Conserving biodiversity through certification of tropical agroforestry crops at local and landscape scales (original) (raw)
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Biological Conservation, 2012
The expansion of agricultural plantations at the expense of forest drives dramatic losses of biodiversity and carbon. Consumers are now demanding sustainability in tropical agriculture and producers are responding with questionable certification standards. Many certification schemes-including those for oil palm, soy, sugar cane and cacao-rely upon the High Conservation Value (HCV) concept to prevent unacceptable losses of biodiversity to agricultural conversion. This concept protects very rare species or habitats, exceptional concentrations of wildlife, or large landscape-level areas of forest. Yet much biodiversity persists below these thresholds yielding the spectre of unsustainable conversion of forest to certified plantation crops under a green label. To meet more rigorous standards of sustainability, tropical plantations would have to retain large patches of native forests in the matrix. We highlight six critical areas in need of consideration by conservation scientists, practitioners and certification processes. In particular, the application of HCV to sustainable agricultural development at the national-level, the use of Imperata grasslands and abandoned agriculture, the creation of Biobanks, and increased price premiums for certified crops could redound to the long-term protection of tropical biodiversity.
Conservation Biology, DOI: 10.1111/cobi.12411, 2014
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.
Agricultural certification as a complementary tool for environmental law compliance
Agricultural sustainability standards are an important way of reducing commodity expansion's pressures on biodiversity. Despite the increase of global area under certification and mounting evidence of positive socioeconomic outcomes, certification-derived conservation benefits are less clear. We applied a robust counterfactual approach with a difference-indifference methodology to quantify the environmental consequences of certification in one of the largest coffee-producing areas in the world, in southern Brazil, within the Atlantic Forest and Cerrado biomes. We evaluated whether the adoption of certification standards affected native vegetation regeneration and deforestation, the proportion of vegetation deficit within each farm (the required area to achieve Federal Legislation required vegetation cover), and the conservation of sensitive vegetation protected under law across 531 certified farms. We did not detect certification-derived effects on the natural vegetation cover deficit and on deforestation and regeneration rates, which were low for certified and non-certified farms. However, we found that certified farms are restoring more sensitive areas than non-certified farms in the Atlantic Forest, which indicates a potential combined effect between law enforcement and certification. We suggest that in more consolidated landscapes, certification beneficial impacts on deforestation and regeneration might be more limited than observed in areas with weaker governance, such as agricultural frontiers or low-income countries. However, our results demonstrate the potential for certification schemes to complement and promote environmental legislation compliance. These potential combined effects between private sustainability standards and compliance with government environmental policies could provide a potent tool for improving the effectiveness of certification schemes in other high-biodiversity landscapes.
Where are commodity crops certified, and what does it mean for conservation and poverty alleviation?
Biological Conservation
Voluntary sustainability standards have expanded dramatically over the last decade. In the agricultural sector, such standards aim to ensure environmentally and socially sustainable production of a variety of commodity crops. However, little is known about where agricultural certification operates and whether certified lands are best located for conserving the world's most important biodiversity and benefiting the most vulnerable producers. To examine these questions we developed the first global map of commodity crop certification, synthesizing data from over one million farms to reveal the distribution of certification in unprecedented detail. It highlights both geographical clusters of certification as well as spatial bias in the location of certification with respect to environmental, livelihood and physical variables. Excluding organic certification, for which spatial data were not available, most certification of commodity crops is in tropical regions. Certification appears to be concentrated in areas important for biodiversity conservation, but not in those areas most in need of poverty alleviation, although there were exceptions to each of these patterns. We argue that the impact of sustainability standards could be increased by identifying places where it would be most beneficial to strengthen, consolidate, and expand certification. To achieve this, standards organizations will need to undertake more rigorous collection of spatial data, and more detailed analysis of their existing reach and impacts, with attention to potential trade-offs between different objectives. Efforts to promote spatial prioritization will require new partnerships to align specific conservation aims with the interests and capabilities of farmers.
Biological Conservation
Ecologically complex agroecosystems often provide multiple conservation benefits, yet understanding the agricultural practices that favor biodiversity is often a theoretical task until we simultaneously demonstrate the economic impact of such practices on farmers. We provide a multifunctional analysis of both biodiversity and ecosystem services that influence coffee farm profit in Puerto Rico. We show that the vegetation heterogeneity of an agroecosystem, more so than any one ecological component (e.g. shade), is associated with a higher biodiversity of plants, birds, lizards, bees, ants, and parasitoid wasps. However, a farm's vegetation heterogeneity does not consistently correlate with profit-related ecosystem services, including coffee yield and biological control of coffee pests and pathogens, due to tradeoffs between services. Therefore, inherent financial incentives that would encourage farmers to manage farms in ways that maintain high associated biodiversity may be lacking. We explored several economic incentives that would allow farms to be simultaneously biodiverse and profitable, which we show is possible through realistic incentive schemes. We found that the combination of a certification premium plus carbon payments (50% premium plus $16 t −1 CO 2 e) or a restructuring of agricultural subsidies using currently experienced subsidy amounts may be sufficient to make farms that are more heterogeneous, and therefore more biodiverse, the most profitable option for farmers. If these biodiverse farms can also be profitable, it will open critical opportunities for maintaining rural landscapes that support farmers' livelihoods, as well as protect the planet's biodiversity.
