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Esta investigación fue desarrollada por la Unidad de Modelado Ecosistémico del Programa de Bosques, Biodiversidad y Cambio Climático del CATIE en conjunto con el Centro de Inteligencia Territorial de la Municipalidad de Curridabat a través de la Gerencia de Despacho. La Unidad de Modelado está enfocada en la investigación y la asistencia técnica sobre el efecto del cambio global en los ecosistemas, servicios ecosistémicos e implicaciones para la sociedad latinoamericana, mediante el desarrollo y la aplicación de herramientas de modelado biofísico y socioeconómico dirigidas a apoyar la planificación de toma de decisiones y la gestión de proyectos para mitigación y adaptación a la variabilidad y el cambio climático.

International audience; Climate change threats for territories where agroforestry prevails include land use changes that seem more irreversible than before, between coffee and sugarcane according to their respective price fluctuations. To understand the mechanisms driving coffee withdrawal and assess its level of irreversibility, we analyze dynamics in the Balaica subcorridor of the Costa Rican biological corridor CBVCT (Corredor Biológico Volcánico Central -Talamanca). Considering land use changes from shade coffee plantations to pastures or sugarcane fields, the instructions of the Resilience Assessment Workbook from the Resilience Alliance were applied so as to represent threshold cascades. With local experts of different disciplines, we investigate how economic, ecological and social phenomena interlink at the three scales of the landscape, its farming plot and the country. Two threshold cascades result from this investigation: from coffee to sugarcane and from coffee to pasture. In each case, they represent a set of hypotheses on how phenomenon of different kinds can succeed one another, leading to irreversible changes impeding balancing effects to take place for each phenomenon, for instance price adjustments or soil restoration.; Las amenazas del cambio climático para los territorios donde prevale la agroforestería, incluyen cambios de uso del suelo más irreversibles que los que se conocieron hasta ahora entre cultivos de café y de caña de azúcar según fluctuaciones de precios respectivos. Para entender los mecanismos rigiendo el abandono del café y evaluar su grado de irreversibilidad, analizamos las dinámicas en el subcorredor Balalaica del Corredor Biológico Volcánico Central -Talamanca (CBVCT) en Costa Rica. Considerando los cambios de cafetales bajo sombra a pastos o a cañales, aplicamos las instrucciones de la guía Resilience Assessment de la Resilience Alliance para la construcción de una cascada de umbrales. Investigamos con expertos locales de diferentes disciplinas, cómo se vinculan fenómenos económicos, ecológicos y sociales a las tres escala del territorio, de sus parcelas y del país. Los resultados consisten en dos cascadas de umbrales, de café à caña y de café a pasto. Representan en cada caso un conjunto de hipótesis sobre la posible sucesión de fenómenos de diferentes naturalezas, que lleva a cambios irreversibles por no poder contar con los efectos de reequilibrio que ocurren de forma separada, por ejemplo ajustes de precio en lo económico o restauración de suelos abandonados en lo ecológico.

The forest transition theory has provided a framework for the analysis of land-use (LU) dynamics worldwide and has described economic development trajectories leading from contraction to expansion of forest areas. This framework does not differentiate forest cover types or ecosystem services (ES) because it uses an indicator of areas for describing forests regardless of their state and contribution to human well-being. Over the past decades, growing populations and human activity have increased pressures on ecosystems and heightened the demand for provisioning ES, particularly in tropical forested regions, where LU change is simultaneously the main driver of the decrease of ES provided by forests and the increase of ES by agricultural lands. We propose a framework to analyze Ecosystem Services Transition, i.e. changes in the delivery of bundled ES, driven by development trajectories and the demand for ES. We apply this framework to the case of Reventazón watershed in Costa Rica, a mountain socio-ecological system that has undergone major changes in LU and ES which are expected to continue. The aim of this work was to: (1) map selected ES using InVEST modeling tool; (2) analyze the historical dynamics of the selected ES; (3) identify socio-economic drivers. The analysis of ES dynamics in our study site revealed a transition in ES, although some trends are only nascent and still uncertain. Trends in regulating and cultural services followed a U-shaped curve (recent increase after previous decrease), while forest provisioning services followed an inverted U-shaped curve and agricultural provisioning services do not display a clear recent trend. If the demand for provisioning services was a main driver of changes in landscapes and economic services from the 1940s to the 1980s, the current evolution (from the 2000s) is also driven by demand for regulating and cultural services related to water, carbon and tourism.