Confronting sustainable intensification with uncertainty and extreme values on smallholder tropical farms

Abstract

Sustainable intensification of agricultural lands might reconcile the conservation of tropical forest with food production, but in-depth assessments considering uncertainty and extreme values are missing. Uncertainty prohibits mapping probabilities to potential future states or ranking these states in terms of their likelihood. This in turn hampers the assessment of possible decision outcomes. Here, we use simulations to investigate how uncertainty may influence the social acceptability of alternative land-use strategies to halt tropical deforestation (including sustainable intensification), based on indicators representing farmer satisfaction. The results show how extreme values (worst values) for indicators of farmer satisfaction may undermine the adoption of sustainable intensification. We demonstrate that a pure forest conservation strategy leads to lower food production, but outperforms a sustainable intensification strategy that maintains food security. Pure forest conservation performed better, i.e., could secure higher farmer satisfaction, than sustainable intensification across a range of indicator groups. This suggests strong barriers to achieving sustainable intensification. Using agricultural subsidies breaks the dominance of pure forest conservation by enhancing the economic returns of sustainable intensification. We discuss the importance of access to labor and farmers’ preferences for the use of already cleared lands, which achieved the worst values under sustainable intensification and conclude that any assessment of land-use strategies requires careful consideration of uncertainty and extreme values.

Agricultural intensification, Indigenous stewardship and land sparing in tropical dry forests

“…Further, agricultural production in Indigenous land systems is often small-scale, subsistence-oriented and based on traditional agroecological practices 64,65 , making these systems less prone to the drive to increase profitability, and thus be subject to rebound effects from agricultural intensification. Smallholders might refrain from intensification due to increased labour intensity and/or ecological concerns 66,67 . However, it is important to highlight that intensification has frequently occurred in smallholder communities, including in Indigenous communities 68,69,70 .…”

optimLanduse: A package for multiobjective land‐cover composition optimization under uncertainty

“…Natural variability is usually reflected by the standard deviation, whereas the standard error of the mean usually reflects model confidence. Choosing extreme values, as for example, applied in Knoke et al (2022), ensures that the entire space of possibilities is covered.…”

“…Natural variability is usually reflected by the standard deviation, whereas the standard error of the mean usually reflects model confidence. Choosing extreme values, as for example, applied in Knoke et al (2022), ensures that the entire space of possibilities is covered. coefTable further contains a column with the direction for each indicator to indicate whether more or less of the indicator is desirable (see Equation ).…”