Frontiers in forests and global change, 2019
Commodity crop expansion remains a leading driver of deforestation and defaunation in the tropics. Voluntary certification standards are the primary mechanism for making commodity production more sustainable and rely on the High Conservation Value (HCV) framework for protecting biodiversity on farms. In the oil palm sector, the HCV approach requires producers to create a management and monitoring plan for on-farm species and habitat, but many companies struggle with interpreting and implementing recommendations from HCV reports. In this study, we explore the challenges to effective biodiversity monitoring on oil palm plantations by consulting recommendations from twenty-one HCV reports for RSPO-certified projects in Latin America, and conducting semi-structured interviews with eight RSPO-certified palm oil mills in Colombia to understand how companies adopt recommendations. We identified several shortcomings under the HCV management-monitoring process including lack of indicators and guidance in HCV reports, emphasis on operational (i.e., procedural) over strategic (i.e., effectiveness) monitoring, over-reliance on incidental wildlife encounters for monitoring populations, and significant technical and financial barriers facing companies. We provide recommendations for improving these aspects including the adoption of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBV)-population state variables that bridge raw data with global indicators for policymakers-to guide and standardize monitoring on plantations. We conclude by proposing a strategy for biodiversity monitoring that is long-term, driven by EBVs, and centralized at the sector level in Colombia to improve standardization and reduce costs. Current company efforts track drivers of biodiversity trends that complement EBVs, and should continue to encourage staff buy-in and awareness of biodiversity conservation importance.
Conservation Impacts of Sustainability Standards in Tropical Agriculture
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. † † † † comparables a lo largo de sitios y regiones y proporcionan retratos detallados de los efectos de los estándares de sustentabilidad. Para implementar esta estrategia, proponemos colaboraciones nuevas entre la comunidad de investigadores de la conservación y la comunidad de estándares de sustentabilidad para desarrollar indicadores comunes y protocolos de monitoreo, fomentar la síntesis y el compartir los datos y enlazar con mayor efectividad la investigación y la práctica. Conforme el papel de los estándares de sustentabilidad en la gobernación del uso de suelo continúa con su evolución, la evidencia fuerte de los factores que contribuyen a la efectividad puede ayudar a asegurar que dichos estándares son diseñados e implementados para maximizar los beneficios para la conservación de la biodiversidad.
Biodiversity, yield, and shade coffee certification
Ecological Economics, 2005
The current crisis in the coffee market provides an opportunity to explore alternative markets. In Latin America, coffee is traditionally produced under a diverse and dense canopy of shade trees. The structural and floristic diversity contained therein harbors a high biodiversity of associated organisms. The recent trend of reducing this shade cover so as to increase production raises concerns about the potential loss of biodiversity. This concern has given rise to a variety of conservation programs, including shade coffee certification, a market-based conservation strategy. Shade coffee certification programs offer the opportunity to link environmental and economic goals. Although the idea of shade certification is to compensate farmers for the biodiversity conservation service provided by their shaded plantations, the premium offered may not compensate for the low yields of the most shaded plantations. Here we present an approach for guiding the establishment of premium prices for coffee producers based on scientific information that relates shade percentage and levels of species richness with yield. Partial data from two separate studies in Chiapas, Mexico, are combined and used to illustrate this approach. In addition, further theoretical explorations are made by adapting an intercropping model and using coffee yield and biodiversity (as it relates to percent of shade of canopy trees) as the two relevant variables. This model is examined qualitatively from the point of view of optimality (balancing biodiversity preservation with production). Results suggest that price premium for shade certification should be high and go directly to the producers, especially if the intent is to conserve forest-sensitive species. D
Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 2013
In tropical regions, the extent of agricultural land is rapidly increasing at the expense of natural forest with associated losses of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Agroforestry has long been proposed as a more sustainable agricultural system, conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services, while providing significant local livelihood. In this context, cacao and coffee agroforestry is often regarded as more compatible with conservation of ecosystem integrity than cacao and coffee plantations. Using metaanalytical techniques and mixed models on data from 74 studies conducted across Africa, Latin America and Asia, a global quantitative synthesis was performed to assess the impact on biodiversity and on ecosystem services of (i) the conversion of natural forest into cacao and coffee agroforestry and (ii) the further intensification of agroforest into cacao and coffee plantation. Forest species richness and total species richness were significantly lower in the more intensively managed than in the more natural land use categories. Response ratios showed that the decline in total species richness was higher when comparing agroforest with plantation (−46%), than when comparing forest with agroforest (−11%). Biodiversity responses to intensification differed between Asia and Latin America, and between different species groups. Response ratios showed that management intensification decreased provision of ecosystem services with 37% when comparing forest with agroforest and with 27% when comparing agroforest with plantation. Our data suggest that species richness decline follows a concave yield function whereas ecosystem service decline follows a more convex yield function. Finally, we identified knowledge gaps related to a conspicuous lack of studies in Africa, and a general underreporting of ecosystem services and environmental variables related to agricultural intensification.