Forest carbon in Amazonia: the unrecognized contribution of indigenous territories and protected natural areas

Walker, Wayne; Baccini, Alessandro; Schwartzman, Stephan; Ríos, Sandra; Oliveira‐Miranda, María A.; Augusto, Cicero; Ruiz, Milton Romero; Arrasco, Carla Soria; Ricardo, Beto; Smith, Richard C.; Meyer, Chris; Jintiach, Juan Carlos; Campos, Edwin Vasquez

doi:10.1080/17583004.2014.990680

Cited by 83 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Despite those achievements over the short period from 2008 to 2016, stabilising (and potentially reversing) the ongoing loss of forest and biodiversity and eventually transforming the SES into a truly sustainable state space will depend on the capacity to deal with a variety of threats to deforestation and biodiversity [3], especially future demographic and production patterns. In contrast to the finding for indigenous territories [11,58], we find that assigning property rights and managing migration are key to effective conservation.…”

Section: Adaptive Capacity Depends On Effective Knowledge Integrationcontrasting

confidence: 51%

“…While the potential of contribution of protected areas and indigenous communities to forest conservation is well documented [2,[57][58][59], our case study on the ZPC process shows that also newly established communities can develop and integrate conservation practices into their resource management. Our interviews detect that the ZPC process has led to advances in all four dimensions of adaptive capacity analysed in this paper.…”

Section: Adaptive Capacity Depends On Effective Knowledge Integrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additional, funding could be provided by conservation funds or indirectly by REDD+. REDD+ funded areas are reported to compete for land-use with agricultural production and to be often implemented in areas with scattered property rights among many stakeholders [58]; however, implementing a REDD+ project on this region has been discouraged [48]. A possible scenario is that additional carbon credits with reasonable time frames are transferred to the park in order to facilitate capacity building in its buffer zone to mediate possible threats.…”

Section: Land Use Planning For Local Sustainable Ses-potential and LImentioning

confidence: 99%

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Building Adaptive Capacity in Changing Social-Ecological Systems: Integrating Knowledge in Communal Land-Use Planning in the Peruvian Amazon

et al. 2018

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Building resilient sustainable social-ecological systems (SES) requires communities to enhance their adaptive capacities. Communal participative land-use planning (Zonificación Participativa Comunal-ZPC) is a tool designed for communities to integrating local and scientific knowledge to sustainably organize and manage their SES. Between 2006 and 2011, a ZPC was developed with communities in the buffer zone of Cordillera Azul National Park (Peru), where rapid demographic changes are converting pre-montane seasonally dry forest into agricultural land. Herein, we analyse how the ZPC enhanced adaptive capacity, enabling the SES to cope with environmental, political and economic changes. Based on qualitative, semi-structured interviews, communities are analysed along their capacities in the dimensions social capital, learning, adaptive management and governance. An analysis of yearly high-resolution forest cover data supports our findings. Deforestation activities in biologically sensitive zones decreased rapidly during the time of the ZPC implementation. We find that particularly the long-term presence of the bridging institution and the continuous testing and reflection of the integrated "hybrid knowledge" enabled communities to develop adaptive capacities. The analysis of ZPC our results reveals the enabling conditions for promoting the learning process to develop a sustainable land-use management in the context of migration and rapid changes.

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Section: Adaptive Capacity Depends On Effective Knowledge Integrationcontrasting

confidence: 51%

Section: Adaptive Capacity Depends On Effective Knowledge Integrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Land Use Planning For Local Sustainable Ses-potential and LImentioning

confidence: 99%

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Building Adaptive Capacity in Changing Social-Ecological Systems: Integrating Knowledge in Communal Land-Use Planning in the Peruvian Amazon

et al. 2018

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“…Indeed, the 610 forest reserves and 2,954 indigenous territories across all nine Amazonian countries may be able to store 11-times more carbon than all unprotected areas combined (58). However, this takes no account of overhunting within protected areas, which is ubiquitous across Amazonia (9), again reinforcing the notion that protecting forests against structural degradation alone is not enough to maintain baseline carbon stocks in perpetuity if megafrugivores are extirpated from otherwise intact forests.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Dispersal limitation induces long-term biomass collapse in overhunted Amazonian forests

