The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) joined forces in 2019, leveraging a combined 65 years’ experience in research on the role of forests and trees in solving critical global challenges.
A new tool enables estimation of investment costs for establishing trees on farms.
Biodiversity is a collective term that describes the natural treasures that make it possible for us to live on our planet. The plants and animals that populate Earth’s terrestrial and marine habitats belong to an interconnected cycle of life that flourishes when protected, and breaks down when disturbed.
This symbiotic web also provides ecosystem services that supply humans with food, water, incomes and the tools to fight climate change. Yet these gifts from nature are now at risk as the world’s forests disappear rapidly to make way for the agricultural systems that are expected to feed a growing global population over the coming decades.
Today, there are more than 3 trillion trees on Earth, yet we are losing around 10 million hectares of them every year. This alarming loss has knock-on effects for the plants and animals that depend on forests for their survival. As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, the dysfunctional relationship between humans and nature can have catastrophic consequences and even jeopardize the food supply, particularly in the developing world. Our mismanagement of natural resources is therefore conflicting with our ability to feed billions of people.
Fortunately, the international community recognizes the urgent need to address this crisis and has taken steps to halt the loss of plant and animal life in natural habitats.
The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is a legally binding treaty that includes 196 countries and promotes national strategies for the conservation and sustainable use of each member’s natural resources. Through their respective National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), each country is expected to pursue specific targets at multiple levels.
However, the UN Decade on Biodiversity 2011‒2020 resulted in little progress toward the global biodiversity targets that were set in Aichi, Japan, in 2010. For a second consecutive decade, the world failed to fully achieve any of the 20 goals that were designed to protect ecosystems and wildlife. The CBD is currently negotiating new targets for the next 30 years.
It is not sufficient to establish protected areas, such as national parks and forests, in order to prevent biodiversity loss. As recognized by Aichi Target 7, agriculture also has an important role to play in ensuring the conservation of biodiversity. It is necessary to sustainably manage the entire landscape, including agriculturally productive areas.
Farms occupy around 5 billion hectares – or 38 percent – of the global land surface. About a third of this is used as cropland, while the remaining two-thirds consist of meadows and pastures for grazing livestock, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
With the right approach, this land can be managed to have a positive impact on biodiversity by creating safe habitats for animals, and fertile ground for a range of plant life.
The Trees on Farms for Biodiversity project (TonF) offers an effective solution. Its main goal is to raise governments’ awareness about the role of trees in contributing to the biodiversity value of agricultural landscapes. TonF works with communities, governments and NGOs in Honduras, Indonesia, Peru, Rwanda and Uganda to conserve and restore biodiversity on farms and to improve agricultural productivity.
The Harnessing the potential of trees on farms for meeting national and global biodiversity targets (TonF's full name) is funded by the International Climate Initiative of the Germany Government and implemented by CIFOR-ICRAF, Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñza (CATIE), International Union for Conservation of Nature, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and Leibnitz Universität Hannover.
However, planting trees involves more than just dropping seeds in the soil and waiting for them to germinate. The process requires a long-term commitment, sufficient resources and sound knowledge about the right tree for the right place and the right purpose. The financial costs can also be underestimated in the planting stage and lead to negative outcomes.
'While planting trees is a great intervention for climate-change mitigation and biodiversity conservation, it does come at a price when farmers plant trees on their land,' said Anja Gassner, project coordinator for TonF and science advisor at the Global Landscapes Forum.
'Unfortunately, a lot of agroforestry projects and programs only concentrate on the planting of the trees and do not consider all additional expenditure that comes with managing trees well on farms,' she continued. 'As a result, many agroforestry projects do not lead to the expected benefits, as the full costs and the full implications of asking farmers to plant trees were not considered.'
The costs of investing in agroforestry — or trees on farms — are borne by farmers who spend money on buying tree seedlings, labour for nurturing the trees, and other variable inputs, such as fertilizer and manure. There are also institutional costs that need to be considered in ensuring an enabling environment for farmers to adopt agroforestry options, such as the establishment of quality tree nurseries or the development of processing factories for tree commodities.
The TonF initiative has developed a Trees on Farms' Investment Scenario Tool to estimate the costs associated with the TonF targets agreed on by each country team. This was done through a stakeholder engagement process at the beginning of the project to improve biodiversity. Each of the targets includes three possible scenarios.
- Current status – 'business as usual' or 'status quo' – which refers to the prevailing land-use practices in the project sites of each country.
- Optimised or sustainably managed land-use systems with TonF options for better and improved livelihoods, that is, the integration of tree species that provide tangible benefits to farmers through food and nutrition, fodder, timber, fuelwood and/or incomes.
- Optimised or sustainably managed land-use systems for high biodiversity: tree species from the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species that provide high biodiversity benefits in terms of ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, nitrogen fixation or reduced run-off/erosion.
