This atlas provides habitat suitability maps for 54 species that are widely used in Central America for shade in coffee or cocoa agroforestry systems. The 54 species represent 24 fruit species, 24 timber species and 6 species used for soil fertility improvement.
Anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) is the most important transformation of the Earth system that occurred in the preindustrial Holocene, with implications for carbon, water and sediment cycles, biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services and regional and global climate.
Widespread palm oil production causes much controversy due to its negative impacts in the tropics. But whatever is said about it, it is big business and getting bigger by the day due to increasing global demands. Alongside this, the size and depth of the social and environmental debates surrounding palm oil production are also growing.
Almost one-quarter of the world’s land area has been degraded over the past 50 years because of soil erosion, salinization, peatland and wetland drainage, and forest degradation. The resulting damage, in terms of lost ecosystem goods and services, costs the world an estimated US$6.3 trillion a year. Almost a quarter of the world’s land area has been degraded over the past 50 years.
Why is it so important to restore degraded landscapes? It’s actually very simple.
The Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) entered a new era in December 2017 when it successfully launched its next five-year phase, centered on building a worldwide movement to connect and engage one billion people around sustainable land use.
Policy reform is required to more accurately value natural capital and incentivize green investments through aligned subsidies, supportive financial measures, and risk mitigation support.
A centralized system that synthesizes evidence and connects projects to investors would both improve awareness of initiatives and funding sources, and build capacity and financial literacy.
Landscape governance relates to how rules and decision-making address overlapping claims and conflicting interests in the landscape. It also relates to how rules and decision-making encourage synergies among stakeholders and stimulate the sustainable management of the landscape.
Oil palm plantations in Indonesia have been linked to substantial deforestation in the 1990s and 2000s, though recent studies suggest that new plantations are increasingly developed on non-forest land. Without nationwide data to establish recent baseline trends, the impact of commitments to eliminate deforestation from palm oil supply chains could therefore be overestimated.
In the last decade, there have been a number of global/regional targets and initiatives to halt and reverse land degradation and restore degraded land.
The pressure on land is growing in many regions of the world, due to the increasing demand for arable crops, meat and dairy products, bio-energy and timber, and is exacerbated by land degradation and climate change.