Biodiversity, environmental change and land-use policy in Sulawesi and Maluku

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Deforestation and forest degradation are causing widespread loss of tropical biodiversity, profoundly impacting ecosystem functioning as well as stocks of natural resources and ecosystem assets (natural capital). The greatest reductions in diversity are experienced as forests are converted to permanent agriculture, a process that disrupts the delivery of important ecosystem services such as pollination and pest control. In contrast, the impacts from well-managed smallholder agriculture are less extreme, as the associated land parcels are typically embedded within landscape mosaics comprising fallows and forest remnants.Wallacea is currently emerging as a new developmental frontier in Indonesia and a target for agribusiness and extractive industries. A particularly understudied part of the Asian tropics, it has an exceptionally distinctive vertebrate diversity which forms the second highest level of endemism in the world, making the region a global priority for both conservation and ecosystem service provision. In addition, land-use history and current trajectories remain poorly understood, with the region notably omitted from recent deforestation baselines for this very reason. In fact, the diverse history of the Wallacea archipelago is acknowledged as a major source of uncertainty when applying land-use change models developed from elsewhere in Southeast Asia, as well as predicting the impacts of future environmental change. Given that further forest degradation and agricultural conversion are expected in Wallacea, the future prospects for natural capital in the region depend to a large extent on how we manage human-modified landscapes.Bringing together an interdisciplinary team from British and Indonesian universities, with four NGO partners active in Wallacea, this project will deliver the science needed to understand tensions in land-use and the responses of biodiversity to environmental change in Wallacea. We propose a novel and ambitious study of biodiversity responses to recent and historical land-cover change across multiple landscapes in little-studied islands, so that evaluations of current land-use policies and predictions of future environmental scenarios will be evidence-based and realistic. More specifically, spatial trajectories of land-cover change will be generated for each landscape, drawing from publicly-available remote-sensed data and local land-use plans. This will enable us to hindcast forest cover back to Wallace's time and forecast to key target years for international policy commitments (e.g. 2030 for the UN Sustainable Development Goals and 2050s for the UN Framework on Climate Change). Significantly, we will generate new biodiversity data from across land-cover gradients in forests, agroforests and intensive farmland (e.g. cocoa, oil palm, coffee), model community responses to past, present and future forest cover, and apply state-of-the-art genomics methods to assess genetic and evolutionary responses to land-cover change for several important conservation flagship species (NERC-Ristekdikti programme's Goals 1 and 2). Focusing on terrestrial vertebrates, the fauna that environmental policies aiming at safeguarding biodiversity are typically focused upon, we will track Alfred Russel Wallace's journey through Sulawesi and the Moluccas (Maluku). Finally, with collaboration from Project Partners with additional expertise in Wallacea, we will evaluate the impact of current land-use policies on ecosystem assets and dependent human beneficiaries, drawing on our land-cover, biodiversity and additional carbon and socio-economic data (Programme's Goals 2 and 3). Because many provinces in Indonesia are yet to implement newly-required spatial planning processes, our joint environmental research has an unprecedented opportunity to inform local development.