Prospects of Adoption
of Tree-based Systems in a Rural Landscape
and Its Likely Impacts on Carbon Stocks and Farmers’ Welfare: the
FALLOW Model Application in Muara Sungkai, Lampung,
in a “Clean Development Mechanism’ Context
Desi Ariyadhi Suyamto, Meine van Noordwijk, Betha Lusiana, Andree Ekadinata and Ni’matul Khasanah
Environmental services provided by a landscape, including carbon stocks
stored, depend on land use patterns. Adoption of land use practices among
choices of land use systems in a rural landscape depends on farmers’
strategic decisions in allocating land and tactical decisions in allocating
labour, both likely to be based on the results farmers expect to obtain, and strongly
conditioned by capital availability. Their expectations gradually change on the
basis of local experience, and are influenced by external information sources
(knowledge diffusion from elsewhere and ‘extension’ or the priming
of expectations for land use practices that are not yet widespread). At the
local community scale, specific restrictions on land use options are set, and
issues such as fire control are determined by the cohesiveness of the local
community. Prices of the various commodities and their volatility are
determined by the surrounding economy, as does the wage rate for off-farm and
out-of-the-landscape labour opportunities. The overall outcome of the dynamic
land use mosaic determines the amount of biomass and carbon stocks of the
landscape. The FALLOW model was designed to provide a comprehensive description
of the factors and interactions described above, to allow the testing of
hypotheses about ‘causal’ explanations (including the various
direct and indirect feedbacks) and to evaluate ‘scenarios’ of
‘baseline’ and policy-change land use evolution. Baselines are
important in the discussion of ‘environmental service rewards’,
while the likely response to ‘rewards’ can include ‘perverse
incentives’ and ‘leakage’, if additional capital relieves constraints
to the development of less-environmental friendly land use options. This paper
reports results on prospective analyses using the FALLOW model on adoption of
land use systems by transmigrant and local farmers in lowland peneplain of
Muara Sungkai, Lampung,
planting in a limited area) approach to a programmatic one (facilitating
spontaneous tree adoption in a larger area) in terms of carbon-stocks gains and
projected effects on farmers’ welfare, in a 'clean development mechanism'
context. The results suggested that a ‘project’ approach was likely
able to increase carbon stocks without leakage in a short-term monitoring
period. However a reduction of carbon stocks below baseline (‘leakage’)
can be expected in the longer term if the tree planting
approach did not provide off-farm employment opportunities to surrounding
farmers. If costs of ‘extension’ and ‘social control on
fire’ are assumed to be zero, the ‘programmatic’ approach to
removing constraints to spontaneous smallholder adoption was likely able to
increase both carbon stocks and farmers’ welfare better than the
simulated ‘project’ approach. .