• Energy Research

With data from a household survey covering migrant settlers and indigenous (Kichwa) communities in the Sumaco Biosphere Reserve (SBR), this study analyses the drivers of agricultural diversification/specialisation, focusing on the role of ethnicity and the livelihood strategies (LS) they follow. Data were collected using the Poverty and Environment Network methodology of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR-PEN). In order to establish the drivers of agricultural diversification, the number of crops and the Shannon index of crops areas were used as the dependent variables in ordinary least square (OLS) models, while a multinomial logit model (MLM) was used to assess a household’s degree of diversification. The results of the OLS regression provides evidence supporting the notion that households, with Livestock-based and Wage-based livelihood strategies (LS) are less diversified and more specialized than households with Crop-based LS. Ethnicity has a positive and significant effect on agricultural diversification, with Kichwa farms more diversified than those of their migrant colonist counterparts. The results of the multinomial logit model (MLM) show that large Kichwa households, with Crop-based and Forest-based LS are more likely to adopt a highly diversified agricultural strategy. Based on these findings, we recommend a redirection of agricultural incentives, towards the adoption of diversified agricultural systems, as a strategy to promote more sustainable production systems in the Ecuadorian Amazon Region.

AbstractForests provide important ecosystem services (ESs), including climate change mitigation, local climate regulation, habitat for biodiversity, wood and non‐wood products, energy, and recreation. Simultaneously, forests are increasingly affected by climate change and need to be adapted to future environmental conditions. Current legislation, including the European Union (EU) Biodiversity Strategy, EU Forest Strategy, and national laws, aims to protect forest landscapes, enhance ESs, adapt forests to climate change, and leverage forest products for climate change mitigation and the bioeconomy. However, reconciling all these competing demands poses a tremendous task for policymakers, forest managers, conservation agencies, and other stakeholders, especially given the uncertainty associated with future climate impacts. Here, we used process‐based ecosystem modeling and robust multi‐criteria optimization to develop forest management portfolios that provide multiple ESs across a wide range of climate scenarios. We included constraints to strictly protect 10% of Europe's land area and to provide stable harvest levels under every climate scenario. The optimization showed only limited options to improve ES provision within these constraints. Consequently, management portfolios suffered from low diversity, which contradicts the goal of multi‐functionality and exposes regions to significant risk due to a lack of risk diversification. Additionally, certain regions, especially those in the north, would need to prioritize timber provision to compensate for reduced harvests elsewhere. This conflicts with EU LULUCF targets for increased forest carbon sinks in all member states and prevents an equal distribution of strictly protected areas, introducing a bias as to which forest ecosystems are more protected than others. Thus, coordinated strategies at the European level are imperative to address these challenges effectively. We suggest that the implementation of the EU Biodiversity Strategy, EU Forest Strategy, and targets for forest carbon sinks require complementary measures to alleviate the conflicting demands on forests.

The total area of short rotation coppice (SRC) in Germany has increased to about 6000 ha in the last decade, without the benefit of subsidies. About 15% of Germany's total SRC area is in Bavaria. Up to now, the main focus of studies of SRC has been on experimental sites. Hence, as yet there have been no studies analyzing the sites used to cultivate SRC commercially, the management practices used, or the characteristics of the farmers who cultivate SRC. To fill this knowledge gap, we used a standardized questionnaire to gather information about SRC operators in Bavaria and their SRCs. SRC farmers differed from farmers who did not grow SRC: They had larger farms, often farmed organically, and the proportion of land they leased from other owners was lower. Furthermore, the relative forest area of SRC farmers was greater, whereas the relative area of permanent grassland was lower. The sites used for SRC cultivation showed below-average land rents, but generally were well supplied with water. The tree species cultivated in 98% of the cases was poplar. Biomass was predominantly harvested motor-manually after five to ten years for use in private wood chip heating systems. The use of marginal lands with sufficient water supply for biomass production with SRC in relatively long rotation cycles seems to be a favorable method of biomass production in southern Germany. This management practice on marginal land might be interesting for other countries because the competition with food production is low. However, economic analyses are needed.

