More food, more forests, fewer emissions, better livelihoods: linking REDD+, sustainable supply chains and domestic policy in Brazil, Indonesia and Colombia

Abstract

The triple, intertwined challenges of climate change, the conversion of tropical forests to crop lands and grazing pastures, and the shortage of new arable land demand urgent solutions. The main approaches for increasing food production while sparing forests and lowering carbon emissions include sustainable supply chain initiatives, domestic policies and finance, and REDD+. These approaches are advancing largely in isolation, separated by different scales of intervention, performance metrics and levers for shaping land user behavior. As a result of this disconnect, farmers are receiving few, if any, positive incentives to forgo legal forest clearing and to invest in more sustainable production systems. These three approaches could become mutually reinforcing through integrated, performance-based incentive systems operating across regions and scales, linked through a shared metric of jurisdiction-wide performance introduced here as the Jurisdictional Performance System.

Acknowledgements

We thank D McGrath, S Schwartzman, T Killeen, R Smith, RM Vidal, P Moutinho, E Armijo, J Clay, J-K Viz, J Douglas and A Grimard for suggestions and conversations that influenced this article; K Schwalbe and A Dorie contributed formatting and graphic design, respectively.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

Funding was provided by grants from Norad to IPAM International Program, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the Woods Hole Research Center, the Grantham Foundation to IPAM International Program, CLUA to IPAM, the Larry Linden Conservation Trust, and Roger and Vicky Sandt. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.