Simon Bolwig

Integrating Poverty and Environmental Concerns into Value-Chain Analysis: A Conceptual Framework

Many policy prescriptions emphasise poverty reduction through closer integration of poor people or areas with global markets. Global value chain (GVC) studies reveal how firms and farms in developing countries are upgraded by being integrated in global markets, but few explicitly document the impact on poverty, gender and the environment, or conversely, how value chain restructuring is in turn mediated by local history, social relations and environmental factors. This article develops a conceptual framework that can help overcome the shortcomings in ‘standalone’ value-chain, livelihood and environmental analyses by integrating the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ aspects of value chains that together affect poverty and sustainability.

Bioenergy and climate change mitigation: an assessment

Bioenergy deployment offers significant potential for climate change mitigation, but also carries considerable risks. In this review, we bring together perspectives of various communities involved in the research and regulation of bioenergy deployment in the context of climate change mitigation: Land‐use and energy experts, land‐use and integrated assessment modelers, human geographers, ecosystem researchers, climate scientists and two different strands of life‐cycle assessment experts. We summarize technological options, outline the state‐of‐the‐art knowledge on various climate effects, provide an update on estimates of technical resource potential and comprehensively identify sustainability effects. Cellulosic feedstocks, increased end‐use efficiency, improved land carbon‐stock management and residue use, and, when fully developed, BECCS appear as the most promising options, depending on development costs, implementation, learning, and risk management. Combined heat and power, efficient biomass cookstoves and small‐scale power generation for rural areas can help to promote energy access and sustainable development, along with reduced emissions. We estimate the sustainable technical potential as up to 100 EJ: high agreement; 100–300 EJ: medium agreement; above 300 EJ: low agreement. Stabilization scenarios indicate that bioenergy may supply from 10 to 245 EJ yr−1 to global primary energy supply by 2050. Models indicate that, if technological and governance preconditions are met, large‐scale deployment (>200 EJ), together with BECCS, could help to keep global warming below 2° degrees of preindustrial levels; but such high deployment of land‐intensive bioenergy feedstocks could also lead to detrimental climate effects, negatively impact ecosystems, biodiversity and livelihoods. The integration of bioenergy systems into agriculture and forest landscapes can improve land and water use efficiency and help address concerns about environmental impacts. We conclude that the high variability in pathways, uncertainties in technological development and ambiguity in political decision render forecasts on deployment levels and climate effects very difficult. However, uncertainty about projections should not preclude pursuing beneficial bioenergy options.

Conserving the Birds of Uganda’s Banana-Coffee Arc: Land Sparing and Land Sharing Compared

Reconciling the aims of feeding an ever more demanding human population and conserving biodiversity is a difficult challenge. Here, we explore potential solutions by assessing whether land sparing (farming for high yield, potentially enabling the protection of non-farmland habitat), land sharing (lower yielding farming with more biodiversity within farmland) or a mixed strategy would result in better bird conservation outcomes for a specified level of agricultural production. We surveyed forest and farmland study areas in southern Uganda, measuring the population density of 256 bird species and agricultural yield: food energy and gross income. Parametric non-linear functions relating density to yield were fitted. Species were identified as “winners” (total population size always at least as great with agriculture present as without it) or “losers” (total population sometimes or always reduced with agriculture present) for a range of targets for total agricultural production. For each target we determined whether each species would be predicted to have a higher total population with land sparing, land sharing or with any intermediate level of sparing at an intermediate yield. We found that most species were expected to have their highest total populations with land sparing, particularly loser species and species with small global range sizes. Hence, more species would benefit from high-yield farming if used as part of a strategy to reduce forest loss than from low-yield farming and land sharing, as has been found in Ghana and India in a previous study. We caution against advocacy for high-yield farming alone as a means to deliver land sparing if it is done without strong protection for natural habitats, other ecosystem services and social welfare. Instead, we suggest that conservationists explore how conservation and agricultural policies can be better integrated to deliver land sparing by, for example, combining land-use planning and agronomic support for small farmers.

Integrating place-specific livelihood and equity outcomes into global assessments of bioenergy deployment