Peres

Emilio

Schietti

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

324

335

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Tropical forests are the global cornerstone of biological diversity, and store 55% of the forest carbon stock globally, yet sustained provisioning of these forest ecosystem services may be threatened by hunting-induced extinctions of plant-animal mutualisms that maintain long-term forest dynamics. Large-bodied Atelinae primates and tapirs in particular offer nonredundant seed-dispersal services for many large-seeded Neotropical tree species, which on average have higher wood density than smaller-seeded and winddispersed trees. We used field data and models to project the spatial impact of hunting on large primates by ∼1 million rural households throughout the Brazilian Amazon. We then used a unique baseline dataset on 2,345 1-ha tree plots arrayed across the Brazilian Amazon to model changes in aboveground forest biomass under different scenarios of hunting-induced large-bodied frugivore extirpation. We project that defaunation of the most harvest-sensitive species will lead to losses in aboveground biomass of between 2.5-5.8% on average, with some losses as high as 26.5-37.8%. These findings highlight an urgent need to manage the sustainability of game hunting in both protected and unprotected tropical forests, and place full biodiversity integrity, including populations of large frugivorous vertebrates, firmly in the agenda of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) programs. T ropical forests worldwide store >460 billion tons of carbonover half of the total atmospheric storage (1)-and tropical forest conversion and degradation account for as much as 20% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (2). Tropical forests are also the most species-rich ecosystems on Earth, yet the role of species interactions in stabilizing tropical forest dynamics and maintaining the flow of natural ecosystem services, including long-term forest carbon pools, remains poorly understood. Over 80-96% of all woody plant species in tropical forests produce vertebrate-dispersed fleshy fruits (3, 4), yet many large-bodied frugivore populations in tropical forest regions have already been severely overhunted (5), resulting in functionally "empty" or "half-empty" forests with subsequent disruptions in seed dispersal mutualisms (6). Indeed, the total forest area degraded by unsustainable hunting in the largest remaining tropical forest regions may exceed the combined extent of deforestation, selective logging, and wildfires (7,8). Even formally decreed forest reserves in remote areas have succumbed to population declines and local extinctions of large vertebrates (9, 10), yet the consequences of this pervasive defaunation process to the persistence of tropical forest ecosystem services remains poorly explored.Overhunting can amplify dispersal limitation in many largeseeded plant species relying primarily or exclusively on harvestsensitive large-bodied frugivores. The causal mechanisms through which hunting leads to altered phytodemographics-recruitment bottlenecks resulting from replacement of seedlings f...

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“…The state of the LAC environment is maintained by the numerous indigenous and local communities that inhabit the diverse ecosystems. There is increasing evidence that indigenous lands protect the natural environment through reduced rates of deforestation and habitat conversion, and lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to surrounding areas (e.g., Nolte et al 2013, Vergara-Asenjo and Potvin 2014, Walker et al 2015. Ecosystems are protected within indigenous lands not because they are being "managed" in a direct and active way, but as the indirect outcome of a healthy community within its environment; i.e., sustainable management results from sophisticated practices that maintain social and ecological integrity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Community-based management of environmental challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean

Delgado-Serrano¹,

Mistry²,

Matzdorf³

et al. 2017

E&S

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ABSTRACT. This Special Feature gathers the results of five research projects funded by the 7th Research Framework Program of the European Union and aims to identify successful cases of community-based management of environmental challenges in Latin America. The funding scheme, Research for the benefit of Civil Society Organizations, fostered innovative research approaches between civil society and research organizations. More than 20 field sites have been explored, and issues such as trade-offs between conservation and development, scientific versus local knowledge, social learning, ecosystem services, community owned solutions, scaling-up and scalingout strategies, the influence of context and actors in effective environmental management and governance, and the conflicts of interests around natural resources have been addressed. Based on our experiences as project coordinators, in this editorial we reflect on some of the important lessons gained for research praxis and impact, focusing on knowledge of governance models and their scaling-out and scaling-up, and on methods and tools to enable action research at the science-civil society interface. The results highlight the richness of community-based management experiences that exist in Latin America and the diversity of approaches to encourage the sustainable community-based management of environmental challenges.

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Forest carbon in Amazonia: the unrecognized contribution of indigenous territories and protected natural areas

Cited by 83 publications

References 18 publications

Building Adaptive Capacity in Changing Social-Ecological Systems: Integrating Knowledge in Communal Land-Use Planning in the Peruvian Amazon

Building Adaptive Capacity in Changing Social-Ecological Systems: Integrating Knowledge in Communal Land-Use Planning in the Peruvian Amazon

Dispersal limitation induces long-term biomass collapse in overhunted Amazonian forests

Community-based management of environmental challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean

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