Land-use intensification in forest-agriculture frontier landscapes: effects on ecosystem services and poverty alleviation (ESPA-Frontiers)

农业集约化是指增加每公顷作物或牲畜产量的干预措施。虽然集约化可以通过当地对创新的需求来实现，但它越来越多地通过林业-农业前沿的政策干预来实施。“可持续集约化”和“节约土地”是回应对未来粮食安全和地球极限的关切的流行政策叙述的例子。农业集约化也是可持续发展目标和加速非洲绿色革命的努力等全球发展目标和战略的特点。一些最迅速的变化发生在林业-农业边界，其特点往往是从自给经济向经济作物经济过渡，休耕时间从较长到较短，购买投入水平从较低到较高的马赛克景观。在这些迅速变化的社会生态系统中，减轻贫困和保护环境也是优先目标。然而，以前对这种过渡性景观的审查发现，集约化可以产生更多的收入，但也会导致负面后果，包括人力和社会资本的损失、森林砍伐和生物多样性的丧失（货车Vliet et et al. 2012）。目前，我们对这些结果的趋势和模式、它们形成的背景或如何改进政策知之甚少。这种关于可持续农业和景观的知识差距非常适合通过ESPA综合来解决，首先是因为对可持续农业的关注一直是ESPA经验组合的核心（Mace 2014），其次是因为ESPA概念方法提供了深入的方法来询问更广泛的经验案例。因此，我们借鉴了ESPA的研究，但也借鉴了ESPA的生态系统服务框架，人类福祉和权衡，以指导我们的综合更广泛的经验证据。我们建议综合一个跨学科的参考文献和灰色文献，主要是通过叙述性综合方法，也有可能使用统计荟萃分析或定性比较分析作为次要方法。综合报告将探讨农业集约化如何影响土地使用、生态系统服务和减贫之间不断变化的权衡。一个特别新颖的出发点是关于土地使用变化，特别是农业集约化如何改变不同利益攸关方对生态系统的评价的新发现，例如在集约化和商品化系统下，传统农业系统下重视的生态系统服务可能变得不那么重要（甚至被视为有害）。我们建议与一个跨学科的专家工作组合作，与从事农业，保护和发展的组织的主要政策制定者和从业者密切合作。参与将最终导致知识交流活动，这些活动的目的是吸收研究成果，造福穷人。我们建议通过共同制作知识产品（包括政策简报和短片）、举办讲习班、在全球活动中传播以及与政府间科学政策平台等全球科学政策平台互动来做到这一点。关于后一项活动，项目工作组之所以被选中，部分是因为它对这些平台做出了广泛的贡献，因此有机会参与更广泛的科学政策传播进程。

Agricultural intensification refers to interventions to increase the outputs per hectare of crops or livestock. Whilst intensification can occur through local demand for innovation, it is increasingly imposed through policy interventions in forest-agriculture frontiers. 'Sustainable intensification' and 'land sparing' are examples of popular policy narratives that respond to concerns over future food security and planetary boundaries. Agricultural intensification also features in global development goals and strategies, such as the Sustainable Development Goals and efforts to accelerate a Green Revolution for Africa. Some of the most rapid change is taking place in forest-agriculture frontier, often characterized by mosaic landscapes in transition from subsistence to cash-cropping economics, from longer to shorter fallows, and from lower to higher levels of purchased inputs. These rapidly changing social-ecological systems are also places where poverty alleviation and environmental conservation are priority objectives. However, previous reviews of such transitional landscapes finds that intensification generates more income but also leads to negative outcomes including loss of human and social capital, deforestation, and biodiversity loss (van Vliet et al. 2012). At present we know very little about the trends and patterns of such outcomes, the contexts in which they take shape, or how to improve policy. This knowledge gap about sustainable agriculture and landscapes is well suited to being addressed through an ESPA synthesis, firstly because concerns for sustainable agriculture have been central to the ESPA empirical portfolio (Mace 2014) and secondly because ESPA conceptual approaches provide insightful ways to interrogate the wider body of empirical cases. Thus we draw on ESPA studies but also draw on ESPA framings of ecosystem services, human wellbeing and trade-offs to guide our synthesis of the wider empirical evidence. We propose to synthesise an interdisciplinary body of refereed and grey literatures, primarily through a narrative synthesis approach, with potential to also use statistical meta-analysis or Qualitative Comparative Analysis as a secondary approach. The synthesis will ask how agricultural intensification shapes the changing trade-offs between land use, ecosystem services and poverty alleviation. One particularly novel point of departure is the emerging findings about how land use change, and in particular agricultural intensification, changes how ecosystems are valued by different stakeholders, such that ecosystem services valued under traditional agricultural systems may become less valued (or even become perceived as disservices) under intensified and commodified systems. We propose to work with an interdisciplinary working group of experts with strong engagement with key policymakers and practitioners in organisations working on agriculture, conservation and development. Engagement will ultimately lead to knowledge exchange activities that are intended to bring about uptake of research findings and benefits to the wellbeing of the poor. We propose to do this through co-produced knowledge products (including a policy brief and a short film), workshops, dissemination at global events and interaction with global science-policy platforms such as IPBES. Regarding the latter activity, the project working group has partly been selected for a wide spread of contributions to these platforms and therefore direct opportunities to be part of wider processes of communicating science to policy.