Prospects for forest-based ecosystem services in forest-coffee mosaics as forest loss continues in southwestern Ethiopia

Abstract

a b s t r a c tWhen natural ecosystems are degraded owing to land-use changes, humans will increasingly rely on managed landscapes for biodiversity and ecosystem services. In landscapes with ongoing foresteagriculture transitions and agricultural intensification, we need to understand the impact of land-use changes on ecosystem service provisioning and the relative roles of remnant forests and managed landscapes in ecosystem service delivery. Using socio-ecological surveys in southwest Ethiopian agroecosystems, we assessed the impact of land-use changes on forest-based ecosystem services and livelihoods, and the prospects for coffee agroforests to provide complementary forest-based ecosystem services. We found that over 67% of provisioning and <50% of cultural and regulating forest-based services can be provided by semi-forest and garden coffee systems. Most forest-based cultural, regulating and supporting services cannot be substituted in coffee agroforests since these services are largely concentrated in the forest remnants. The extent to which people substitute or complement those losses in coffee agroforests depends on the livelihood strategies and socio-cultural practices of local people, management intensity, and policy and demographic factors that affect agroecosystem intensification.

Social-ecological outcomes of agricultural intensification

“…Across our dataset as a whole, there are relatively few studies that present socially differentiated outcomes, and this is an important research gap. However, it is still notable that inequality is reported in the majority of our lose-lose cases, either because the better-off are found to disproportionately capture the benefits of agricultural intensification [45][46][47][48] and/or because more vulnerable social groups are found to disproportionately suffer from the loss of ecosystem services on which their livelihoods depend 40,45,46,49,50 . For example, Islam and colleagues 46 show how rapid uptake of saltwater shrimp production in Bangladesh is enabling investors and landowners with large holdings to get higher profits while poorer people are "left with the environmental consequences that affect their long term lives and livelihoods" (page 450 of ref.…”

“…Via the second pathway, agricultural intensification negatively affects ecosystem services, which in turn negatively impacts well-being, with the poorest disproportionately affected. For example, Tadesse and co-authors 45 show how intensification of coffee production in Ethiopia, driven by investors and state enterprises, is initially blamed for declining access to and availability of several provisioning ecosystem services, negatively affecting the well-being of local minority groups who are more reliant on these services for their livelihoods. We also observe more complex outcome pathways that seem to combine both directions of social-ecological interaction.…”

“…4). These cases often involve the entwined processes of crop specialization and progress towards monoculture of crops such as coffee 45,50 , shrimp 46 , pineapple 40 , onion 41 and maize 65 , along with a transition from subsistence farming to cash-cropping and abandonment of traditional subsistence crops and varieties. As noted above, these transformations towards monoculture often involve shortage of fertilizers and other inputs, despite research finding increased need for such inputs.…”

Local Ecosystem Service Use and Assessment Vary with Socio-ecological Conditions: A Case of Native Coffee-Forests in Southwestern Ethiopia

“…Southwest Ethiopia is home to various indigenous peoples and native coffee forest fragments with an intimate and long history of human-ecosystem interdependence and use of various ecosystem services of local and global importance (Tadesse et al 2014a, c). We explored the use and preferences of locally relevant provisioning and cultural forest-based goods and services from intact forests or other converted landscapes that are collected, consumed and sold by indigenous and recently settled people.…”

The structures underpinning vulnerability: examining landscape-society interactions in a smallholder coffee agroforestry system

“…However, when considering an agricultural system through a resilience lens, it is important to recognize that crop productivity is only one of several variables that may be operating at a much faster timescale than other factors driving the resilience, desirable or undesirable, of a SES [7]. This can manifest as the unintended consequences of agricultural intensification [8,9], the inconsistent influence weather variability may have on yield variability [10] and the proven benefit of diversifying incomes away from an individual crop to increase a household's adaptive capacity [11,12]. Therefore, understanding the long-term dynamics, if possible, and structural attributes acting on a system becomes essential for assessing contextual vulnerability and, by extension, resilience.…”