Increasingly, landscapes are managed for multiple objectives to balance social, economic, and environmental goals. The Ex-Mega Rice Project (EMRP) peatland in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia provides a timely example with globally significant development, carbon, and biodiversity concerns. To inform future policy, planning, and management in the EMRP, we quantified and mapped ecosystem service values, assessed their spatial interactions, and evaluated the potential provision of ecosystem services under future land-use scenarios. We focus on key policy-relevant regulating (carbon stocks and the potential for emissions reduction), provisioning (timber, crops from smallholder agriculture, palm oil), and supporting (biodiversity) services. We found that implementation of existing land-use plans has the potential to improve total ecosystem service provision. We identify a number of significant inefficiencies, trade-offs, and unintended outcomes that may arise. For example, the potential development of existing palm oil concessions over one-third of the region may shift smallholder agriculture into low-productivity regions and substantially impact carbon and biodiversity outcomes. While improved management of conservation zones may enhance the protection of carbon stocks, not all biodiversity features will be represented, and there will be a reduction in timber harvesting and agricultural production. This study highlights how ecosystem service analyses can be structured to better inform policy, planning, and management in globally significant but data-poor regions.
Summary
Tropical forest landscapes face competing demands for conserving biodiversity, sustaining ecosystem services and accommodating production systems such as forestry and agriculture. Land‐sparing and land‐sharing have emerged as contrasting strategies to manage trade‐offs between production and biodiversity conservation. Both strategies are evident in land‐management policies at local‐to‐international scales. However, studies rarely report the impacts of these strategies, assessed for multiple stakeholders and multiple ecosystem services, particularly in real landscapes.
Using a case study from a high‐priority region for forest protection, restoration and rural development in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, we analysed the potential outcomes under 10 alternative policy scenarios, including land‐sharing, land‐sparing and mixed strategies. We used a novel optimization process integrating integer programming with conservation‐planning software (Marxan with Zones) to identify production possibility frontiers (PPFs), highlighting the trade‐off between smallholder agriculture and oil palm, subject to achievement of a set of carbon, timber and biodiversity conservation targets.
All policy scenarios modelled proved to be capable of achieving all targets simultaneously. Most strategies resulted in an expansion of the PPF from the baseline, increasing the flexibility of land allocation to achieve all targets. Mixed strategies gave the greatest flexibility to achieve targets, followed closely by land‐sparing. Land‐sharing only performed better than the baseline when no yield penalties were incurred, and resulted in PPF contraction otherwise. Strategies assessed required a minimum of 29–37% to be placed in conservation zones, notably protecting the majority of remaining forest, but requiring little reforestation.
Policy implications. Production possibility frontiers (PPFs) can evaluate a broad spectrum of land‐use policy options. When using targets sought by multiple stakeholders within an ecosystem services framework, PPFs can characterize biophysical, socio‐economic and institutional dimensions of policy trade‐offs in heterogeneous landscapes. All 10 policy strategies assessed in our case study are biophysically capable of achieving all stakeholder objectives, provided at least 29–37% of the landscape is conserved for biodiversity. This novel methodological approach provides practical options for systematic analysis in complex, multifunctional landscapes, and could, when integrated within a larger planning and implementation process, inform the design of land‐use policies that maximize stakeholder satisfaction and minimize conflict.
It is likely that climate change will be associated with reductions in inflows of water to the Murray-Darling Basin. In this study, we analyse the effects of climate change in the Murray-Darling Basin using a simulation model that incorporates a state-contingent representation of uncertainty. The severity of the impact depends, in large measure, on the extent to which climate change is manifested as an increase in the frequency of drought conditions. Adaptation will partially offset the adverse impact of climate change.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.