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Elon University / Imagining The Internet / Survey X: The Next 50 Years Of Digital Life
By Claude A. Garcia 1, 2, * , Jérémy Vendé 3 , Nanaya Konerira 2, 4, 5 , Jenu Kalla 2, 5 , Michelle Nay 2 , Anne Dray 2, 6 , Maëlle Delay 2 , Patrick O. Waeber 2 , Natasha Stoudmann 2 , Arshiya Bose 2 , Christophe Le Page 7 , Yenugula Raghuram 8 , Robert Bagchi 9 , Jaboury Ghazoul 6 , Cheppudira G. Kushalappa 4 and Philippe Vaast 10, 11
Deforestation and biodiversity loss in agroecosystems are generally the result of rational choices, not of a lack of awareness or knowledge. Despite both scientific evidence and traditional knowledge that supports the value of diverse production systems for ecosystem services and resilience, a trend of agroecosystem intensification is apparent across tropical regions. These transitions happen in spite of policies that prohibit such transformations. We present a participatory modelling study run to (1) understand the drivers of landscape transition and (2) explore the livelihood and environmental impacts of tenure changes in the coffee agroforestry systems of Kodagu (India). The components of the system, key actors and resources, and their interactions were defined with stakeholders, following the companion modelling (ComMod) approach. The underlying ecological processes driving the system were validated through expert knowledge and scientific literature. The conceptual model was transformed into a role-playing game and validated by eight workshops with a total of 57 participants. Two scenarios were explored, a No Policy Change as baseline, and a Restitution of Rights where rights to cut the native trees are handed over to farmers. Our results suggest that the landscape transition is likely to continue unabated unless there is a change to the current policy framework. However, the Restitution of Rights risks speeding up the process rather than reversing it, as inter alia, the differential growth rate between exotic and native tree species, kick in.
Human agency now rivals natural processes in shaping and driving the Earth system to an extent that many advocate the recognition of a new geological era, the Anthropocene [1]. This is particularly true of agroecosystems where, from the local to the global, the human enterprise affects directly or indirectly most if not all elements and processes [2, 3]. One of the outcomes of this stranglehold is that several proposed planetary boundaries that define the safe operating space for humanity have already been crossed, in particular the core Biosphere Integrity boundary (formerly referred to as Rate of Biodiversity loss) [4, 5, 6, 7]. Conservation efforts aim at halting or reversing this trend. Considering that just under 15% of the globe’s 13.4 billion ha of land surface is devoted to conservation, against 11% to arable land and permanent crop production [8, 9] and that further extension of protected areas will be costly even if at all feasible, biodiversity conservation should increasingly be contemplated outside protected areas [10, 11, 12].
So What Is A Research University? In: The Pursuit Of Possibility
Since human agency is of primary importance in shaping these landscapes [13], mainstreaming biodiversity conservation into agroecosystems requires careful consideration of the values, needs, constraints, and actions of farmers and other relevant stakeholders as primary drivers of change [14, 15]. Values and actions can be contradictory, and their elicitation is not straightforward. In Indonesia, for example, farmers readily change their livelihood system by replacing forests and agroforestry systems with alternative crops such as oil palm in response to market incentives, despite their cultural attachment to forest [16]. In many cases, deforestation and the loss of biodiversity are the result of rational choices, not of a lack of awareness or knowledge [17]. Failure to adequately represent agency can lead to policies that are little more than wishful thinking, or even potentially exacerbating negative outcomes [18, 19].
Agents (sensu [18]) seeking to improve agroecosystem governance are confronted with seemingly intractable difficulties. (i) They need to take into account the bounded rationality of the stakeholders, the fact that their rationality is limited by the information they possess, their cognitive limitations, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision [20]. They need to take into account the fact that drivers of decision might be tacit—so obviously nobody mentions them to outsiders—cryptic, unknown to all but the most discerning observer, or even concealed—such as freeriding or corruption [21, 22]. (ii) The system they deal with is highly unpredictable, with complex and nonlinear interactions, feedback loops and delayed effects between individual decisions, collective behaviour and ecological processes [23]. (iii) Finally, the system is highly adaptive and stakeholders can quickly exhibit behavioural plasticity, finding loopholes or revising their strategies.
Models can help explore this complexity [23, 24, 25], provided they capture the full complexity of the stakeholders’ decision-making process. Dismissing this critical system feature and behaviour limits the model’s validity and outputs [26]. Thorough and recent reviews of participatory approaches with an emphasis on collaborative modelling exist, and can be referred to [27, 28]. Participatory models [29], agent-based modelling [23], and scenario planning [30] have been proposed as possible avenues to help agents ‘muddle through’ this quagmire.
