers and KE fellows will benefit from the KE process by building understanding of reforestation actors' scientific needs. We intend that the KE process can be sustainable and that the network will be self-maintaining after the fellowship.