The triple, intertwined challenges of climate change, the conversion of tropical forests to crop lands and grazing pastures, and the shortage of new arable land demand urgent solutions. The main approaches for increasing food production while sparing forests and lowering carbon emissions include sustainable supply chain initiatives, domestic policies and finance, and REDD+. These approaches are advancing largely in isolation, separated by different scales of intervention, performance metrics and levers for shaping land user behavior. As a result of this disconnect, farmers are receiving few, if any, positive incentives to forgo legal forest clearing and to invest in more sustainable production systems. These three approaches could become mutually reinforcing through integrated, performance-based incentive systems operating across regions and scales, linked through a shared metric of jurisdiction-wide performance introduced here as the Jurisdictional Performance System.
Leaf development and demography explain photosynthetic seasonality in Amazon evergreen forests
Leaf development and demography explain photosynthetic seasonality in Amazon evergreen forests
In evergreen tropical forests, the extent, magnitude, and controls on photosynthetic seasonality are poorly resolved and inadequately represented in Earth system models. Combining camera observations with ecosystem carbon dioxide fluxes at forests across rainfall...