Creating a new relationship with nature through a ‘stewardship economy’

December 5, 2021 / activist360 / Leave a comment

*Small forestry in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo by Juan Carlos Huayllapuma/CIFOR*

New approach reshapes markets by putting stewards of nature at the center.

By Ravi Prabhu, Steven Lawry, John Colmey, Forests News (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
—Aldo Leopold, American conservationist and forester

On the islands that lie between Alaska and Russia, ancient tradition mandates that the native Aleut people will not pick a blueberry without ceremony or prayer. In 18th century colonial India, 363 Bishnoi men and women died at the hands of foresters while clinging to their trees to save them from being turned into timber, inspiring the term ‘tree hugger.’

While perhaps not the first that comes to mind, one word to describe these acts is, by definition, ‘stewardship’: the conducting, supervising, or managing of something, especially the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care.

Echoing Leopold and others who have come before, we at CIFOR-ICRAF, our partners, and the growing global community invested in re-examining the relationship between people and nature are ascribing a contemporary meaning to the concept of ‘stewardship.’ In this understanding, stewardship is the respect we exercise in using nature to produce the goods and services necessary to meet the needs of the world’s 8 billion people as well as those of the environment. It’s clear we must get away from our abusive and purely extractive relationship with nature, and stewardship embodies a responsible and caring relationship with the natural world to ensure collective, planetary well-being and health.

Who are the stewards?

Charles Hugh Stevenson , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — *Drying Salmon at Unalaska, Alaska. Credit: Charles Hugh Stevenson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

As illustrated in the examples at the beginning of this article, the notion of stewardship of nature is as old as human culture. Today, we think of environmental stewardship as inclusive, equitable, place-based, and focused on resilient, prosperous, and sustainable development.

We can think of stewardship of land in particular as a deliberate and informed combination of solicitude, foresight and skill – a marriage of practice and ethics – that has tangible impacts in landscapes. Present-day movements around regenerative agriculture, natural farming and agroecology, buoyed by attention to gender, ethnic and age equality, are examples of the modern embodiment of stewardship practices at forest, farm and community levels.

Land stewards, then, are not simply owners or producers of commodities (food, timber, fiber, etc.), as water stewards are not just those making use of water resources. Yes, stewards are engaged in their landscapes, but in ways that uphold a ‘duty of care’ – an ethos of responsibility for all the ecosystem services the land currently provides, as well as the integrity of its history and, importantly, its future. This, of course, takes hold best when stewards, as individuals or communities, hold rights to their land and waters, giving them the legal assurance to invest in the longevity of their natural resources.

Supporting these directly engaged stewards are larger players, such as governments, businesses, educational and research institutions, nonprofit organizations, and the slew of others that recognize the societal benefit of environmental stewardship, which fuels their relationship with landscapes and their caretakers with the same mindset and approach of stewardship – in whatever form that may be, from policy support and project implementation, to knowledge and site-specific research, to innovative finance. Establishment of national parks, climate negotiations and public awareness campaigns are all forms of stewardship when executed well, but ideally their missions ultimately tie back to advancing the efforts of the people spending their days working to sustainably benefit from and protect our natural resources.

Stewardship also involves fluid, productive dialogues between all these actors to improve the policies, consumption patterns and behavior change needed to realize sustainable benefits from nature for livelihoods.

Market influence

Botanic Garden Meise wild coffee nursery in Yangambi - DRC. Photo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR — *Botanic Garden Meise wild coffee nursery in Yangambi – DRC. Photo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR*

The market economy and balance sheets require land to be considered as a fixed asset, which in turn implies that market mechanisms can drive sustainable outcomes. But it is this strictly utilitarian view of land and nature that drives their commodification – and the crushing environmental crises that result.

A primary part of the problem is that markets have no realistic way of pricing agricultural commodities so that they bear the full cost of what it takes to ensure land and nature are resilient and able to heal themselves. (Embedded in this is the aforementioned challenge that, in many countries, and especially in forest-reliant communities, insecure or unclear property and tenure rights act as deterrents to investments in stewardship.)

