Knowledge exchange for sustainable tropical landscapes

This project will build a KE network of stakeholders from academia, industry, policy, and conservation in order to translate NERC research findings into practice and policy for ensuring the sustainability of tropical agricultural landscapes under climate change.

Tropical landscapes perform multiple functions, including providing food, supporting the highest concentrations of biodiversity globally, and providing essential ecosystem services, including storing vast amounts of carbon within rainforests. All these functions impact globally and are under increasing pressure from human population growth. There is a large and growing body of scientific evidence to aid decision-making about the sustainable management of tropical landscapes, but this information is rarely available to decision makers and practitioners charged with developing and implementing best practice. The role of the KE fellow will be to bridge the gap between academia and other sectors to facilitate more informed decision-making. The development of sustainable tropical landscapes relies on multiple and diverse stakeholders, often with competing priorities, therefore the KE fellowship aims to provide a robust and consistent evidence-base across sectors.

The first phase of the fellowship will focus on improving sustainability of oil palm dominated landscapes in SE Asia. Oil palm is the world's primary source of vegetable oil, and SE Asia is responsible for 80% of global production. The fellow already has extensive technical knowledge of the subject from previous KE projects, and has developed a diverse network of contacts of important stakeholders, including: the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm oil (RSPO) - the certification body for sustainable palm oil, Unilever - the largest single user of palm oil globally, and Proforest - an NGO responsible for the development of the 'High Conservation Values' (HCV) process (see letters of support) .The fellow will use this existing knowledge and contacts to deliver targeted KE on urgent and emerging issues.

The second phase of the programme will expand the scope of KE to include new regions, crops and research topics to maximise the KE output from NERC-funded tropical research at York. The final phase of the project will place KE activities in the context of climate change to ensure the safeguarding of food security, natural resources and ecosystem services in the face of environmental change. It will also create a KE legacy, by putting in place mechanisms to ensure that KE continues to flow between academia and decision-makers beyond the lifetime of the project.

By delivering the four project objectives, the fellow will bridge the gap between academia, industry, government and NGOs. This approach will ensure the incorporation of NERC science into policy and practice, to achieve progress towards effectively balancing the multiple functions of tropical landscapes. KE activities will include building contacts through visits to stakeholders in the UK and in the focal tropical countries, and development and maintenance of effective communication tools. Two multi-sector workshops will highlight issues and challenges, while encouraging collaboration across sectors. Focus topics for KE will be identified for which the relevant scientific evidence will be synthesised and disseminated by the fellow in a variety of ways ranging from synthesis reports to podcasts. In addition, three secondments are planned. Each secondment will target a different sector and will enable the fellow to work closely with individual organisations to deliver scientific knowledge which is tailored according to targeted needs.

By these means the programme will facilitate more efficient uptake of scientific evidence into policy and practice, ultimately benefiting society through safeguarding food security, biodiversity and ecosystem services under a changing climate.