Based on the agreed TonF targets, CIFOR-ICRAF works with each country team to feed all required details into the Investment Scenario Tool. This makes it possible to assess the investment costs needed to move from the current scenario (i) to scenarios (ii) and (iii) by taking into consideration the political and financial frameworks (enabling environment) of intervention options to be included in national plans and programs. This analysis highlights leverage points by identifying opportunities as well as obstacles.
Sectoral policies — on forests, agriculture or conservation — can conflict with one another and impede management options for TonF, especially with regard to access and extraction rights to trees and products. In order to influence national decision making through the NBSAPs, a major task is to map the political processes across sectoral boundaries.
'While NBSAPs usually do a very good job of setting national policies and priorities for biodiversity conservation, they seldom put in place the investment needs or financing plans for these strategies, particularly in areas where smallholder farmers will be the key targeted group,' said Brian Chiputwa, a livelihoods and gender expert at CIFOR-ICRAF who developed the Investment Scenario Tool. 'For interventions that involve integrating TonF, this tool can help estimate the investment costs that will be needed from the farmers’ side as well as those that will need to be borne by public or private institutions.'
Agroforestry World asked Chiputwa — who is based in Nairobi — about his work and why it is relevant to the conservation of biodiversity on farms.
INTERVIEW
Agroforestry World: What is the general goal of the Investment Scenario Tool?
Brian Chiputwa: The NBSAPs are the main processes through which nations provide a road map for the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The NBSAPs often do very well in articulating national targets when it comes to landscape restoration. However, what is often missing is a consideration of the investment costs required and the future benefits to be accrued, for interventions that take a relatively long time to reach planting maturity, such as tree growing.
The main goal of the TonF Investment Scenario Tool is to be able to account for investment costs that are associated with implementing TonF options at various levels. The tool considers two main types of investment needs: (i) the costs borne by the farmer associated with integrating TonF options, such as the purchase of inputs, including tree seedlings, manure and fertilizers; and (ii) the institutional costs needed for setting up an enabling environment, such as the development of infrastructure, including tree nurseries and processing factories for tree commodities.
So one can think of it as an ex-ante decision-support tool that goes beyond knowing the right tree for the right place and the right purpose, by also considering the investment costs and future benefits associated with different agroforestry options. Growing trees is a medium-to-long-term investment for which farmers are only able to realize the benefits five, 10, 15 or 20 years down the road. Yet the costs of nurturing these trees by the farmer are immediate.
In recent years, we have seen a trend of governments committing to planting millions of trees. For example, Uganda plans to plant around 40 million trees this year while Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Initiative aimed to plant 200 million trees in a single day at 1000 sites across the country. So having such a tool can go a long way to informing researchers, practitioners and policymakers and ensuring they prioritize TonF options — depending on the socio-economic capabilities and needs of the targeted communities — to increase the probability of the trees growing to maturity even after the external support has ended.
Agroforestry World: Under the project, what investment scenarios are you considering?
Chiputwa: The tool is currently being piloted in five countries, first as a standardized tool and then adapted to the specific TonF targets that each country team sets through stakeholder engagement. Basically, we have three scenarios: the “business as usual” or “status quo” baseline scenario, which involves what the farmer usually does without any intervention. This current scenario is assumed to be an unsustainable land-use system in terms of biodiversity. Our thinking is: How do we improve this current scenario in the project sites in each country through TonF options to make it more sustainable in the long term?
An alternative scenario is to integrate TonF species with direct and tangible benefits that improve farmers’ livelihoods. Integrating fruit trees can provide food and nutrition for households. Tree fruits, such as mangoes for example, are an important source of micro-nutrients, including vitamin A. Some trees can be used as fodder for livestock because a lot of smallholders practise mixed farming, meaning they have both crops and livestock. There are also trees that can provide fuelwood, which farmers would otherwise have to fetch elsewhere or buy from the market. And certain tree species provide timber for sale. So, in Scenario 1, we are looking at a menu of trees that offer tangible benefits to the farmer.
Now the question would be, if the farmers incur certain costs per hectare in the current scenario, how much more would they have to invest in order to incorporate trees that are beneficial to their livelihoods? We then model the investment costs and future benefits of different crop or tree configurations for each scenario.
Here are examples of some TonF scenarios we are estimating costs for in the five project countries.
- Transitioning from full-sun cocoa to shaded cocoa systems in Padre Abad and Campo Verde, Peru
- Substituting dead fences (that is, poles and wire etc) with live fences (integrated with trees) in pastoral systems in Catacamas, Honduras
- Increasing indigenous tree cover by 30 percent within coffee and banana systems in Mount Elgon, Uganda
- Rehabilitating abandoned fallows with monocultural tree plantations (rubber, oil palm)
- Integrating TonF options in maize and bean monocultural systems in Bugesera and Gishwati, Rwanda
Agroforestry World: What methods do you use to quantify the expenses involved in integrating trees on farms?
Chiputwa: The way we have designed this tool template makes it possible to capture all the costs that individual farmers incur on a per-hectare basis as well as the institutional costs of moving from their current scenario to scenario 2 or 3 through the adoption of TonF options.