Abstract Since economic profitability is the most important factor for the adoption of short rotation coppice (SRC) for energy from biomass, our objective was to analyze and summarize published knowledge about the economic evaluation of SRC. Of 37 studies, 43% reported economic viability of SRC in comparison to a reference system; whereas 19% stated economic disadvantages of SRC, and 38% reported mixed results, depending on the underlying assumptions. We found a wide variety of underlying assumptions, underlying costs, process chains and methods used to evaluate SRC systems. Of the 37 studies, 8% used static approaches of capital budgeting, 84% used dynamic approaches and 8% applied approaches in which uncertainties were taken into account. Due to the long-term nature of investment in SRC, and therewith, the uncertain development of sensitive assumptions, approaches which consider uncertainties were best suited for economic evaluation. The profitability of SRC was found to be most sensitive to the price for biomass and biomass yield, but site-specific biomass data was lacking. Despite the wide variation within each cost unit, costs for land rent, harvesting, chipping, and establishment consistently made up the largest proportion of overall costs, and should therefore, be chosen carefully. We close with suggestions for improving the economic evaluation of SRC and enhancing traceability and comparability of calculations.

Abstract As bioenergy plants, short rotation woody crops (SRWC) feature high biomass productivity and provide positive external effects, such as reduced soil erosion, increased soil life, and reduced nitrate leaching. However, they are not widespread in intensive cropping systems due to long investment periods and perceived economic disadvantages (low profitability and high risk). Nevertheless, the perceived uncertainty as the main barrier of adoption has not been addressed sufficiently, since the economic risk of SRWC has not been quantified and compared with conventional crops extensively. Another shortcoming of recent economic evaluations is that they are based on mutually exclusive comparisons of alternative investments. In fact, SRWC can be considered an asset of agricultural portfolios, whereby diversification effects are expected due to different ecology, products, and markets. To address these shortcomings, we quantified the economic risk of SRWC and conventional crops and applied the Modern Portfolio Theory to evaluate the economic diversification effects of SRWC at the farm level in a low- and a high-yielding study region in Bavaria (Germany). In SRWC-crop comparisons, SRWC showed the lowest economic risk of all crops compared and gross margins which were competitive with most alternative crops. Furthermore, the correlation of the gross margins of SRWC and agricultural crops compared was relatively low. Therefore, the inclusion of SRWC into existing farm production plans offered economic diversification, increasing the profitability at farm scale, while lowering risk. Thus, diversifying cash crop rotations with SRWC is an effective risk-management instrument that can furthermore provide positive external effects.

Climate change has significant effects on forest ecosystems around the world. Since tree diameter increment determines forest volume increment and ultimately forest production, an accurate estimate of this variable under future climate change is of great importance for sustainable forest management. In this study, we modeled tree diameter increment under the effects of current and expected future climate change, using multilayer perceptron (MLP) artificial neural networks and linear mixed-effect model in two sites of the Hyrcanian Forest, northern Iran. Using 573 monitoring fixed-area (0.1 ha) plots, we measured and calculated biotic and abiotic factors (i.e., diameter at breast height (DBH), basal area in the largest trees (BAL), basal area (BA), elevation, aspect, slope, precipitation, and temperature). We investigated the effect of climate change in the year 2070 under two reference scenarios; RCP 4.5 (an intermediate scenario) and RCP 8.5 (an extreme scenario) due to the uncertainty caused by the general circulation models. According to the scenarios of climate change, the amount of annual precipitation and temperature during the study period will increase by 12.18 mm and 1.77 °C, respectively. Further, the results showed that the impact of predicted climate change was not very noticeable and the growth at the end of the period decreased by only about 7% annually. The effect of precipitation and temperature on the growth rate, in fact, neutralize each other, and therefore, the growth rate does not change significantly at the end of the period compared to the beginning. Based on the models’ predictions, the MLP model performed better compared to the linear mixed-effect model in predicting tree diameter increment.

Agroforestry has been promoted as a key forest landscape restoration (FLR) option to restore ecosystem services in degraded tropical landscapes. We investigated the share and type of agroforestry selected in an optimized landscape, accounting for a mosaic of alternative forest landscape restoration options (reforestation and natural succession) and forest and common agricultural land-uses. We extend previous studies on multi-objective robust optimization and the analytic hierarchy process by a systematic sensitivity analysis to assess the influence of incorporating agroforestry into a landscape. This approach accounts for multiple objectives concurrently, yet data and computational requirements are relatively low. Our results show that experts from different backgrounds perceive agroforestry (i.e., alley cropping and silvopasture) very positively. Inclusion of large shares of agroforestry (41% share of landscape) in the FLR mix enhanced simulated ecosystem service provision. Our results demonstrate that landscapes with high shares of agroforestry may also comprise of high shares of natural forest. However, landscapes dominated by single agroforestry systems showed lower landscape multifunctionality than heterogeneous landscapes. In the ongoing effort to create sustainable landscapes, our approach contributes to an understanding of interrelations between land-covers and uncertain provisions of ecosystem services in circumstances with scarce data.