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.
The potential ecological costs and cobenefits of REDD: a critical review and case study from the Amazon region
The potential ecological costs and cobenefits of REDD: a critical review and case study from the Amazon region
Analysis of possible REDD program interventions in a large-scale Amazon landscape indicates that even modest flows of forest carbon funding can provide substantial cobenefits for aquatic ecosystems, but that the functional integrity of the landscape’s myriad small watersheds would be best protected under a more even spatial distribution of forests. Because of its focus on an ecosystem service with global benefits, REDD could access a large pool of global stakeholders willing to pay to maintain carbon in forests, thereby providing a potential cascade of ecosystem services to local stakeholders who would otherwise be unable to afford them.