Landscape characteristics of Rejoso Watershed: land cover dynamics, farming systems and community strategies
Landscape characteristics of Rejoso Watershed: land cover dynamics, farming systems and community strategies
25 October, 2018
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The Rejoso watershed provides vital livelihoods for the Pasuruan communities. Farming of annual and perennial crops, including agroforestry, timber plantations and livestock is the most dominant source of income. In the last decade, stone mining has gradually become an alternative source of income for the communities in the midstream area of the Rejoso Watershed. In the upper stream of Rejoso watershed, adjacent to Mount Bromo, the tourism becomes an alternative local revenue. Population growth and economic pressure are causing dramatic changes in the Rejoso Watershed. Dominant anthropocentric development activities have been gradually affecting the environment’s quality, especially the watershed’s function of maintaining good quality and quantity of water resources. The most common environmental issues related to water resources are floods, droughts, erosions, and landslides. An initiative that simultaneously conserves and strengthens the local economy and livelihoods is urgently needed. The ‘Rejoso Kita’ initiative was designed to achieve these aspirations. As an initial step towards the implementation of such an initiative, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) is leading a scoping study as basis for the ‘Rejoso Kita’ strategy implemented by a consortium coordinated by Social Investment Indonesia Foundation, CK-Net and partners supported by the Danone Ecosystem.
A business case: co-investing for ecosystem service provisions and local livelihoods in Rejoso watershed
A business case: co-investing for ecosystem service provisions and local livelihoods in Rejoso watershed
28 May, 2018
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The Rejoso business case is based on information from piloting a payment for ecosystem services (PES) scheme aimed at stimulating multi-stakeholder co-investment in restoring and maintaining good watershed functions. The business case presents the benefits of applying innovations in setting the PES pilot that enhance participation and inclusiveness of smallholder farmers in the programme, link the scientific approaches to on-theground actions and, ultimately, ensure that the programme is cost-efficient and effective in restoring and maintaining watershed functions compared to ‘business as usual’.
Estimating water user demand for certification of forest watershed services
Estimating water user demand for certification of forest watershed services
11 April, 2018
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Eco-certification is one solution to the common problem of verification of delivery of services in payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes. Certification incurs costs, which may limit uptake, so it should be able to benefit users of certified services for it succeeds. In part to inform a project targeting expansion of the Forest Stewardship Council’s forest management certification to include ecosystem services, we tested market demand for a potential certification scheme for watershed services. Using choice experiments among end-users of water subject to an existing PES scheme in Lombok, Indonesia, we assessed potential business values of certification. Our results suggested that preferred business values included credible information disclosure on improved water quality, reduced flood risk, environmental safeguards, and/or social safeguards of the upstream forests. These preferences indicate potential demand for a certification of forest watershed services designed to provide such information to end users.
A picture paints a thousand words for Smart Tree-Invest project
A picture paints a thousand words for Smart Tree-Invest project
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Getting behind the camera enables farmers to express their perspectives and assess their land in a creative and engaging way.
The Climate-smart, Tree-based Co-investment in Adaptation and Mitigation in Asia (Smart Tree-Invest) project focused on improving the livelihoods and resilience of smallholder farmers through the promotion of climate-smart, tree-based agriculture in three countries by reducing their vulnerability to climate change.
The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) project, supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), recently completed its three-year journey.
Among the most innovative aspects of the project was Photovoice, a participatory research method that saw cameras provided to farmers in the project’s field sites.
“The main objective was to help in identifying and understanding the vulnerability and adaptive capacities of smallholder farmers to climate change and variability in Ho Ho-subwatershed as a project site, through photos that reflect local perceptions and knowledge on vulnerability,” said Tran Ha My, communications staff member for Smart Tree-Invest in Vietnam.
“Photovoice is also a different approach to share farmers’ insights and experiences, which helped the project and local stakeholders to develop more appropriate solutions for enhancing livelihood and environmental resilience in the subwatershed,” she added.
The benefits of the approach were twofold. The farmers had a creative way to express their perspectives, could better understand their vulnerabilities and capacities and more actively participated in discussing issues related to their land. Meanwhile, the researchers also collected baseline photographs of the landscape in the process.