It is no wonder that forests are being replaced by monoculture oil palm, cacao or plantation timber. Even where they exist, the niche markets for high-priced ‘fully costed’ products are far too thin to offer people decent livelihoods and the means to sustain their original landscapes. Farmers in these scenarios are reduced to agricultural factory workers, for lack of a better term.

Over time, the results of these powerful and unsustainable market pressures on direct land users – perhaps would-be stewards under different conditions – result in rapidly degrading land and the ensuing cascade of effects: massive increases in greenhouse gases, disappearing biodiversity, polluted and vanishing water resources, and ever intensifying forms of agriculture that are increasingly dependent on ecologically and economically expensive inputs. This is accelerated by the erosion of social externalities, such as democratic institutions, livelihoods, rights and nutrition.

Turning point

*The women of Perigi Village travelled along 500 m of rubber gardens while carrying puruns to get to their place. Photo by Rifky/CIFOR*

We clearly need a change in direction. We believe the answer lies in a shift to a stewardship economy, which would operate both within and outside markets as we know them, supporting, recruiting and connecting stewards, nature and the broader economy through an equitable and affordable system of incentives and rewards that would assure the future of life as we know it. It would aim to fairly reward farmers, forest users and other ‘landscape architects’ for the produce they deliver to markets. It would also see them profit from the services and values they conserve and restore – clean air, removal of greenhouse gases, clean water, biodiversity, and places of spirituality, worship and history.

As for pricing, commodities in a stewardship economy would bear their fair – but not necessarily full – share of the true costs of their production and trade. This means a kilo of rice, wheat or maize would not be priced out of the grasp of poor people. The difference between these fair and full prices would be paid outside market mechanisms, such as through ‘conditional cash transfers’ that are a recognized mechanism for performance-based payments, in this case used for the delivery of services beyond the produced commodities.

In this way, stewards are not forced to commodify their landscapes, as they are rewarded for allowing their lands to continue in health. The two core pillars of the stewardship economy, then, might well be the total income from fair commodity prices and stewardship dividends – delivered through conditional cash transfers, for instance – for service delivery.

A major task, then, is co-designing the mechanisms and building the institutional architecture that help determine both the fair and full costs, translate the fair costs into market prices, and ensure the equitable difference – what could be called the ‘stewardship dividend’ – is efficiently put into the pockets of stewards.

At the same time, the individual rights of stewards and their communities to land and natural resources would need to be taken into account. Innovative finance and investment arrangements, including peer-to-peer finance systems, would have to be mobilized to achieve this.

We believe almost all the tools and elements of a stewardship economy exist already, in one form or the other; what has been missing has been an effort to put the parts together into a greater whole. Our intention is to explore this assembling in the context of the stewardship of farms, forests and terrestrial landscapes.

Modern forms of agriculture, forest and land management have divorced people from nature. People have been turned into laborers and nature into commodities. ‘Stewardship economics’ is the turning point we propose for a more resilient, equitable and optimistic future. Nature is more than products; it also provides immeasurable services. People are not just producers; they are also caretakers. It is high time we recognize and reward this, and we will all benefit as a result.

Stewardship Economy

An equitable system of exchange that rewards those managing nature sustainably for the goods and services derived from those landscapes – which often feed into markets to meet the needs of the global population – while recognizing and promoting the rights of all people to food, water, nutrition, health, voice and a decent livelihood. Coupled with pillars of the landscape approach and democracy, it builds upon classic notions of ‘stewardship’ in a modern context: a deliberate and informed combination of solicitude, foresight and skill – a marriage of practice and ethics – that brings visible and tangible impacts in landscapes and ecosystems. It is underpinned by economic principles and financial mechanisms that will ensure fair and equal benefits and market inclusion of land managers, while meeting consumers’ pricing needs. Shifting fully to a stewardship economy, which exists today in facets and fragments, can swiftly unblock pathways to a more sustainable future for a planet in crisis.This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.

