Methods to Assess the Impacts and Indirect Land Use Change Caused by Telecoupled Agricultural Supply Chains: A Review

Accounting for land use changes beyond the farm-level in sustainability assessments: The impact of cocoa production

Impact assessments are used to raise evidence and guide the implementation of sustainability strategies in commodity value chains. Due to methodological and data difficulties, most assessments of agricultural commodities capture the impacts occurring at the farm-level but often dismiss or oversimplify the impacts caused by land use dynamics at larger geographic scale. In this study we analyzed the impacts of two cocoa production systems, full-sun and agroforestry, at the farm-level and beyond the farm-level. We used life cycle assessment to calculate the impacts at the farm-level and a combination of land use modelling with spatial analysis to calculate the impacts beyond the farm-level. We applied this to three different future cocoa production scenarios. The impacts at the farm-level showed that, due to lower yields, cocoa agroforestry performs worse than cocoa full-sun for most impact indicators. However, the impacts beyond the farm-level showed that promoting cocoa agroforestry in the landscape can bring the largest gains in carbon and biodiversity. A scenario analysis of the impacts at the landscape-level showed large nuances depending on the cocoa farming system adopted, market dynamics, and nature conservation policies. The analysis indicated that increasing cocoa demand does not necessarily result in negative impacts for carbon stocks and biodiversity, if sustainable land management and sustainable intensification are adopted. Landscape-level impacts can be larger than farm-level impacts or show completely opposite direction, which highlights the need to complement farm-level assessments with assessments accounting for land use dynamics beyond the farm-level.

Forest Cover Change, Households’ Livelihoods, Trade-Offs, and Constraints Associated with Plantation Forests in Poor Upland-Rural Landscapes: Evidence from North Central Vietnam

Vietnam’s forests have experienced a notable transformation over the past 20 years from net deforestation to reforestation and expanding forests. Continued reforestation that aims to achieve further economic and environmental benefits remains a national priority and strategy. We explore the current status of plantation forests and highlight possible means to facilitate their expansion in the uplands of Vietnam. We employ mixed method triangulation to empirically explore plantation forests and their economic role in household livelihood, to quantify trade-offs between plantation forests and shifting cultivation, and to assess the constraints on plantation forest expansion in Nghe An province, north-central Vietnam. Results show that forest in the study area expanded by 406,000 ha (71.1%) between 1990 and 2016. Plantation forests increased by nearly 500% (from 32,000 ha to 190,000 ha), while natural forests expanded by 48.1% (from 538,000 ha to 797,000 ha). Plantation forests contributed an average of 35.1 percent of total household income in wealthier households and 27.9 percent of income in poor households. Switching from shifting cultivation to plantation forests would increase total household income and average carbon stock but decrease food provision. Total Economic Value would be higher for plantation forest scenarios if increased carbon stocks in plantations can be monetized. This carbon income might drive conversion of shifting cultivation to plantation forests. Constraints on further expansion of plantation forest are low external cooperation, education, market stability, and agroforestry extension services. Our empirical results inform national plantation forest development, sustainable upland livelihood development, and climate change mitigation programs to ultimately facilitate forest transition and improve the resilience and sustainability of socio-ecological systems.

Land Suitability Evaluation and an Interval Stochastic Fuzzy Programming-Based Optimization Model for Land-Use Planning and Environmental Policy Analysis

People explosion and fast economic growth are bringing a more serious land resource shortage crisis. Rational land-use allocation can effectively reduce this burden. Existing land-use allocation models may deal with a lot of challenges of land-use planning. This study proposed a hybrid quantitative and spatial optimization land-use allocation model that could enrich the land-use allocation method system. This model has three advantages compared to former methods: (1) this model can simultaneously solve the quantitative land area optimization problem and spatial allocation problem, which are the two core aspects of land-use allocation; (2) the land suitability assessment method considers various geographical, economic and environmental factors which are essential to land-use allocation; (3) this model used an interval stochastic fuzzy programming land-use allocation model to solve the quantitative land area optimization problem. This model not only considers three uncertainties in the natural system but also involves various economic, social, ecological and environmental constraints—most of which are specifically put into the optimization process. The proposed model has been applied to a real case study in Liannan county, Guangdong province, China. The results could help land managers and decision makers to conduct sound land-use planning/policy and could help scientists understand the inner contradiction among economic development, environmental protection, and land use.

A Synthesis of Opportunities for Applying the Telecoupling Framework to Marine Protected Areas

The world’s oceans face unprecedented anthropogenic threats in the globalized era that originate from all over the world, including climate change, global trade and transportation, and pollution. Marine protected areas (MPAs) serve important roles in conservation of marine biodiversity and ecosystem resilience, but their success is increasingly challenged in the face of such large-scale threats. Here, we illustrate the utility of adopting the interdisciplinary telecoupling framework to better understand effects that originate from distant places and cross MPA boundaries (e.g., polluted water circulation, anthropogenic noise transport, human and animal migration). We review evidence of distal processes affecting MPAs and the cutting-edge approaches currently used to investigate these processes. We then introduce the umbrella framework of telecoupling and explain how it can help address knowledge gaps that exist due to limitations of past approaches that are centered within individual disciplines. We then synthesize five examples from the recent telecoupling literature to explore how the telecoupling framework can be used for MPA research. These examples include the spatial subsidies approach, adapted social network analysis, telecoupled qualitative analysis, telecoupled supply chain analysis, and decision support tools for telecoupling. Our work highlights the potential for the telecoupling framework to better understand and address the mounting and interconnected socioeconomic and environmental sustainability challenges faced by the growing number of MPAs around the world.