Page 50 - FAO-IPCC Expert meeting on climate change

Policies for land use, sustainable food production and consumption and climate action
5.1 Policies that relate to resource management, climate responses, and food security
Policies that relate to land and other ecosystems to support food supply under climate change must target multiple, often overlapping and sometimes conflicting objectives simultaneously. Meeting policy objectives such as resource conservation, restoration of ecosystem services, land, water and food productivity and food security often require simultaneous and coordinated strategies and it is not always evident that the right approaches, frameworks and mechanisms are fully developed. In parallel to policymaking, a reliance on maximizing private profits also has limits as demonstrated by market failures and the increasing relevance of ecosystem services that fall outside the market system. Market failures in turn provide the impetus for policy action whether it be payment for environmental services or other forms of regulations. The use of payments for environmental services has been applied in many policy contexts; their effectiveness, however, is limited and they are more readily applied in some sectors (e.g. forest management) than in other emerging concerns (land restoration, soil health and soil carbon).
Overall land use policies and planning need to combine the traditional regulatory and territorial aspects implemented by governments and also supply chain governance interventions and emerging private-led mechanisms for sustainability. The range of actors and stakeholders is evolving in the context of climate change, requiring new forms of “trans-scalar land use planning”.44
There is a large body of scientific evidence on how to better harness biodiversity within agricultural systems (i.e. agro- ecological farming), although the right policy and economic tools to make the change may yet be unavailable. With increasing climate variability, there are more fluctuations in world food supply, calling for a need to fully grapple with the implications of climate-induced shocks on food prices and supplies and how these shocks are transmitted across sectors and borders.
5.1.1 The case of payments for environment services: potentials and limits45
Payments for environmental services (PES) were introduced to provide the market valuation to natural capital as a policy instrument to ensure more sustainable use and conservation of resources and ecosystem services, as well as to improve land productivity and, as a consequence, food security. PES steps in when there is no existing market structure. PES is enforced through regulation and can be effective, at least in the short run, in effecting change (e.g. forest preservation) when strong regulatory, monitoring and enforcement tools are applied in combination with economic incentives and participatory approaches. One relatively successful case is Brazil’s effort to slow down deforestation in the Amazon region. Part of the success is due to unconditional payments to poor households independent of what they did in the forest (which places them strictly speaking outside PES). However, the robust application of compliance and enforcement comes with restrictions on land use to avoid leakage and unreported deforestation. This has been followed by more driven initiatives such as deforestation-free supply chains and the application of certification schemes that relate to life cycle analysis. Costa Rica also offers an example of successful application of PES for forest recovery, the country has managed to reverse deforestation from 70 percent in 1997 to 48 percent deforested land more recently. In this case, afforestation was initially made possible through the creation of national parks in lower producing regions. Further gains in the afforestation effort, however, required the participation of livestock growers who control a third of all land in the country. The government of Costa Rica has adopted a landscape approach to land management based on strong inter-ministerial collaboration and has pursued other integrated methods, such as agroforestry.
With the exception of the few successful cases of forest recovery, PES have not been particularly effective. The reasons are many, one of which is the market valuation of ecosystem services that tends to be based on partial assessments. Many studies indicate that putting a value on a service, say, natural bee pollination, can trigger substitutions towards alternative options, thus nullifying the original conservation goal. For example, a study from China shows that hand pollination by significantly inexpensive labour outperforms natural bee pollination. This raises serious implications
44 Rudel and Meyfroidt. (2014).
45 According to the Millennium Assessment Report (2003), ecosystem services are defined as “the benefits people obtain from ecosystems”. This ranges from food production to climate regulation. Environmental services are a subset of ecosystem services characterized
by externalities. Programmes to implement payments for these services are variously referred to as payment for ecosystem services programmes, payment for environmental services programmes, or simply PES programmes.
FAO-IPCC Expert meeting on climate change, land use and food security