Collaborative Research Centre 990: Ecological and Socioeconomic Functions of Tropical Lowland Rainforest Transformation Systems (Sumatra, Indonesia) (Phase 3: 2020 – 2023)

Towards more sustainable land use in lowland tropical regions

In Phases 1 and 2 of EFForTS, we have established substantial heterogeneity in ecosystem functions (Focus 1 and 2) that are critically affected by the underlying scale of both measurement and analysis (Focus 3). The findings from EFForTS, including those from the EFForTS-BEE and the EFForTS-OPMX, illustrate that moving towards more sustainable land use in Jambi could be achieved by improvements via two different pathways: on-farm management practices and adjustments to existing policy frame-works (although both channels are interdependent). Our results also show that policies that have certain objectives can also have unintended consequences on land-use change.
Improving farm management practices is a particularly promising pathway because there is a potential for win-win situations. For oil palm, Gerard et al. (2017) illustrate that the improved environmental func-tions of enrichment planting can be accompanied by improvements in yields. Similarly, the reduced ferti-lisation in EFForTS-OPMX does not have negative yield effects, but reduces the cost of producing palm oil. When integrating the policy perspective, multiple layers of policy arenas, often with entirely different policy makers with different objectives, intersect in shaping the framework for land use in Jambi. In Phase 2, a number of specific policies have been analysed. For the palm oil value chain, these include REDD+ (Hein et al. 2018, C02 Faust), and enrichment tree planting in oil palm landscapes (Gerard et al. 2017, B11 Hölscher/Kreft/Wollni), and for the rubber value chain, the role of international trade agree-ments, specifically the International Tripartite Rubber Council (Kopp et al. 2019, C01 Brümmer) or the regulatory framework for land-use rights (Kubitza et al. 2018a, C07 Qaim). The multiple and often inco-herent objectives embedded in the currently observed policy mix constitute a major barrier for moving towards more sustainable land use in Jambi.
In Phase 3, Focus 4 will serve as a platform for integrating the activities within EFForTS and beyond towards identifying options for making land use in Jambi more sustainable, comprising environmental, economic and social dimensions. Regarding the management pathway, findings from the experimental approaches in EFForTS-BEE and EFForTS-OPMX will be merged with the farm-scale surveys from Pro-ject Group C (C01 Brümmer, C06 Mußhoff, C07 Qaim) in order to identify those practices that allow for mitigating pressure on environmental functions while maintaining current levels of economic functions of the transformation systems. However, even if such win-win situations were adopted at a large scale in Jambi, it remains questionable whether future generations can fully continue to make use of ecosystem services in transformation systems.
Moving towards these intergenerational objectives of sustainable land use requires a close look at the policy frameworks that govern land-use related decisions in Jambi. Although the role of policies is inher-ent to many projects in EFForTS, the process of developing options for policy mixes towards more sustainable land use in Jambi is hampered by the lack of comprehensive policy scenarios, including all relevant policy arenas. In Phase 3, we will hence develop and evaluate policy scenarios that allow to mitigate ecological and socio-economic trade-offs in oil palm and rubber landscapes and discuss policy options for scaling-up of location-specific micro-policies to the landscape and regional scales. The pro-cess of defining joint policy scenarios as a common ground for recommendations towards land-use systems with improved trade-offs between socio-economic and ecological functions is elusive yet direly needed (Swart et al. 2004). We will define, in close collaboration with our counterparts, a business-as-usual scenario as reference. This will include the current state of play in the relevant policy dimensions (i.e., policies in trade, agriculture, forestry, and infrastructure). In line with C02 Faust, two alternative sce-narios will be developed, with one putting emphasis on the socioeconomic functions (“intensified land use“), and a second one with more emphasis on the ecological functions of the research landscape (“op-timized scenario”). In light of the observed conflicting governance regimes (Hartmann et al. 2018), special attention in the development of alternative scenarios will be given to market-based policies towards greater sustainability (Parson and Kravitz 2013). Jointly with C02 Faust and C12 Paul, these policy sce-narios will be discussed and revised together with local stakeholders in an iterative participatory process. The resulting policy scenarios will be comprehensive and include those policies with a direct effect on land-use decisions of smallholders (e.g., land policies, ISPO certification or replanting subsidies), ex-tending to larger businesses in the agricultural sector (e.g., concession regulations or storage policies), and those which affect the structure and conduct in downstream industries (e.g., differential export taxes based on the processing extent). Changes in political frameworks for international trade in rubber and palm oil will be discussed too (e.g., EU policy discussions on banning palm oil imports). This heteroge-neous set of policies requires a joint platform that provides a viable way to cover such a wide range of policy fields (e.g., from infrastructure development over production subsidies and incentives for inter-cropping to policy governance in international trade) and such heterogeneous scales and levels of ag-gregation (from the local over the national to the international level).
For linking these two pathways (on-farm management and policy frameworks), the two new projects C11 Lay et al. and C12 Paul will be of particular importance. C11 Lay et al. aims at modelling of the ‘rural local economy’ around selected villages by means or an Environmental Social Accounting Matrix (ESAM) will allow to identify the linkages between the rubber and oil palm smallholders and the local non-farm economy. This can help to analyse feedback loops between the farm and the non-farm sec-tors, which would otherwise go unnoticed when looking at effects of changing management practices on smallholders solely. ESAM also is one possible approach to evaluate changes in policies at the scale of the ‘rural local economy’. The collaborative farm-modelling in C12 Paul will help to bridge the scaling problem between the on-farm and the policy perspective in allowing for an evaluation of the landscape level effects of changing management practices at the farm level. Finally, sustainable land use also re-quires a spatially explicit landscape-wide perspective that emphasizes the role of composition, configu-ration and connectivity of different land-use systems based on integrating a broad set of ecological and socioeconomic functions (Grass et al. 2019). This integration will rely on findings from the Landscape Assessment, and will be conducted in close collaboration with the ecological-economic modelling activi-ties of B10 Wiegand/Lay, C11 Lay et al. and C12 Paul. Together, these projects thus provide the link for merging both pathways towards more sustainable land use in Jambi.
In terms of analytical methods, Focus 4 will entail both qualitative and quantitative components. The lat-ter, for example, will be derived based on the findings from EFForTS-BEE since establishment of the experiment as well as the existing models developed in EFForTS, including EFForTS-ABM (for land use decisions, Dislich et al. 2018) and RUBNET (for traders’ channel choices; Kopp and Salecker 2018). To evaluate scenarios for scaling-up, we will rely on integrative modelling approaches in collaboration with B09 Westphal/Grass, B11 Hölscher/Kreft/Wollni, C11 Lay et al. and C12 Paul. By making EFForTS knowledge available for Indonesian teacher education (and the public), the PR project also contriburtes to Focus 4.
Hypotheses


  1. Integrating information from Project Groups A, B and C has substantial implications for reconciling ecological and socioeconomic needs in Sumatran lowlands towards more sustainable land use and landscapes.

  2. Local, national, and international policies that are targeting sustainability of land-use systems can have unintended consequences on land-use change and on ecological and socioeconomic functions. Such unintended consequences of policies increase with ecological and socioeconomic heterogeneity and with the targeted scale of the policy interventions.

  3. Improved policy measures are possible, if (a) heterogeneous relations between ecological and socio-economic functions at different scales inform the design of prospective policies, and (b) acceptance of local stakeholders and stakeholders from outside are integrated in a participative process from the early design onwards.