Integrated assessment models suggest that the large-scale deployment of bioenergy could contribute to ambitious climate change mitigation efforts. However, such a shift would intensify the global competition for land, with possible consequences for 1.5 billion smallholder livelihoods that these models do not consider. Maintaining and enhancing robust livelihoods upon bioenergy deployment is an equally important sustainability goal that warrants greater attention. The social implications of biofuel production are complex, varied and place-specific, difficult to model, operationalize and quantify. However, a rapidly developing body of social science literature is advancing the understanding of these interactions. In this letter we link human geography research on the interaction between biofuel crops and livelihoods in developing countries to integrated assessments on biofuels. We review case-study research focused on first-generation biofuel crops to demonstrate that food, income, land and other assets such as health are key livelihood dimensions that can be impacted by such crops and we highlight how place-specific and global dynamics influence both aggregate and distributional outcomes across these livelihood dimensions. We argue that place-specific production models and land tenure regimes mediate livelihood outcomes, which are also in turn affected by global and regional markets and their resulting equilibrium dynamics. The place-specific perspective suggests that distributional consequences are a crucial complement to aggregate outcomes; this has not been given enough weight in comprehensive assessments to date. By narrowing the gap between place-specific case studies and global models, our discussion offers a route towards integrating livelihood and equity considerations into scenarios of future bioenergy deployment, thus contributing to a key challenge in sustainability sciences.

Crops, trees, and birds: Biodiversity change under agricultural intensification in Uganda's farmed landscapes

Abstract Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 106(2): 115–130, 2006 This paper examines the relationship between the intensity of agricultural land use and the abundance and richness of trees and birds in a humid tropical developing region where natural vegetation is being rapidly converted into farmland under market and population pressures. We analysed survey data on land use, birds and woody plants collected in 14 study sites situated within smallholder cropland and commercial plantations in southern Uganda. Commercial plantations had very few trees and only 10% of the original bird species. Land use intensification in smallholder systems also showed losses in bird abundance and species richness, but not nearly as much as in plantations. In both systems the impact of intensification was much bigger on the specialised and threatened birds compared to the less specialised species. This argues strongly for ‘species-sensitive’ conservation policies combining protected areas with land use regulation in areas undergoing intensification. We also found a much higher loss in bird biodiversity during the first phases of land use intensification (when larger tracts of forest are cleared) than in later phases characterised by clearing of smaller patches of vegetation and improved management of farm trees. This suggests high pay-offs to geographical targeting of conservation efforts in farmed landscapes.

Bioenergy production and sustainable development: science base for policy-making remains limited

The possibility of using bioenergy as a climate change mitigation measure has sparked a discussion of whether and how bioenergy production contributes to sustainable development. We undertook a systematic review of the scientific literature to illuminate this relationship and found a limited scientific basis for policymaking. Our results indicate that knowledge on the sustainable development impacts of bioenergy production is concentrated in a few well‐studied countries, focuses on environmental and economic impacts, and mostly relates to dedicated agricultural biomass plantations. The scope and methodological approaches in studies differ widely and only a small share of the studies sufficiently reports on context and/or baseline conditions, which makes it difficult to get a general understanding of the attribution of impacts. Nevertheless, we identified regional patterns of positive or negative impacts for all categories – environmental, economic, institutional, social and technological. In general, economic and technological impacts were more frequently reported as positive, while social and environmental impacts were more frequently reported as negative (with the exception of impacts on direct substitution of GHG emission from fossil fuel). More focused and transparent research is needed to validate these patterns and develop a strong science underpinning for establishing policies and governance agreements that prevent/mitigate negative and promote positive impacts from bioenergy production.

An Analysis of Organic Contract Farming Schemes in East Africa

As noted in a number of chapters in this volume, recent years have seen a substantial increase in African smallholder production to ‘sustainability’ standards. This reflects the dynamic growth of Northern markets for products certified to these standards and, in turn, the premium prices that this generates. All of the production concerned appears to be organized through a contemporary variant of contract farming. Like earlier African variants, this is donor-supported. But contracting for sustainability attributes is generally by private corporations rather than by government or public—private agencies and contracts are ‘market based’, in the sense that they tend to focus mainly on price and quality requirements rather than input supply, production calendars and so on.

Product carbon footprint standards and schemes

Concern over climate change has stimulated interest in estimating the total amount of greenhouse gasses (GHG) produced during the different stages in the ‘life-cycle’ of goods and services — that is their production, processing, transportation, sale, use and disposal (Brenton et al., 2008; Edwards-Jones et al., 2008; Oresund Food Network, 2008). In this chapter we refer to the outcome of these calculations as product carbon footprints (PCFs), where ‘carbon footprint’ is the total amount of GHGs produced for a given activity and ‘product’ is any good or service that is marketed. PCFs are thus distinct from GHG assessments performed at the level of projects, corporations, supply chains, municipalities, nations or individuals.

Quality or volume? An economic evaluation of coffee development strategies for Uganda

The article identifies challenges and opportunities for the Ugandan robusta coffee industry in the context of the global coffee crisis. It presents a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of development strategies through which Uganda might promote its largest export commodity. It is suggested that Uganda would benefit from moderately increasing robusta production, while a further decline in output could undermine its current price premium in the market. There may also be important benefits associated with increasing the value of Ugandan robusta through improvements in quality.