Well-managed, well-placed plantations are an important component of sustainable landscapes because they can provide an opportunity to restore degraded land, spare natural forest and enhance social values whilst increasing productivity. Mosaics of new plantations, forest restoration and responsible farming, could expand forest cover and related environmental services through effectively blending crop, livestock and forestry as an integrated system. System-wide and cross-sector planning and zoning in mosaic design is an essential pre-requisite to maximise the efficiency of production whilst reducing competition for land and water. The New Generation Plantations (NGP) platform (http://newgenerationplantations.org) experience accumulated over the last seven years is that the ecological and social infrastructure of mosaics provides a means to tackle the paradox that the more we advance on development, the more we fail on sustainability.
It is within this new paradigm, that the NGP platform principles carry particular significance: well-managed plantations in the right places can help conserve biodiversity and meet human needs, while contributing to sustainable economic growth and local livelihoods, by:
- Social forestry, as an increasingly central theme for forestry and plantations. Engaging with stakeholders means far more than simply carrying out consultations and obtaining the consent of communities affected by plantations. It’s about really getting to know, talking and listening to them, and empowering them to meet their needs and achieve their aspirations;
- Maintaining ecosystem integrity and protecting high conservation value areas (HCV), making sure plantations don’t disrupt natural cycles – for water, nutrients, carbon and biodiversity - and increasingly look beyond individual operations toward maintaining and restoring ecosystems on a broader landscape scale;
- Plantations should be profitable businesses. They create jobs, often in poor rural areas, but have the potential to do far more than this. Plantations should be a means to support inclusive green growth, and share benefits with the local communities who are sharing the landscape.
Therefore the NGP concept provides an innovative framework for implementing sustainable intensification as a contributor to the functioning of socially and ecologically resilient landscapes. A significant contributor to the functioning of resilient landscapes is the family farmer. The State of Food and Agriculture published at the end of the International Year of Family Farming has provided a compelling case for concerted efforts to bring innovation to family farming: 500 million family farmers – managing 90% of all farms in the world, occupying around 70–80% of farmland – produce more than 80% of the world’s food in value terms. The overarching view of the FAO is that family farms must be supported “to innovate in ways that emphasize sustainable intensification of production and improve their livelihoods”. The FAO proposes that sustainable intensification can be achieved through a “cohesive multi-stakeholder innovation system to develop new technologies and practices suited to their needs and local conditions or through overcoming barriers and constraints to the adaptation and adoption of existing technologies and practices and access to relevant markets”.
Forestry should not follow a different route. The New Generation Plantations is an aspirational concept for a new era of production landscapes incorporating sustainable intensification. Robust land use planning that dynamically integrates optimised productivity in production areas through precision silviculture with conservation of forest areas and active restoration of rezoned degraded land and forest. Within this diverse, resilient ecological infrastructure, better prospects for the livelihoods and food and nutrition security of local communities can be achieved. The fundamental challenge and opportunity of our time is therefore to ensure that technology reaches those who need it the most.
The question we wish to explore within the New Generation Plantations platform is; if the promise of an innovation-driven, technology rich sustainable intensification is an option for the future, how can we design frameworks that drive research in the right directions, and that bring innovation down to the local level and the family farmer and that resolve the tensions between forestry and food security and nutrition?
Luis Neves Silva