“Using photos in focus groups and a video baseline survey puts faces to the once-anonymous ‘stakeholders’ of a project. They give a more personal dimension to all the figures and statistics and help show what farmers really need and how researchers can help,” Amy Cruz, communications staff member for ICRAF in the Philippines, wrote early in the life of the project.
The personal dimension was clear in the results, which showed smallholders’ land through their own eyes. Later, impact photos displayed improvements in the farmers’ livelihoods through knowledge gained from the project.
“Photovoice is a process that allows more nuanced capturing of the important elements in a landscape by letting farmers themselves decide specific areas to photograph. We asked them to capture two of their areas that were most vulnerable to climate change, two of their resources and two of their coping strategies. Aside from documentation of the landscape and the farmers’ perspectives, the photos were used in discussion groups to further draw out opinions of the landscapes in their respective villages,” Cruz explained.
“Nearly all the farmers identified sloping areas on their farms as the most vulnerable — they were usually flooded during rains — and the crops as their resources. There was, however, a variety of coping strategies mentioned by the farmers when discussing the photographs.
“Some said they did not do anything when the land flooded; they just waited for the waters to recede. Others said that they did, or planned to, use contouring on their fields to counter erosion. Quite a few also used trees as boundaries and windbreaks,” she added.
The photographic results were used in focus group discussions with participants and with other farmers who did not take photos themselves. Through conversations over the results, the farmers were all able to agree on common issues that they faced.
“Photovoice provides an initial glimpse of the vulnerabilities of the farmers,” Cruz said in a separate blog. “While it is not enough to give a complete measure of vulnerability, it is an effective way to start the discussion. The farmers analyze and express their perceptions, while the researchers draw evidence from the photos and discussions with the farmers. Literature review and quantitative methods of vulnerability assessment could then be used to validate these findings.”
By looking at the bigger picture, smallholders and researchers worked creatively and more effectively toward climate-smart farming systems.
By Hannah Maddison-Harris, FTA Communications and Editorial Coordinator.
This work forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA). We would like to thank all donors who supported this work through their contributions to the CGIAR Fund. This project was supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
Smart Tree-Invest, supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), worked in watersheds in Buol, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia; Lantapan municipality, Bukidnon province, the Philippines; as well as Ha Thinh and Quang Binh provinces in Vietnam.
The project, which ran from 2014 to 2017, aimed to improve the livelihoods and resilience of smallholder farmers through the promotion of climate-smart, tree-based agriculture in the three countries, aimed at reducing their vulnerability to climate change.
It did so by developing co-investment models that involve smallholders as ecosystem service providers while local governments and the private sector invest as ecosystem service beneficiaries.
Based on diagnostic studies of needs and opportunities in each country, the project introduced novel tree-planting schemes to improve the quality of home gardens, smallholders’ plantations, riparian and sloping land — and ultimately the quality of the environment and local livelihoods.
The process of identifying opportunities as well as new schemes for using resources available locally have been adopted by local governments in the three countries, overcoming their initial skepticism based on past ‘project’ experience. Moreover, toward the end of the project, private sectors were eager to join in initially monitoring ecosystem services in their sites in Indonesia, supporting market access for smallholders in Vietnam, and starting the initial incentive flow in the Philippines.
Smart Tree-Invest was the first project to explicitly pilot the development of Co-investment in Ecosystem Services (CIS) schemes, a concept that emerged from earlier Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) ideas. More than 600 farmers from the three countries were involved in co-investment activities.
FTA researcher and ICRAF ecosystem services specialist Beria Leimona, who was the overall leader of Smart Tree-Invest, noted the similarities between the three countries.
“We chose these sites because we work closely with the International Fund for Agricultural Development or IFAD [which had established a presence in the areas through previous projects] and all of the sites are remote, and they are more or less the ‘poorest of the poor’,” she said.
The Lantapan watershed had previously hosted an investment in environmental services project. There was also investor interest in the areas in terms of the private sector, including a major hydropower company in the downstream. It was the first time co-investment had been implemented on the ground.
The area “had been degraded to some extent,” Leimona said. ICRAF has had a presence in Lantapan for quite some time, she explained, beginning with the Landcare initiative in the 1990s.
