Reducing intensification by shifting cultivation through sustainable climate-smart practices in tropical forests: A review in the context of UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Abstract

The tropical forests provide important ecosystem services at local and global scales (i.e. climate regulation, carbon cycling, and food resources). Shifting cultivation (SC) is the most common traditional farm system in tropical forest landscapes, which along with hunting and gathering from forests, have been the main food sources and livelihoods. This traditional SC was probably sustainable for nomadic indigenous populations for centuries. However, the non-traditional shifting cultivation is a consequence of cultural changes of indigenous communities influenced by western culture that induce land-use changes using new technologies, promoting the high local-scale expansion and intensification, and overhunting. The intensification occurs due to the short-term farm system, low crop diversity or monocultures, and larger slash and burn forest patches inducing agricultural expansion due to higher commercial crop demand. This expansion and intensification determine the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, forest degradation and fragmentation, higher greenhouse gas emissions, defaunation and local extinction. Thus, degraded forest rehabilitation with different sustainable food systems (i.e. Agroforestry) can reduce the expansion and intensification of SC. Restored forest, agroforestry, and second-growth forests can be restored as reservoirs for valuable biodiversity and a host of different ecosystem services. Tropical forests are central to climate change mitigation efforts and should prioritize the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. In this context, we provide a review on the effects of shifting cultivation intensification on tropical forest landscapes as a base to apply sustainable climate-smart practices in the context of UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.