An agenda for assessing and improving conservation impacts of sustainability standards in tropical agriculture

Abstract

Sustainability standards and certification serve to differentiate and provide market recognition to goods produced in accordance with social and environmental good practices, typically including practices to protect biodiversity. Such standards have seen rapid growth, including in tropical agricultural commodities such as cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soybeans, and tea. Given the role of sustainability standards in influencing land use in hotspots of biodiversity, deforestation, and agricultural intensification, much could be gained from efforts to evaluate and increase the conservation payoff of these schemes. To this end, we devised a systematic approach for monitoring and evaluating the conservation impacts of agricultural sustainability standards and for using the resulting evidence to improve the effectiveness of such standards over time. The approach is oriented around a set of hypotheses and corresponding research questions about how sustainability standards are predicted to deliver conservation benefits. These questions are addressed through data from multiple sources, including basic common information from certification audits; field monitoring of environmental outcomes at a sample of certified sites; and rigorous impact assessment research based on experimental or quasi-experimental methods. Integration of these sources can generate time-series data that are comparable across sites and regions and provide detailed portraits of the effects of sustainability standards. To implement this approach, we propose new collaborations between the conservation research community and the sustainability standards community to develop common indicators and monitoring protocols, foster data sharing and synthesis, and link research and practice more effectively. As the role of sustainability standards in tropical land-use governance continues to evolve, robust evidence on the factors contributing to effectiveness can help to ensure that such standards are designed and implemented to maximize benefits for biodiversity conservation.

Habitat selection in transformed landscapes and the role of forest remnants and shade coffee in the conservation of resident birds

“…While the ideal way to measure the value of a habitat would be to estimate survival and reproduction parameters based on long‐term demographic and/or movement studies of species showing a representative range of ecological and behavioural traits (Milder et al, ; Sekercioglu, Loarie, Brenes, Ehrlich, & Daily, ), these are rarely feasible in tropical ecosystems. Our results show that occupancy and abundance models generated from the wide‐scale application of simple sampling methodologies (Irizarry et al, ; Ruiz‐Gutiérrez, Hooten, & Campbell Grant, ) may neglect important differences in habitat preference and performance.…”

Participatory Guarantee Systems: Alternative Ways of Defining, Measuring, and Assessing ‘Sustainability’

“…Under contemporary neoliberalism, standards and certification have become the leading governance mechanism for determining what sustainability entails, how to measure it, and how to assess it (Busch ; Fransen ; Milder et al . ). These standards use science‐based methods (Bain et al .…”

Ecosystem service information to benefit sustainability standards for commodity supply chains

“…Further, these benefits may be accrued at the level of (1) practices on the farms; (2) outcomes at the local farm level; or (3) outcomes at the broader landscape level and over longer time scales. Key limitations of the existing evidence base were also identified in this seminal paper, which resulted in recommendations for improvement to demonstrate these different benefits at the different levels, prioritizing the third level as the one at which the need for counterfactuals is most urgent . The recommendations may be difficult to follow, however, owing to many of the same information gaps faced in implementing the standards criteria themselves.…”

“…The recommendations may be difficult to follow, however, owing to many of the same information gaps faced in implementing the standards criteria themselves. The attempt to “select and quantitatively monitor changes in key environmental parameters that sustainability standards are hypothesized to influence” or to “develop common indicators and metrics for sampled monitoring of conservation outcomes” could be made vastly more tractable through understanding of the relationships between land use or aquatic ecosystem management and ecosystem services, and the potential use of remotely sensed or modeled proxies of ecosystem response could help target the collection of more expensive empirical field data. Counterfactuals could likewise be identified or even modeled through the use of ES information.…”

“…Identifying biodiversity or ecosystem‐service hotspots or worry spots (e.g., areas of high conservation value, high susceptibility to erosion, key mitigation areas for restoring or protecting water quality) can help target not only interventions but also monitoring. ES information and modeling could also help link farm‐scale effects to the landscape‐scale effects deemed so important to demonstrating broader impacts . While the standards themselves are designed for implementation at the farm scale, adoption is growing across broad areas in many regions (especially in coffee), so it is not implausible to expect to begin to see larger‐scale effects.…”