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Three decades after their establishment, many smallholder oil palm plantations are overmatured and will require replanting soon. Replanting offers a unique opportunity to redesign plantations, close yield gaps, boost farm productivity, and secure livelihoods. However, replanting requires knowledge, inputs, and financing. If postponed or done sluggishly, replanting could further exacerbate existing socioeconomic and environmental challenges in smallholder oil palm cultivation. We collected literature relevant to the replanting of oil palm and created a narrative literature review to highlight the challenges that smallholders face during replanting. We identified access to inputs, finances, and knowledge as paramount challenges that might influence smallholders' decisions about when, how, and what to replant. Barriers to successful smallholder replanting in Indonesia are a lack of knowledge on replanting and proper training, uneven access to high-quality seedlings, as well as uneven eligibility for public replanting funds. We finish the review with recommendations for policymakers and researchers on how to overcome the challenges replanting holds and emphasize the opportunities replanting offers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Contracts between companies and local communities have been used in Indonesia for over 20 years to involve smallholder farmers in the emerging palm oil industry. Impacts of these contracts have not been analyzed systematically. Here, data from a village survey, spanning a time period from 1992 to 2012, are used to evaluate effects on rural economic development. Panel regression models with village fixed effects show that contracts have significantly contributed to wealth accumulation. Contracts signed before 1999 were more beneficial than contracts signed afterward, which is due to more public sector support and infrastructure investments during the earlier period. Contracts have contributed to decreasing inter-village inequality, not only because poorer villages were more likely to adopt a contract, but also because they benefited more from contract adoption than richer ones. The results suggest that well-designed contracts can be important for smallholder farmers to benefit from the oil palm boom. The village-level approach has clear advantages to evaluate direct and indirect economic effects, but it also has drawbacks in terms of analyzing environmental effects and issues of intra-village inequality. More research with various approaches is needed to better understand the multifaceted implications of oil palm contracts for sustainable rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tropical biodiversity is threatened by the expansion of oil-palm plantations. Reduced-impact farming systems such as agroforests, have been proposed to increase biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. In regions where oil-palm plantations already dominate the landscape, this increase can only be achieved through systematic ecological restoration. However, our knowledge about the underlying ecological and socio-economic processes, constraints, and trade-offs of ecological restoration in oil-palm landscapes is very limited. To bridge this gap, we established a long-term biodiversity enrichment experiment. We established experimental tree islands in a conventional oil-palm plantation and systematically varied plot size, tree diversity, and tree species composition. Here, we describe the rationale and the design of the experiment, the ecosystem variables (soil, topography, canopy openness) and biotic characteristics (associated vegetation, invertebrates, birds) of the experimental site prior to the establishment of the experiment, and initial experimental effects on the fauna. Already one year after establishment of the experiment, tree plantings had an overall positive effect on the bird and invertebrate communities at the plantation scale. The diversity and abundance of invertebrates was positively affected by the size of the tree islands. Based on these results, we expect a further increase of biodiversity and associated ecological functions in the future. The long-term interdisciplinary monitoring of ecosystem variables, flora, fauna, and socio-economic aspects will allow us to evaluate the suitability of tree islands as a restoration measure. Thereof, guidelines for ecologically improved and socio-economically viable restoration and management concepts could be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate land-use dynamics in Jambi, Sumatra, one of the hotspots of Indonesia's recent oil palm boom. Data from a structured village survey are used to analyze the role of socioeconomic and policy factors. Oil palm is partly grown on large plantations, but smallholders are also involved to a significant extent. We find that, in spite of considerable oil palm expansion, rubber remains the dominant crop. Most of the oil palm growth takes place on previous fallow and rubber land. Oil palm has not been a major driver of deforestation. Much of the forest in Jambi was cleared more than 20 years ago, and rubber was an established cash crop long before the oil palm boom started. However, oil palm growth occurs in locations with ongoing logging activities, so indirect effects on deforestation are possible. The Indonesian government's transmigration program of the 1980s and 1990s was instrumental for the start and spread of oil palm in Jambi. Some autochthonous villages have adopted oil palm. But oil palm adoption in autochthonous villages started later and happens at a slower pace than in the villages of the transmigrants from Java. