For several decades, Southeast Asia’s tracts of dense, old-growth rainforest have served as fertile ground for lumber, and much land has been converted to agriculture. Now, palm oil plantations are being planted where forests once stood.

In 2011, Indonesia, one of the region’s most prosperous countries, instituted a two-year moratorium on clearing new areas of forest, which is set to expire this May and has been criticized as having several loopholes. Other countries, including Cambodia and Myanmar, are losing forests rapidly.

Out of concern for climate change, international initiatives such as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) have aimed to promote conservation and sustainable development in countries with significant forest cover. But these efforts do not always support local needs, and can inadvertently have negative impacts.

Tim Forsyth, a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow, speaks about the gap between conservation efforts and economic and social development in Southeast Asia. He is visiting Stanford this quarter from the London School of Economics and Political Science where he is a reader in environment and development at the Department of International Development.

What major types of forest management do we see across Southeast Asia today?

A number of countries have put laws in place to restrict illegal logging, and have established national park areas. These are usually old-growth rainforests that restrict logging and agriculture. The problem with national parks is that they put so many restrictions on land use that the vulnerable populations living around them either suffer or are forced to cut other trees. I have spent some years working in poorer villages in Indonesia and Thailand on the edge of protected forests, and usually conservation policies avoid the fact that people need to get livelihoods somehow. Government policy should acknowledge how these people are vulnerable to changes in crop prices and the availability of land, or else these people might be forced into breaking the rules of national parks.

There is also production forest, which usually includes forest plantations. These can include softwoods such as pine, or hardwoods such as teak — and increasingly oil palm for food and biofuels. Forest plantations are attractive to governments and businesses because they earn money and can provide timber for construction and exports. Sometimes, plantations also gain carbon credits, although this is not a lot of money so far. In terms of conservation, destroying old-growth forest and replacing it with a monoculture plantation is not good for biodiversity. It also does not benefit those local people who want to harvest forest products or use part of the land for agriculture.

Finally, there are community forests that are supposed to be places where people can grow food, live, and have forest cover. The definition of “community forest,” however, varies from place to place. In Thailand, for example, the way the government defines it is not very different from a conservation area, and consequently there is not much space for agriculture. The Philippines, on the other hand, is more decentralized and local people can shape the nature of the forest landscape more. Corruption, however, is a problem.

Is there an ideal model that successfully supports sustainable development? How does your research approach this issue?

There has been much progress in collaborations that involve willing governments, international advisors, and local actors — often in accordance with an international agreement such as the Convention on Biological Diversity. These collaborations are more useful than a single actor working alone, and they acknowledge a wider range of objectives.

A new initiative is Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+). This is meant to encourage governments to slow down deforestation by rewarding them financially through carbon credits. But REDD+ has a number of challenges. The main problem is that the value of the credits is so low at the moment. REDD+ also overemphasizes forest cover, rather than forest quality. This means that if a satellite image of a country shows a lot of forest cover, that is good according to REDD+. But this gives no indication as to the biodiversity or the diversity of livelihoods inside a forest. It is a green light to all of the people who want fast-growing tree plantations, which makes them money and supplies them with wood for construction. In addition, it keeps a government happy because it supplies their country with timber and tax revenue, but this is not necessarily what you would call sustainable development.

There are elements of good models in different places, and it really depends on one’s viewpoint. Nepal offers a good example of community forestry because, in principle, it aims to engage local people more effectively and equally, and so can combine local development with the protection of national forests. From a development perspective, some forms of conservation can hurt poorer people and actually undermine conservation efforts. Therefore, in my work, I try to promote policy that acknowledges the needs of the more vulnerable populations. My research tries to make climate change policy more relevant to development processes in Southeast Asia. In my current project, I am seeing how policy recommendations about forests can be reshaped and reinterpreted locally in developing countries in order to address local interests. My goal is to understand how expert knowledge about climate change can be governed more effectively in order to enhance both development and conservation in Asia with better outcomes for everybody.

