Alternative futures for Borneo show the value of integrating economic and conservation targets across borders

Runting, Rebecca K.; Meijaard, Erik; Abram, Nicola K.; Wells, Jessie A.; Gaveau, David; Ancrenaz, Marc; Possingham, Hugh P.; Wich, Serge A.; Ardiansyah, Fitrian; Gumal, Melvin; Ambu, Laurentius; Wilson, Kerrie A.

doi:10.1038/ncomms7819

Cited by 94 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 56 publications

(67 reference statements)

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“…Communities in the HoB inhabit some of Indonesia's most dynamic frontier land. They are often Indonesia's poorest people, reside in the world's largest transboundary rainforest and face some of the world's greatest rates of deforestation due to the rapid expansion of oil palm [13][14][15].…”

Section: Landscapes In the Heart Of Borneomentioning

confidence: 99%

Estate Crops More Attractive than Community Forests in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

Langston

Riggs

Sururi

et al. 2017

Land

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Smallholder farmers and indigenous communities must cope with the opportunities and threats presented by rapidly spreading estate crops in the frontier of the agricultural market economy. Smallholder communities are subject to considerable speculation by outsiders, yet large-scale agriculture presents tradeoffs that they must navigate. We initiated a study in Sintang, West Kalimantan in 2012 and have returned annually for the last four years, building the baselines for a longer-term landscape approach to reconciling conservation and development tradeoffs in situ. Here, the stakeholders are heterogeneous, yet the land cover of the landscape is on a trajectory towards homogenous mono-cropping systems, primarily either palm oil or rubber. In one village on the frontier of the agricultural market economy, natural forests remain managed by the indigenous and local community but economics further intrude on forest use decisions. Conservation values are declining and the future of the forest is uncertain. As such, the community is ultimately attracted to more economically attractive uses of the land for local development oil palm or rubber mono-crop farms. We identify poverty as a threat to community-managed conservation success in the face of economic pressures to convert forest to intensive agriculture. We provide evidence that lucrative alternatives will challenge community-managed forests when prosperity seems achievable. To alleviate this trend, we identify formalized traditional management and landscape governance solutions to nurture a more sustainable landscape transition.

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Section: Landscapes In the Heart Of Borneomentioning

confidence: 99%

Estate Crops More Attractive than Community Forests in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

Langston

Riggs

Sururi

et al. 2017

Land

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“…We therefore further caution that an equal offset ratio indicated by our analysis represents a minimum value to compensate biodiversity values that have been lost due to oil-palm development in Kalimantan. Even using this conservative estimate, the extent of offsetting areas required to fully compensate biodiversity losses will likely be increasingly constrained by regional development targets aiming for the expansion of oil palm and industrial timber plantations, logging and mining (Abood et al, 2015;Runting et al, 2015). The high costs incurred also raises questions about the economic capacity of the oil-palm industry.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Oil-palm plantations in Kalimantan are predicted to expand between 6.9-9.4 million hectares (Abood et al, 2015;Carlson et al, 2013;Runting et al, 2015) over the next five years. To minimise carbon emissions and thus offset future liabilities, our results imply that there should be no oil-palm expansion on peatlands including areas in a degraded condition.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…of them are endemic (Runting et al, 2015). Bornean forests store high amounts of above-ground carbon, averaging 230 MgC per hectare, which is 60% higher than Amazonian forests .…”

Section: The Context Of the Thesis And Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Borneo is a global biodiversity and regional evolutionary hotspot with 534 threatened species (de Bruyn et al, 2014;Runting et al, 2015). The region also has high carbon storage capacity in the form of forest biomass and peat soil carbon Slik et al, 2010), but this capacity is highly threatened by deforestation, fire, and peat decomposition (Carlson et al, 2013;Gaveau et al, 2014b;Page et al, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Restoration planning of degraded tropical forests for biodiversity and ecosystem services

Budiharta¹

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Forest restoration has the potential to mitigate the impact of deforestation and forest degradation.Various global policies have been sought to put restoration into the mainstream agenda including under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the program for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+). The Aichi Target of the CBD set a target for at least 15% of degraded ecosystems to be restored by 2020 for key goals including biodiversity conservation, carbon enhancement and the provision of livelihoods. A theoretical framework to underpin decisionmaking for landscape-scale restoration has been slow to emerge, resulting in a limited contribution from science towards achieving such policy targets. My thesis develops decision frameworks to guide the restoration of degraded tropical forests to enhance biodiversity and the delivery of ecosystem services. In this thesis, three critical questions on how to make better decisions for landscape-scale restoration are addressed by: (a) considering landscape heterogeneity in terms of degradation condition, restoration action and cost, and temporally-explicit restoration benefits; (b) leveraging restoration within competing land uses using emerging policy for offsetting; and (c) enhancing feasibility by accounting for the social and political dimensions related to restoration.I use Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) as a case study area, as it represents a region that is globally important in terms of biodiversity and carbon storage. Kalimantan's forests also provide essential livelihoods for local people. Yet, rapid deforestation and forest degradation threaten the forests in this region. Chapter 2 verifies that forest loss and degradation is the most significant threat to biodiversity in Kalimantan, impacting more than 80% of threatened animal species and 60% of threatened plant species. The future of Kalimantan's wildlife depends on the survival of species in human-modified landscapes including in restored forest.Quantifying carbon benefit in a policy, such as forest restoration under the REDD+, requires a standardised tool, which has not been available for data-poor regions including Kalimantan. In Chapter 3, I examine a process-based model, called 3-PG (physiological principles for predicting growth), to estimate the above-ground biomass (AGB) content of the major forest types occurring on the island of Borneo. Using readily available climate and soil data, the results indicate the 3-PG model accurately predicts AGB compared with field-measured data, revealing the potential application of this model for carbon sequestration analyses. The datasets along with a set of parameters used in this chapter are employed in the subsequent chapters.Degraded tropical forests are characterised by a broad spectrum of forest condition states, mainly as a result of varying intensities of logging and fire. In Chapter 4, I develop a new framework to ii optimally allocate restoration investments to forests of varying condition, with two contrasting o...

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Reserve design to optimize the long‐term persistence of multiple species

Strimas‐Mackey

Brodie

2018

Ecological Applications

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Protected areas form the cornerstone of global efforts to conserve biodiversity. Most current methods for designing reserve networks focus on maximizing the representation of species, but with no assurance that those species will persist in the protected landscapes into the future. We present a new strategy for reserve design that combines metapopulation theory with spatial conservation prioritization to estimate conservation solutions that minimize extinction risk across numerous species simultaneously. Our framework optimizes the spatial configuration of reserves to maximize metapopulation persistence for an entire assemblage of species by accounting for both species representation and landscape connectivity. As a case study, we design a reserve network for 114 terrestrial mammal species in Indonesian New Guinea. Our approach builds on Marxan, the flagship representation-based reserve design tool, improving estimated persistence (metapopulation capacity) by an average of 4.6-fold across species, without increasing the socioeconomic cost. We suggest that enhancing species persistence, rather than protecting arbitrary proportions of species' ranges, should be the ultimate objective of conservation planning.

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Alternative futures for Borneo show the value of integrating economic and conservation targets across borders

Cited by 94 publications

References 56 publications

Estate Crops More Attractive than Community Forests in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

Estate Crops More Attractive than Community Forests in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

Restoration planning of degraded tropical forests for biodiversity and ecosystem services

Reserve design to optimize the long‐term persistence of multiple species

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