Abstract
There is an urgent need for a global transition to sustainable and wildlife-friendly farming systems that provide social and economic equity and protect ecosystem services on which agriculture depends. Java is home to 60% of Indonesia’s population and harbors many endemic species; thus, managing agriculture alongside human well-being and biodiversity is vital. Within a community of ~400 coffee farmers in the province of West Java, we assessed the steps to develop a wildlife-friendly program until reaching certification between February 2019 and October 2020. We adopted an adaptive management approach that included developing common objectives through a process of stakeholder consultation and co-learning. We firstly investigated via interviews the expectations and the issues encountered by 25 farmers who converted to organic production in 2016. Their main expectations were an increase in income and an increase in coffee quality, while they had issues mainly in finding high quality fertilizers, reducing pests, and increasing productivity. We used this information to establish a problem-solving plan for the transition to community-wide wildlife-friendly practices. As part of the adaptive evaluation, we assessed the quality of coffee plantations before and after the implementation of coproduced actions. The quality of coffee significantly improved after our interventions to reduce the coffee berry borer, especially in the fields that started as inorganic and converted to organic. We uncovered additional issues to meet the standards for certification, including banning hunting and trapping activities and increasing coffee quality for international export. We describe the coproduced actions (agroforestry, conservation education, local law, organic alternatives) and phases of the program and discuss the potential barriers. We provide novel evidence of adaptive management framework successfully used to implement management actions and reach shared goals.
Highlights
IntroductionLand sparing (or nature sparing) is defined as “Increasing yields on farmed land while at the same time protecting native vegetation or freeing up land for habitat restoration elsewhere” [5]
We interviewed a group of 25 local farmers (14 men and 11 women) from Pangauban village who converted to organic farming in 2016 to begin a process to obtain certification based on Indonesian standards
The success of the program was derived by the long-term conservation effort and community involvement that was done in the area since 2012 [27]
Summary
Land sparing (or nature sparing) is defined as “Increasing yields on farmed land while at the same time protecting native vegetation or freeing up land for habitat restoration elsewhere” [5] This strategy implies high yields concentrated in a relatively small area of land thereby allowing more efforts in the protection of nearby ecosystems. Land sharing (or wildlife-friendly farming) is defined as “Producing both food and wildlife in the same parts of the landscape by maintaining or restoring the conservation value of the farmed land itself” [5] This strategy usually presents a lower yield per area land sparing, needing a larger area for the production of the same yield. The benefit of this strategy is that wildlife-friendly farming areas contain much higher biodiversity than intensive farming areas, they usually do not sustain the same biodiversity of the natural ecosystem [6]
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