Reinmar Seidler

Deforestation and Sustainable Mixed-Use Landscapes: A View from the Eastern Himalaya1

Abstract The interrelationships between smallholder agriculture, forest cover, and biodiversity loss have received insufficient research and analytic attention, though they stand at the center of the ongoing biodiversity crisis in tropical landscapes. Despite important advances in conservation science, knowledge generation remains fragmentary, and the formal institutions concerned with agriculture, forestry, social change, and climate change continue to work to a large extent in isolation, especially in developing countries. Drawing on our research program in the montane Eastern Himalaya of India, for example, two questions are explored: What types of landscapes can provide livelihood security for growing populations while maintaining healthy ecosystems? What kinds of knowledge, institutions, and policies will help us move toward land-use patterns that support livelihoods and protect biodiversity, given a regional economy based on small-scale agriculture? Here, we advocate for a greater integration of knowledge types (scientific, traditional, and participatory) and institutions (formal and informal, government and community) to foster better planning in order to reconcile several functions at the landscape level, including smallholder agriculture, the production of ecosystem goods and services, and the protection of biodiversity.

Forest Canopies as Earth’s Support Systems: Priorities for Research and Conservation

In this chapter we address three sets of questions about the present and future role of canopy science within the larger context of forest science. First we review research that either promotes or constrains canopy science as a distinct field. Second, we examine what is known about how canopies are being altered by human use of tropical forests, and consider priorities for research in human interactions with forest canopies. Third, we ask how canopy science can help address the urgent need to understand patterns of human impacts and global environmental changes, specifically in tropical forest ecosystems. It is evident from this volume that canopy researchers are shifting their priorities toward forest canopy conservation by embracing whole-forest approaches with reference to ecosystem services, forest health, climate change, sustainability science, economics, education, and the social sciences.

Biodiversity in Logged and Managed Forests

Over millennia, human societies have managed forests for the production of a range of goods and services. As long as population densities remained low, the impact of humans on forest ecosystems was minimal, except near population centers of ancient civilizations. With the start of the industrial revolution, the demand for forest products increased considerably. At the same time, rapidly expanding human populations started to exert tremendous pressure on forests. Timber extraction on an industrial scale became the principal goal of forest resource managers in the latter half of the nineteenth century and remained so through much of the twentieth century. With mounting losses of forest cover and increasing interest in the conservation of biodiversity, attention has now again shifted to managing forests for a wider array of goods and services.

Opinion: India faces a long and winding path to green climate solutions.

A little over a year ago, the global community proposed an ambitious new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to protect the environment and enhance human well-being. Three months later, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, CoP21 in Paris, announced equally ambitious new targets for action on climate change. Such bold commitments have been facilitated by development trends in several emerging economies. India, for one, has made truly astonishing gains: the World Bank reports that in over just seven years, from 2004 to 2011, the number of Indian citizens living in acute poverty fell from 426 million to 263 million, a reduction in the proportion of the population in poverty from 38% to <22% (povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/IND; iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/index.htm).

Chapter 7 – Climate Vulnerability, Water Vulnerability: Challenges to Adaptation in Eastern Himalayan Springsheds

Calls for adaptation to climate change in mountain regions often emphasize concepts of climate-smart villages and climate-adaptive rural development. However, we lack reliable information about how local weather patterns are likely to change in complex mountain landscapes. Some of this uncertainty is likely to be irreducible; hence, adaptation should focus on current patterns of inequity in vulnerability. We describe an innovative state-sponsored program to revive springs and recharge groundwater aquifers in rain-shadow areas of Indian Eastern Himalaya. Conflicting impacts developed between agency programs for livelihood diversification and those meant to increase water security. The result is that existing inequities in livelihood security and water security remained unaddressed and may even have been exacerbated. Investment in better coordination among government agencies will be necessary to increase overall water security among rural communities in this region.