Image

The practical problem of dealing with forest destruction and climate change in Southeast Asia is also a function of social and economic trends. As countries become more prosperous, more and more people live in megacities, drive cars, live in air-conditioned apartments, and frequent shopping malls.

A couple of years ago in Bangkok, I took lots of photographs of t-shirts printed with global warming messages and of people carrying reusable bags. When I was there recently, all of these things had disappeared. In other words, there is a tendency for people to think of conservation efforts as a fashion trend.

I do not think that any city in Asia is doing enough. We have to start planning cities in ways that use fewer greenhouse gases, and also to encourage people to realize that they can be real agents of change. At the moment, many urban citizens believe they can implement climate change policy by managing rural and forested landscapes. Instead, they need to realize the problems of these approaches, and to see what they can do themselves.

Scientists are making progress in helping millions of wheat farmers adapt to hotter conditions, but the gains have been uneven, reports a new study led by Stanford University. New approaches to breeding are needed to withstand increasingly common heat waves and keep pace with growing global food demand.

Wheat is the most widely grown crop in the world; unfortunately it is also one of the most sensitive to future global warming. Scientists around the world strive to develop new wheat varieties each year that incorporate improved features, much like car companies release new models each year. Different strategies are commonly used; some target fully irrigated conditions that favor very high yields, while others focus on dry and hot conditions where yield maintenance under stress is a priority.

The team, which includes scientists from Stanford and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (known as CIMMYT), evaluated 25 years of data from historical trials around the globe and analyzed the outcome of different past breeding approaches to help prioritize future strategies. The fully irrigated nursery, known as the elite spring wheat yield trials, produces varieties that are released for the majority of wheat farmers in countries like India and Egypt each year. While cultivars selected under stressed conditions showed significant yield progress at higher temperatures, the elite trials did not.

“There has been very impressive progress in improving yields for the elite varieties at the cooler temperatures that wheat prefers,” explains lead author Sharon Gourdji, a post-doctoral scholar in Stanford’s department of Environmental Earth System Science and Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE).

“However, to date, our analysis shows a lack of yield gains for these varieties in hot environments over the past 25 years. Along with the gains in cool conditions, this means that the yield difference between cool and hot conditions is getting larger.”

A CIMMYT researcher plants wheat seed in pots in the center's greenhouse facilities. Photo credit: X. Fonseca/CIMMYT

"I think we have learned that the current main approach to breeding won't quite cut it in terms of adapting wheat to climate change,” said co-author David Lobell, assistant professor in Environmental Earth System Science and FSE center fellow. “That is useful information as breeding centers try to raise their game to contend with long-term warming."

Lobell notes that there are good reasons why improved heat tolerance for the elite varieties has not happened naturally.

“Breeding is tough since scientists are aiming for so many traits at once – for example, disease resistance, high yields, and good quality for bread making. Adding heat tolerance is like telling a scout looking for a superstar athlete, ‘by the way, make sure he’s a straight A student’,” said Lobell.

One important lesson from the study is that sifting through historical data can help identify what works and what does not.

“It can often be a hard sell to have breeders take the time to send their data back once they have selected their varieties and moved on,” explains CIMMYT wheat physiologist and co-author Matthew Reynolds. “This study clearly demonstrates the advantage of having these data to assess progress. It shows the genetic potential of wheat to adapt to warmer-than-usual conditions, and reinforces the value of screening under stress as a strategy for adaptation to climate change.”

The progress in the nursery targeted towards stress conditions shows that it is possible to make sizable gains in improving heat tolerance. But whether this can be combined with continued high performance under cooler conditions remains to be seen.

“It is critically important for farmers that they not only survive the bad or hot years, but that they can take full advantage of the favorable years” says Gourdji. “What is needed is a breeding strategy that can successfully achieve both.”

This work was supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Additional co-authors of the study include CIMMYT’s Ky Mathews and Jose Crossa.