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The district of Kodagu in the Western Ghats (India) is located in a major biodiversity hotspot [31]. Farmers in Kodagu produce one third of Indian coffee [32, 33], in addition to rice and other cash crops such as cardamom (Eletaria cardamomum M.), ginger (Zingiber officinale R.), and areca nut (Areca catechu L.) [34]. The resulting landscape is a dynamic mosaic of terraced rice fields, evergreen and moist deciduous forest fragments, some of them sacred [35, 36], and coffee farms. These coffee farms, locally referred to as Estates, produce mostly Robusta coffee (Coffea canephora var robusta L.), under complex, multi-storeyed agroforestry systems [17, 37]. A survey of more than 21, 000 trees in the landscape identified more than 270 different tree species [38]. The landscape is also dotted with water storage tanks used to irrigate coffee to induce flowering, increase yield and reduce the need for dense shade cover [17, 39].
Land use and land cover change, and the consequent loss of biodiversity in this landscape, result primarily from the decisions individual coffee farmers make on their estates. Time series have shown that most changes to the tree cover happen inside privately owned land, leaving the area under the direct control of the government and the Karnataka Forest Department largely untouched [17]. Tree cover changes mainly because of three different management interventions: when coffee farmers (i) replace forest habitats with coffee plantations, (ii) remove shade trees to increase coffee productivity, and (iii) replace a rich and diverse evergreen and moist deciduous canopy cover by planting Silver Oak (Grevillea robusta A. Cunn.), a fast growing tree originating from Australia [40, 41]. Of these three practices, the slow conversion to Silver Oak has received most attention, and the reasons advanced by the coffee farmers are well documented [40, 41, 42]. This species can be logged and traded easily, as it lacks any specific protection rights. This is not the case for native species, whose harvest is restricted and for which full value of the timber cannot be recovered by the coffee farmer [17].
For over 10 years, coffee farmers and their representatives have been actively advocating a policy change, demanding full ownership rights over all the trees on their land, not only the exotic ones, and the lifting of restrictions on the harvesting of native trees [42, 43]. Over the years, this issue has led to considerable friction between coffee farmers and the Karnataka Forest Department which opposes farmer demands for tree ownership rights out of concern of the environmental impact this would have on tree cover across the district. Vocal representatives of the coffee farmers, for example the Codagu Planters Association (sic), deny that the granting of tree rights would result in a loss of tree cover or conversion [44]. This position resonates with discourses on devolution, where privatization and downsizing of state control on one hand, and community empowerment on the other, have replaced earlier State-control centred narratives [45]. This polarized debate has led to a long-lasting standoff between the opposing
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The district of Kodagu in the Western Ghats (India) is located in a major biodiversity hotspot [31]. Farmers in Kodagu produce one third of Indian coffee [32, 33], in addition to rice and other cash crops such as cardamom (Eletaria cardamomum M.), ginger (Zingiber officinale R.), and areca nut (Areca catechu L.) [34]. The resulting landscape is a dynamic mosaic of terraced rice fields, evergreen and moist deciduous forest fragments, some of them sacred [35, 36], and coffee farms. These coffee farms, locally referred to as Estates, produce mostly Robusta coffee (Coffea canephora var robusta L.), under complex, multi-storeyed agroforestry systems [17, 37]. A survey of more than 21, 000 trees in the landscape identified more than 270 different tree species [38]. The landscape is also dotted with water storage tanks used to irrigate coffee to induce flowering, increase yield and reduce the need for dense shade cover [17, 39].
Land use and land cover change, and the consequent loss of biodiversity in this landscape, result primarily from the decisions individual coffee farmers make on their estates. Time series have shown that most changes to the tree cover happen inside privately owned land, leaving the area under the direct control of the government and the Karnataka Forest Department largely untouched [17]. Tree cover changes mainly because of three different management interventions: when coffee farmers (i) replace forest habitats with coffee plantations, (ii) remove shade trees to increase coffee productivity, and (iii) replace a rich and diverse evergreen and moist deciduous canopy cover by planting Silver Oak (Grevillea robusta A. Cunn.), a fast growing tree originating from Australia [40, 41]. Of these three practices, the slow conversion to Silver Oak has received most attention, and the reasons advanced by the coffee farmers are well documented [40, 41, 42]. This species can be logged and traded easily, as it lacks any specific protection rights. This is not the case for native species, whose harvest is restricted and for which full value of the timber cannot be recovered by the coffee farmer [17].
For over 10 years, coffee farmers and their representatives have been actively advocating a policy change, demanding full ownership rights over all the trees on their land, not only the exotic ones, and the lifting of restrictions on the harvesting of native trees [42, 43]. Over the years, this issue has led to considerable friction between coffee farmers and the Karnataka Forest Department which opposes farmer demands for tree ownership rights out of concern of the environmental impact this would have on tree cover across the district. Vocal representatives of the coffee farmers, for example the Codagu Planters Association (sic), deny that the granting of tree rights would result in a loss of tree cover or conversion [44]. This position resonates with discourses on devolution, where privatization and downsizing of state control on one hand, and community empowerment on the other, have replaced earlier State-control centred narratives [45]. This polarized debate has led to a long-lasting standoff between the opposing
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