“With Landcare, we saw the potential: we gave the awareness [about tree planting], but what sort of incentives would make them want to sustain the pilot?”
Researchers subsequently “added information about what type of ecosystem services farmers and outside beneficiaries could get if they planted trees on their farms, which was in this case the watershed functions — increasing water quality for the company and also reducing erosion from farmland.”
“Through Smart Tree-Invest, we wanted to get more stakeholders involved in linking development programs with well-measured conservation objectives to result in green-growth scheme in their jurisdictions, including IFAD as the development agency and particularly the district and provincial government,” Leimona said.
Buol in Indonesia and Ha Tinh in Vietnam were more remote than the Philippines site. There was “almost no private sector,” Leimona said, adding that there was also less interest from business and infrastructure was less supportive.
She put this down to the area not being “sexy” or high-profile like locations such as Kalimantan, leading to almost no projects occurring there.
The silver lining was that “the enthusiasm of the local government was very high because they were quite eager to see what happened.”
Among the other notable differences between the sites were that in terms of the landscape structure, Vietnam did not have a mixed system or agroforestry. That stemmed from land-use policy, said Leimona, whereby farmers must follow government requirements on what to plant on their land.
In Buol, agroforestry existed with crops such as cacao, coconut and candlenut, Leimona explained. However, it had not been commercialized and was not well managed. “People didn’t think it could be a source of future profits,” she said, adding that farmers previously concentrated more on their patchouli or paddy fields.
Among other approaches, the project used the Capacity Strengthening Approach to Vulnerability Assessment (CaSAVA) framework, which ICRAF developed. The participatory approach of CaSAVA helped the collection of local ecological knowledge from smallholders in Lantapan, according to researcher Kharmina Anit in the Philippines, and increased their awareness of the issues in their landscapes, encouraging practical adaptation solutions at the community level.
The project also provided best practices in support of the implementation of policies in each country.
The administration has requested ICRAF’s support through continued technical assistance as it replicates the project activities after the project’s end.
In summing up the project’s impacts and its relation to greater goals at the closing event in Jakarta, FTA scientist Meine van Noordwijk said it was “not only about healthy food but also healthy farmers and healthy forests […] in the frame of climate change.”
Unlike management systems that require results to be outlined beforehand and achieved, Van Noordwijk added, Smart Tree-Invest made a commitment and then awaited the impacts. The “open-ended” learning approach fit into existing structures of regulations and funding mechanisms, as well as working within local contexts.
“[This] provided food for thought on how we may see one object from different perspectives, and end up with different results,” said ICRAF ecosystem services specialist Sacha Amaruzaman. “Professor van Noordwijk reflected on the different characteristics of three country sites; how the similar start in each site through the application of the CaSAVA framework ended up with different co-investment schemes.”
“Clarification of the issues, weighting the trade-off between options and considering context are the three actions required to achieve development goals,” he added.
The partnerships formed with governments and other stakeholders stand as testament to this, as does the continued commitment in the sustainability of the project.
By Hannah Maddison-Harris, FTA Communications and Editorial Coordinator.
This work forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA). We would like to thank all donors who supported this work through their contributions to the CGIAR Fund. This project was supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
Landscape restoration in Ethiopia brings watershed to life
Landscape restoration in Ethiopia brings watershed to life
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Water is now abundant in Gergera after “treatment” of the catchment with gabions, planting of trees and elephant grass, and natural regeneration of vegetation. Photo by Cathy Watson/ICRAF
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Ethiopia is suffering from severe drought. But there is water in Gergera. Twenty years of restoring its hills and valley has brought life back to this area in the state of Tigray.
The work has been painstaking, complex and multidimensional and continues to this day. But its hard-won results offer up two key lessons. First, landscape restoration in drylands hinges on water management. Second, restoration can create a base for better livelihoods and jobs for youth who formerly left in droves.
Ministers visited the watershed on May 31, 2017 after a meeting at which the Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), as part of work supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA), signed a memo of understanding to establish a National Agroforestry Platform to support climate-resilient green growth and transformation.