Finding the sweet spot: How to scale up and finance ecosystem-based adaptation

November 28, 2021 / activist360 / Leave a comment

*Banjul, The Gambia. Used under Creative Commons license. Photo credit: Roel van Deursen.*

By Julie Mollins, Forests News (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Protecting and restoring landscapes and building sustainable agroforestry systems is a powerful way to boost resilience to climate change and extreme weather events while supporting billions of livelihoods.

Incorporated into the international framework on climate change in 2011 at COP17, adaptation became a specific area of focus at the U.N. COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, where a work program was established to define specific global goals pertaining to it.

At the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), scientists are working on developing robust ecosystem-based adaptation strategies.

They must be part of broad, systems-wide approaches integrated into economic, political and social strategies, said Patrick Worms, senior science policy advisor at CIFOR-ICRAF, who led a side event discussion at COP26.

“The solution is thus not rocket science, but something much harder: the ability of our institutional systems to work across silos to jointly manage this fragile planet of ours.”
—Patrick Worms, senior science policy advisor at CIFOR-ICRAF

“We need to embed ecosystem adaptation – just like we need to embed mitigation – in the way the economy works, in the way government works, in the way that everything works, as we try to arrest carbon buildup, ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss,” Worms said.

Lalisa Duguma, a scientist in the CIFOR-ICRAF Sustainable Landscapes and Integrated Climate Actions team, is working on a large-scale ecosystem-based adaptation project, funded by the multi-billion-dollar Green Climate Fund (GCF) which aims to promote the climate-resilience of rural communities in Gambia.

One difficulty working in African countries is that data on climate is scarce and inconsistent, which makes it a challenge to determine the extent of interventions required.

“Most is based on global data sets downscaled to the local context, but in this downscaling process, a lot of contextual realities are missing, which could inform the design process much better,” Duguma said.

Other challenges involve a lack of human resources and institutional capacity to implement adaptation actions, resource mismatches and how to measure the impact of interventions.

“In most ongoing adaptation actions, there is no clear strategy for scaling up – how scaling should go forward,” he said.

To address some of the challenges around capacity and infrastructure in Gambia, a baseline for tree cover was established, leading to investments into nine central nurseries and 100 million seedlings a year, said Malanding Jaiteh, who manages the $20 million, six-year forest restoration project on behalf of the country’s Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Natural Resources.

Another challenge is livestock grazing which can compromise restoration efforts, making it difficult to plan and establish. Grazing is free range in Gambia, and even takes on an international dimension as nomadic herders at times enter the country from Senegal.

“Transmigration presents serious challenges, especially to our newly established seedlings or newly established planting areas — farmers may be planting in the agricultural lands, but as soon as they are gone, or two years later, you know, some other population can come in and start destroying them,” Jaiteh said.

Fires are also damaging and demand a lot of resources, requiring a long term fire management system, he said.

In India’s state of Maharashtra, where monocropping of cotton and sugarcane have left farmers vulnerable to climate change, a multi-jurisdictional and multi-sectoral approach is proving effective, said Arjuna Srinidhi, associate thematic lead of climate change adaptation at the Watershed Organization Trust.

More than 80 percent of the state consists of rainfed drylands, where drought frequency has increased sevenfold over the past 50 years, Srinidhi said. Flooding is also a problem and due to erratic weather, adding to the vulnerability of farmers. Over 40 percent of the land is degraded, and groundwater levels are falling rapidly by 1 to 2 meters every year. More than three quarters of the farmers are smallholders with less than 2 hectares of land, so their adaptive capacities are limited, he said.

Mainstreaming ecosystem-based adaptation strategies into government policies and programs is key, but we also learned that watershed development was vital.

“This collaborative process resulted in an evidence-based and demand-driven roadmap for upscaling,” Srinidhi said. “There were several lessons that we learned over the past couple of years, the unanimous acceptance of a roadmap from diverse stakeholders — generating a buy-in from early stages of the project was crucial.”

Serah Kiragu-Wissler, a research associate at TMG Think Tank for Sustainability, observed that capacity-building and extension services are essential. Farmers she worked with said they need ongoing support for adaptation efforts. Land tenure rights are also critical for soil protection, Kiragu-Wissler said, citing examples from Burkina Faso and Kenya.

