Trade-offs in the social-ecological values associated with different land-uses in the eastern Amazon

Proposed session: Understanding challenges and opportunities facing a transition to more sustainable land-use systems in the Eastern Amazon Current trajectories of rural development across much of the tropics are not sustainable. Forests continue to be cleared at a rate of c. 50,000 km2 p.a. and much of the remaining forests are severely degraded from the effects of fragmentation, over-exploitation, fire and climate change. In many areas where forests have been cleared for agriculture, land remains under-utilized and poorly managed. Low agricultural yields and degrading soils contribute towards a failure to meet increasing market demands for commodities within areas already cleared for agriculture, as well making often limited contributions to improvements in well being for many rural people. A transformation to more sustainable development trajectories in tropical agricultural frontiers depends partly on our ability to identify, understand and reconcile apparent conflicts and tradeoffs between human development and environmental objectives, including the maintenance of biodiversity and ecological life-support processes. Research to date on conservation-development trade-offs in production landscapes has focussed largely on local (farm) scale responses of biodiversity to different levels of intensification and yields. We have a poorer understanding of how changes in production affect the provision of key ecosystem services, equity of outcomes, and how these relationships may differ between local and landscape scales, encompassing the full agricultural-forest mosaic. We present data from a large-scale, interdisciplinary assessment by the Sustainable Amazon Network of land-use sustainability in the Brazilian Amazon to ask: How do patterns of ecological and socio-economic condition co-vary across gradients of increasing land-use intensification at multiple scales, and what might be the implications of such trade-offs for environmental conservation and long-term human development opportunities? The RAS initiative has a number of advantages for addressing this question. This includes the collection of co-located ecological and socioeconomic data at local, landscape and regional scales, and a strong engagement with many actors and non-research institutions., We use RAS data on ecological (terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity, above-ground carbon stocks, soil nutrient status and in-stream habitat integrity) and socioeconomic (agricultural productivity and profit, labour and producer well-being) indicators from more than 400 sites and rural properties in 36 catchments across to two regions. At the local scale, this is based on levels of above-ground vegetation, from undisturbed primary forest through to degraded and secondary forest and different production systems. At the landscape scale, the level of human impacts is determined by the extent of deforestation that involves a gradient from 6 to 100% of remaining forest cover in each study region, reflecting different periods of recent agricultural colonisation and distances from the deforestation frontier. Results from this comparative analysis reveal high levels of variability in social and ecological condition within landscapes dominated by small and large properties. This same heterogeneity reveals significant scope to improve conservation and socioeconomic objectives through changes in the management of both agricultural and forested lands, including the adoption of alternative approaches to achieving environmental compliance, options for increased agricultural productivity and ecosystem service markets. (Texte integral)