Over 40 prominent figures attended, including Ministers of State Dr. K Urgesa and Dr. G Gebreyohannes, Dr. W Tadesse of the Ethiopian Environment and Forest Research Institute, Dr. F Kebede, advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, and Dr. E Gabre Madhin, founder of Ethiopia’s commodity exchange. Also present were the ambassadors of Australia and Ireland, M Sawyers and P McManus, representatives of the Finnish, US, Dutch, German and Norwegian embassies and development agencies, and leaders from civil society groups such as OXFAM, Farm Africa, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and Packard.
In Gergera, the visit began at the head of the valley where community leaders had gathered. Alighting and looking around, Ethiopia’s minister of agriculture and natural resources was visibly moved. “I know this place. It was abandoned and untouched. This is very incredible to me,” said Dr. Eyasu Abraha.
The group stood under tall trees, bathed by bird song, with luscious grasses and pools of clean water at their feet. So that it can regenerate, this part of Gergera has long been closed to cattle. “The first thing you notice is the change of vegetation,” said ICRAF’s Director General Dr. Tony Simons, pointing out a Sclerocarya birrea, a tree with a nutritious plum-like fruit with an oil-rich kernel.
With the consent of the community, only cutting and carrying grass to livestock and beekeeping are permissible in this upper catchment. Indeed, the wooded hillsides are rife with carefully placed hives. Gabions built by members of the community slow the rainwater when it courses down the chasm, which, formerly too deep to cross, is gradually filling as earth builds up behind the structures.
Critically, this earth now retains rainwater, which seeps into the ground and emerges as groundwater in the valley where 1000 hectares of land are now under small-scale irrigation. It was not always like this.
“During the period of the Emperor and the Derg, degradation was so severe,” an elder said, referring to the regime that was in place from 1974 for 17 years. “Once we were forced to dismantle a church at risk of being swept away!”
But the fall of the Derg brought a groundswell of activity to address agricultural productivity in an area once struck by famine.
“The people took the initiative to rehabilitate the environment,” explained administrator Habtom Woreta. “That is when Irish Aid came in and we became a model watershed for the region and the world. You can see how the area is transformed! Biodiversity has increased and we have hand-dug wells at 1 meter deep because of recharge. And none of this is in vain. Now we have TVs in the houses. Before we slept on mats, now we have beds.”
Once a hot spot for the perilous out-migration of youth, even that has changed. When Irish Aid representative Aileen O’Donovan asked “about job creation for the youth, who are motivated but restless”, Kebele village leader Tsuruy proudly said: “We have 1070 youngsters, of whom 506 are employed due to restoration.”
“This is music to my ears,” said the minister of agriculture, whose government recently completed a Rural Job Opportunity Strategy.
Down in the valley, young men were building gabions to deflect a gulley away from the fields that would be destroyed if the water went unchecked in the rains. They are paid under the Poverty Safety Net Programme, Ethiopia’s cash transfer scheme. But they also donate 40 free days of their time, both as a social obligation and in anticipation of receiving reclaimed land from the state.
Asked why they were doing this, they shouted, “To earn daily bread and stop the loss of land. The land was going!” Placing a boulder into a square of wire mesh, the ICRAF director general told the group that if good tree cover was kept in the watershed, the water would also come with less velocity.
There were more young men as well as women at the rural resource center, a former government nursery now supported by ICRAF, which technically guides the entire restoration. They earn their living selling trees, particularly avocado, and 13 fodder grass species. They currently have tree seedlings and vegetable plantlets worth $11,523 and $10,000 in the bank.
“Our vision is how these youngsters can eventually be extension workers,” said Professor Mitiku Hailu of Mekelle University.
As the trip wrapped up, the community served bread and honey from the recovering hills. State Minister for Livestock and Fisheries Dr. Gebregziabher Gebreyohannes said “what has been seen today is job creation” and “cash transfers improving the lives of the poor”.
Dr. Kiros Hagdu, who leads ICRAF in Ethiopia, said his center was committed to evidence-based restoration of farms and landscapes with the government and communities and that now was “the time to scale-up the successes nationally.”
The minister of agriculture had the last word. “Agroforestry is becoming the heart and the mind of the government,” said Dr. Eyasu Abraha. “What we see here is really the beginning of transformation. All those youngsters who wanted to migrate will have productive land.”
Can agroforestry landscapes reduce the risk of floods?
Can agroforestry landscapes reduce the risk of floods?