“Farmers cannot develop much interest in protecting soils if they have no security to the tenure to the land that they are working on,” she said. “They clear their land this season they plant and next season they are not actually there. So, what will motivate them to carry loads of manure from the village to the fields if they cannot be assured that it will be there for you know, two, three, four seasons?”

By implementing a community-led institution for managing how land is used, guidelines were introduced which helped secure access to land for women and youth. Now recognized by the local government, this approach is under consideration by other jurisdictions, she said.

Finding finance

Ensuring adequate financing for ecosystem-based adaptation projects is also a challenge, particularly due to its innovative aspects and the fact that so many proposals are unproven.

“Banks, investors and insurance need to make better decisions by assessing the impacts and dependencies on nature and materiality around climate risks,” said Namita Vikas, managing director of auctusESG, a Mumbai-based financial advisory firm. “By deploying capital goods, and surveys, given the effectiveness of such solutions. Adaptation, finance is about going beyond business as usual and incorporating the possible effects of climate change into the design of an activity.”

Andreas Reumann, who works for the GCF, which was established under U.N. climate talks to help poor countries pursue clean growth and adapt to global warming, is a specialist in designing monitoring systems that measure for outcomes.

The fund conducted a global evidence review on adaptation and forest activities with partners, which helped reveal gaps in understanding what works in a specific context.

From there, a two-dimensional matrix was created, which illustrated an imbalance regarding the geographical distribution of information. It also highlighted the question of enabling environments – and how to engage the policy arena, which is a subject that has not yet been researched, Reumann said.

“We as evaluators are thinking about and addressing these issues,” he added. “It requires more knowledge sharing, stronger evidence, and more collaboration on the ground to truly understand what matters.”

Creating data sets has proven to be effective, said Nitin Pandit, director of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment. By identifying 13 million hectares of land, with 100 million households, just outside the protected areas in peninsular India, and working with partners, accumulated data are supplied to financiers.

“So, they know that there is an upside in this because there is a scale that we are already planning in from day one,” Pandit said, sharing an image of large-scale elephants, which are made by artisans from lantana wood, an invasive species. Sold at a high price, the elephants were displayed outside Queen Elizabeth’s Buckingham Palace in London.

“The type of value addition that we can do by using the resources available must add an incentive for people to actually be engaged in adaptation, and therefore demand the kind of finance that is needed to support that kind of work,” he said.

For adaptation initiatives to be effective, it is vital to build dialogue processes and co-generate of the evidence base with government ministries, said Jessica Troni, senior programme officer responsible for the U.N. Environment Programme – Global Environment Facility Climate Change Adaptation portfolio. Budgets and systems thinking must be incorporated to determine how project targets can be mainstreamed into national development plans.

“Mainstreaming has to mean that every single chapter in your national development plan is geared towards building resilience to adaptation – you can then create budgets support for mechanisms that are able to absorb larger investment flows,” Troni said.

Promises to increase the coffers for adaptation ambitions were made at COP26 in an effort catch up with a shortfall in the $100 billion a year by 2020 pledged at COP17 amid efforts to avert, minimize and address loss and damage already occurring from climate change.

“The beautiful thing is that it’s extraordinarily hard to do land-based mitigation without, at the same time, boosting that land’s ability to adapt to climate change, its biodiversity or its ability to provide a range of nutritious foods and other products,” Worms said.

“The solution is thus not rocket science, but something much harder: the ability of our institutional systems to work across silos to jointly manage this fragile planet of ours.”

Products tied to legal and illegal deforestation may be banned in the European Union

November 21, 2021 / activist360 / Leave a comment

By Maxwell Radwin, Mongabay (CC BY-ND 4.0).

Proposed legislation in the European Union would require suppliers to prove their products haven’t contributed to legal or illegal deforestation.
The law would focus on the industries with some of the most egregious environmental track records, including soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa and coffee, as well as leather, chocolate and furniture.
Conservation groups have expressed satisfaction with the first-of-its kind legislation but are concerned about the lack of protections for Indigenous peoples, as well as carbon-rich ecosystems like savannas, wetlands and peatlands.