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the presence of market inefficiencies and missing information, agricultural technologies have often been introduced via subsidies to accelerate diffusion and spur adoption. Yet, for agricultural technologies that mainly generate positive environmental effects, it is not clear how subsidies affect adoption, maintenance, and additional investments. This study introduces native tree seedlings through two different distribution mechanisms to foster tree planting in an oil palm hotspot in Indonesia. In treatment one, oil palm farmers receive information about native tree planting and three different native tree seedlings for free (subsidy treatment). In treatment two, oil palm farmers receive the same information and the opportunity to buy three different native tree seedlings through an auction (price treatment). The results show that conditional on receiving the seedlings the uptake of the technology is similar between the two treatments, suggesting that there is no strong selection effect in the price treatment. For the full sample, the subsidy treatment is associated with higher tree planting activities. The farmers in the subsidy treatment apply less maintenance to their trees, but the number of surviving trees is still higher than in the price treatment. Finally, the subsidy treatment tends to be associated with lower additional planting efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global land-use change has drastic consequences for biodiversity leading to losses of ecological functioning, ecosystem services and human well-being. While species dependent on undisturbed natural habitat are most affected by conversion to agriculture, even populations of disturbance-tolerant species can be endangered in landscapes dominated by high-input mono-cultural cropping systems. This has raised the question of how, and at what cost, a diversity of species can be conserved in such habitats. Focusing on birds of smallholder oil palm-dominated landscapes, we investigated the relationship between the ecological and economic outcomes of remnant or planted trees in smallholder oil palm plantations. The study comprised a household and a field component. We gathered plot specific data on yields, revenue and inputs from 120 households owning productive oil palm plantations in the Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. Bird diversity and abundance as well as vegetation structure was assessed on the same oil palm plots. We tested the effects of a set of economic and ecological variables on measures of bird diversity, bird abundance, oil palm yield, and total revenue. Our results show that a gain in bird diversity and bird abundance conditional on increases in number of trees comes along with a loss in revenue for farmers indicating that there is a win–lose relationship between ecological and economic functions. However, since the relationship is non-linear, costs for bird species gain or gain in bird abundance change depending on the number of trees within an oil palm plantation: in a relatively extensively managed oil palm plantation (high number of trees, low oil palm yields), a further increase in the number of bird species or individuals leads to a relatively high loss in total revenue, whereas in an intensively managed oil palm plantation the same increase in number of bird species results in a smaller loss in revenue. An increase in bird abundance can be fostered at smaller costs when compared to the costs for increasing biodiversity. This suggests that there is room for tree-based enrichment of intensively managed oil palm plantations, where a relatively high increase in bird species richness or bird abundance could be achieved at relatively low cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) can encourage land owners to manage their land in a biodiversity-friendly way. To increase the effectiveness of PES for biodiversity conservation, incentives could be set to reach a minimum size of conservation area and a suitable spatial connectivity between conserved areas. However, little knowledge exists about which incentives most likely generate such landscape patterns since threshold effects and spatial connectivity have been mostly considered separately. Therefore, we present results from a framed field experiment with Indonesian oil palm farmers and compare the effectiveness between two conditional group payment schemes: In the first one, the size threshold payment, payments are made if at least three farmers in the group conserve. In the second one, an agglomeration payment, payments are made if at least three farmers with bordering land engage in conservation. Our results suggest that both PES designs are similarly effective in the absence of communication. Under both, communication increases conservation outcomes in the case of previous successful coordination and is ineffective in the case of previous coordination failure. Yet, for individuals who are reluctant to conserve, communication only increases conservation outcomes under the size threshold payment. We further discuss potential welfare implications of our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]