Search

Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs) are defined as forested areas of at least 500 km2 that show no signs of remotely sensed human activity. They are considered to be of high conservation value due to their role in maintaining biodiversity and mitigating climate change. In 2014, the members of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), one of the major global certification schemes for responsible forest management, took a conservation stand by restricting logging in FSC-certified IFLs. However, this move raised concerns about the economic viability of FSC-certified logging in these areas. To address these challenges, in 2022, FSC proposed an integrated landscape approach, considering local conditions and stakeholders’ needs to balance IFL protection, economic sustainability, and community interests. Here, we leverage publicly available management unit (MU) data, to provide a global quantitative overview of IFLs designated for timber production. We use the concept of ‘conservation burden’ for the extent that MUs overlap with IFLs, representing the impact that IFL protection has on forest management operations if logging is disallowed. Our data indicates that currently FSC-certified MUs affect 0.6% of global IFLs. Too restrictive policies for logging in IFLs may discourage FSC-certification in global IFLs. Considering the environmental and social benefits of FSC certification, it warrants careful examination whether the benefits of protecting a limited subset of FSC-certified IFLs outweighs the cost of potentially reduced growth of the total FSC-certified area. Our data can provide a basis to facilitate stakeholder engagement for landscape-level IFL management.

PR, IFPRI3; ISI; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance; CRP5, Natural Resources and Resilience (NRR); Transformation Strategies, CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE), Integrated landscape approaches (ILA) aim to reconcile multiple, often competing, interests across agriculture, nature conservation, and other land uses. Recognized ILA design principles provide guidance for implementation, yet application remains challenging, and a strong performance evidence-base is yet to be formed. Through a critical literature review and focus group discussions with practitioners, we identified considerable diversity of ILA in actors, temporal, and spatial scales, inter alia. This diversity hampers learning from and steering ILA because of the intractable nature of the concept. Therefore, we developed a tool—an ‘ILA mixing board’—to structure the complexity of ILA into selectable and scalable attributes in a replicable way to allow planning, diagnosing, and comparing ILA. The ILA mixing board tool presents seven qualifiers, each representing a key attribute of ILA design and performance (for example, project flexibility, inclusiveness of the dialogue, and the centrality of the power distribution). Each qualifier has five (non-normative) outcome indicators that can be registered as present or absent. This process in turn guides planners, evaluators and other participating stakeholders involved in landscape management to diagnose the ILA type, or its performance. We apply the ILA mixing board to three ILA cases in Nicaragua, Madagascar, and the Congo Basin to show some of the many possible configurations of qualifiers on the mixing board. Further application of the tool would allow comparative analysis of the complexity of ILA in a structured and manageable way thereby enhancing the understanding of ILA performance and informing the development of evidence-based land use policy.

While the scientific community documents environmental degradation and develops scenarios to identify the operational margins of system Earth, less attention is given to how decisions are made that steer the system in one direction or the other. We propose to use strategy games for this purpose, increasing the representation of human agency in scenario development and creating spaces for deliberation between different worldviews. Played by the right people, strategy games could help break free from established norms and support more transparent democratic dialogues, responding to the human and social limitations of current decision-making. The question is, who gets to play?

While the scientific community documents environmental degradation and develops scenarios to identify the operational margins of system Earth, less attention is given to how decisions are made that steer the system in one direction or the other. We propose to use strategy games for this purpose, increasing the representation of human agency in scenario development and creating spaces for deliberation between different worldviews. Played by the right people, strategy games could help break free from established norms and support more transparent democratic dialogues, responding to the human and social limitations of current decision-making. The question is, who gets to play?

A growing number of people are entering the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector worldwide. In Madagascar, millions of individuals depend on this informal activity. Through a case study in the Alaotra-Mangoro region of Madagascar, our research aimed to understand the “bottom-up” dynamics and ripple effects of the sector, by looking at the realities for rural communities where inhabitants are both directly and indirectly affected by ASM. We were interested in community members' and miners' perceptions of the socio-economic and environmental impacts of ASM, and in identifying the factors attracting people living in one of the country's agricultural hubs to this activity. Our results show a wide diversity of push and pull factors leading people to enter the sector. Although many positive impacts of ASM exist for miners and communities within the vicinity of mines, most miner participants considered themselves worse off since starting to mine, highlighting the high risk and low probability of return of ASM. ASM's potential for local and national development will remain squandered if its negative impacts continue to go unmanaged. Accounting for local contexts and the ripple effects of ASM will be crucial in achieving safety and security for miners, and to tap into the benefits it may offer communities while minimising environmental damage.

Exploitation of natural forests forms expanding frontiers. Simultaneously, protected area frontiers aim at maintaining functional habitat networks. To assess net effects of these frontiers, we examined 16 case study areas on five continents. We (1) mapped protected area instruments, (2) assessed their effectiveness, (3) mapped policy implementation tools, and (4) effects on protected areas originating from their surroundings. Results are given as follows: (1) conservation instruments covered 3–77%, (2) effectiveness of habitat networks depended on representativeness, habitat quality, functional connectivity, resource extraction in protected areas, time for landscape restoration, “paper parks”, “fortress conservation”, and data access, (3) regulatory policy instruments dominated over economic and informational, (4) negative matrix effects dominated over positive ones (protective forests, buffer zones, inaccessibility), which were restricted to former USSR and Costa Rica. Despite evidence-based knowledge about conservation targets, the importance of spatial segregation of conservation and use, and traditional knowledge, the trajectories for biodiversity conservation were generally negative.