The European Union is considering an ambitious new proposal that would regulate imports of products linked to global forest loss.

The law would require suppliers to prove their products haven’t contributed to deforestation, whether legal or illegal. If passed, it would force producers to raise their environmental standards or risk losing out on a market of 27 countries and 450 million people.

“Europe is finally taking steps against the deforestation that it drives, and it is doing it not by placing the burden on consumers, but on the big companies that produce these products,” Nico Muzi, Europe director of environmental advocacy group Mighty Earth, told Mongabay. “If we want change, we need to regulate the industries that cause deforestation.”

The proposal, introduced by the European Commission earlier this week, gives special focus to products with some of the most egregious environmental track records, including soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa and coffee, as well as leather, chocolate and furniture. Should the proposal pass, importers will have to meet stricter traceability measures, such as sharing geographic coordinates of where their products originated.

It also establishes a benchmarking system to determine which countries are the most at risk of deforestation, and pledges 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) to help them develop more sustainable forest management programs.

The EU predicts the proposal will cut at least 31.9 million metric tons of annual carbon emissions and save around 3.2 billion euros ($3.6 billion).

“We must protect biodiversity and fight climate change not only in the EU, but globally, and our consumption should not contribute to global deforestation, which is a major cause of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, the European commissioner for the environment, oceans and fisheries.

Between 1990 and 2020, an estimated 420 million trees were lost to deforestation worldwide, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Agriculture is responsible for nearly 90% of that, with cattle ranching being the biggest contributor.

Globally, Europe is the second-largest importer of products associated with deforestation, according to a 2021 WWF report. In recent years, trade to the region has led to around 16% of global forest loss.

*A herd of cattle on a ranch in Colombia. Image by Rhett Butler, Mongabay.com*

The deforestation proposal is part of a package of recently announced environmental initiatives that include more rigorous regulations for waste and waste trafficking, as well as improved soil protections to increase carbon storage in agricultural areas, fight desertification and restore degraded land, the European Commission said in a statement.

“If we expect more ambitious climate and environmental policies from partners, we should stop exporting pollution and supporting deforestation ourselves,” Sinkevičius said, adding, “With these proposals, we are taking our responsibility and walking the talk by lowering our global impact on pollution and biodiversity loss.”

Other countries, coming out of the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, have announced similar plans to clean up supply chains. Last week, the U.K. passed a law banning products linked to illegal deforestation. In October, U.S. lawmakers introduced a bill that holds importers accountable for forest loss.

However, unlike the European proposal, neither of those measures targets legal drivers of deforestation.

Loopholes and missed opportunities

While the EU’s proposal takes ambitious steps to protect forests, it falls short when it comes to other types of carbon-rich ecosystems, some environmental groups pointed out. For example, the proposal’s current language would exclude protection of many savannas, wetlands and peatlands.

In addition to storing massive amounts of carbon, these ecosystems prevent soil erosion and flooding, and help provide clean drinking water.

“There’s simply no need to destroy native ecosystems to make room for commercial crops,” Mighty Earth’s Muzi said. “There are more than 1 billion acres [400 million hectares] of previously degraded land where all future agricultural needs can easily be met without threatening the world’s last ecosystems.”

Mongabay has reported extensively on the rapid disappearance of wetlands and peatlands due to palm oil, timber and other agricultural commodities, as well as governments’ continued omission of these landscapes from legislation.

The EU’s proposal also fails to include special protections for Indigenous communities, which often serve as stewards of the environment. Instead, it relies on the local laws of the exporting countries despite the fact they’re often weak or ignored.

Muzi said he expects officials to close this loophole by including international human rights standards in the proposal’s language. And because proposals by the European Commission are often heavily revised, he expects many of the other loopholes to be addressed, too.

“Usually, Europe sets the standard for environmental regulations,” he said. “It is often at the forefront. We expect other regions will follow.”