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Floods become a normal part of life when floodplains are converted. Photo by ICRAF
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There is a lack of evidence of the effects of trees on reducing, or worsening, floods. Arguments continue about whether the research results that do exist from small-scale studies also apply at larger scales. A new technique is proving useful for finding evidence and better predicting trees’ role in flood mitigation.
Not surprisingly, humans have found the subject of floods of compelling interest, especially the extent to which removing trees from a watershed increases or decreases the risk of flooding. The pros and cons of deforestation have been hotly debated over the last 100 years and the basic concepts go back 2000 years.
The debate oscillates between strong over-generalizations — encapsulated in statements such as ‘forests are good for any aspect of water’ — to disbelief in anything not supported by strong evidence.
For CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) scientist Meine van Noordwijk of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), the challenge in the debate is properly understanding things at scale. Does deforestation increase the risk of flooding from small to large scales — and even can any flood be attributed to removing or adding trees — or is the evidence primarily valid only at the scale of measurement and not necessarily beyond?
For example, can the results of research in a small catchment be applied across a much larger landscape and help to decide whether more or less trees are needed to reduce flooding, or whether they have any effect at all?
A new article in the journal, Hydrology and Earth System Science, explores the middle ground in the debate and offers scientists an easier way of predicting river flow from rainfall and, consequently, the likelihood of flooding.
It is correlated with two metrics that have been used before: a ‘flashiness’ index as indicator of catchment health; and a ‘base flow’ metric that represents the opposite aspect of continued flow in dry periods. The empirical relationship between these two metrics depends on the context: terrain and details of rainfall patterns. The flow persistence metric can be derived from any period of consistent river flow measurements.
Of course, the more data, the more accurate the estimates will be but data requirements are much less than for the models that have been used so far. This is a good step in the right direction for better understanding how catchments work and how flooding can be reduced.
“Good quality data on river flow is scarce for many tropical watersheds,” said Van Noordwijk, lead author of the study, “so we need to first of all rely on consistency of interpretation and robust indicators of ‘buffering’ as the key process linking floods to rainfall. What we presented is a simple metric called ‘flow persistence’. Where its value is high, it means that only a small fraction of peak rainfall comes to the river the same day; when it is low, peak river flow will be high but will rapidly decline after that.”
Co-author Betha Lusiana, who heads ICRAF’s ecological modelling unit in Indonesia, explained that, “When we applied this method to cases in Southeast Asia, we found that annual variations in rainfall are such that effects of land cover on river flow in anything other than a small catchment can only be asserted statistically with long-term data. Lack of evidence of effects is not the same as evidence of lack of effects, as Sherlock Holmes already noted.”
There is a lot of interest in “restoration”, but we need metrics of where it is most relevant. The Flow Persistence method makes it easier for scientists to gather and analyse data extrapolate it across whole landscapes. This improves the ability to predict effect on river flow, and the potential for flooding, if trees in the form of agroforests are put back into large-scale, deforested landscapes.
This, too, is an area of research which hasn’t been fully studied at large scale yet such knowledge is in increasing demand to meet the needs of the various global programs aimed at rehabilitating the many millions of hectares of degraded landscapes.
“When forests are removed and the land is used for agriculture or other purposes, we observed that the flow persistence decreases when the soils no longer absorb all the rain,” explained Lisa Tanika, who is ICRAF’s hydrologist in Indonesia, “whereas agroforestation, which returns trees to the landscape, can induce a restoration of hydrological functions but it will take 5-to-10 years to see the effects.”
Being able to predict more accurately the restoration of such functions that are provided by different combinations of tree species in landscapes increasingly stressed by extremes of climate will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of rehabilitation programs.
The findings come at an appropriate time, following on from a recent, ground-breaking symposium that brought to the world’s attention the importance of forests and agroforests in the production of atmospheric moisture, a role second only to the world’s oceans in the global water cycle.
“Rather than think of trees only as things that soak up carbon and reduce the harmful effects of greenhouse gases, which is how international bodies like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change see them,” argued Van Noordwijk, who was a key presenter at the symposium.
“We need to shift the focus to their role in the water cycle, something especially important for an increasingly hot and dry world. The Flow Persistence metric is a small but important part of such a shift.”