In Uganda, for example, farmers lack the capacity to manage their trees in a more sustainable manner. What is missing from an institutional point of view is the training of farmers, or capacity building. The question then is, What are the investments needed in this landscape to ensure an enabling environment? And how much would this investment cost stakeholders, like the government, to provide this infrastructure?
Here’s a different example. For us to set up Scenario 1, we need very specific tree species — whether it be trees that provide fuelwood or fodder — yet quality germplasm or seedlings are not available to farmers. From an institutional point of view, we would have to establish a nursery that can supply farmers with the tree species. And we would have to calculate the costs of supplying, let’s say, about 8000 farmers in that landscape. This means estimating the size of the nursery and how much you want the nursery to supply for this community, which may be 160,000 seedlings per year, for example.
Let’s assume we wanted to quantify the cost of supplying a tree species that provides timber, with the further condition that this species must be indigenous because it is known to thrive in the local context. But this species may be extinct, or people don’t like to grow it because there is no market for these trees. So, we would need to think about developing a value chain that can absorb these indigenous trees once they mature, say, in the form of a factory or upgrading existing infrastructure.
The template is in a 'smart' Excel-based form and the teams only have to enter basic details. For example, you have to know within a hectare what annual crops are grown — for example, whether maize, groundnuts or millet — and you have to know the spacing. The template gives you a place to enter the spacing for these different crops as well as the perennials that might be growing. These might be coffee or bananas, as well as the agroforestry tree species that are integrated into the land-use system.
Once you enter all that spacing data, you can estimate projected yields for your annuals and your perennials. Since you know the going market prices, it starts to populate the total revenue that you get on a per-hectare basis. You also have to enter the labour costs for weeding and pruning, for example. Once you enter that information, it is all populated automatically in the tables, so it’s a very smart template.
For the five countries we are working in, the scenarios are very different. The institutional needs of each landscape are highly variable. In Uganda, as I mentioned, it is more about capacity building of farmers in tree management and in Rwanda it’s about improving the value chains and setting up factories that add value to raw tree fruits. So, in as much as we started with a standardized Investment Scenario Tool template, it is very adaptable to the local landscapes where our country teams are working.
Agroforestry World: Are there any plans to apply the Investment Scenario Tool to other countries besides the five locations in the TonF project?
Chiputwa: The current project, which is piloting this tool, runs for four years in five countries. So we are certainly limited in terms of the scope that the tool can take. However, our hope is that with further funding we will be able to fine-tune this tool and scale it out to other countries.
If I had a magic wand, I would ultimately want to see this tool further developed into a free-to-use app that would assist researchers, practitioners and policymakers to make more informed decisions on recommending or implementing TonF interventions. If the data are available, you would just enter all your information into an app and then you would have a table that shows you the costs, the revenues and the institutional expenses for stakeholders under different scenarios. This is the first time at ICRAF that we are modelling these different scenarios associated with the costs of tree planting. If we can get the funding to develop an app, this would be a really good tool that could be useful for years to come.
Agroforestry World: What is the time frame for implementation?
Chiputwa: In March this year, we shared the template with the country teams, who are collating all the data now to enter into the tool. My hope is that we will have the first results coming in within the next 3–5 months. The emphasis is on one target for which we then focus in three scenarios.
In Uganda, for example, the target is to have 30 percent of tree cover under indigenous trees. The current scenario is around 10 percent, so you still have to account for the remaining 20 percent in the second scenario. These trees are specific to the livelihoods of farmers.
The third scenario is when you look at tree species that are of high biodiversity value, so they might not have tangible benefits to the farmer but they provide ecosystem services below the ground, like soil quality, water retention, reduced erosion and so on. Once you are done with Target 1, you move on to other targets. I hope we will have the cost scenarios for the first target in all five countries within the next four months.
Agroforestry World: Why aren’t these investment expenses factored into TonF interventions?
Chiputwa: If you look at the way research and development have been done in the past, you always find that they are driven by broader macroeconomic or institutional goals and yet they have to be implemented at the plot level with farmers. For example, under the Bonn Challenge, countries have committed to certain restoration targets. Uganda aims to restore more than 2 million hectares of degraded land, partly through tree planting. This commitment has to happen on the ground and if you look at most of the degradation, it is on agricultural lands. It may be easier to figure out the total number and cost of acquiring tree seedlings needed to achieve this national target. What may certainly be overlooked are the investment costs needed to see these plants through the planting stage until they reach maturity. This essentially leaves the farmers on their own when it comes to looking after these trees.
Agroforestry World: How does overlooking investment costs affect the outcomes of agroforestry projects?
Chiputwa: One of the main reasons why some restoration projects fail is due to the obsession with 'how many free seedlings have we distributed?' or 'how many trees have we planted?' You might know which tree species you would want farmers to grow as part of this reclamation but if there is no consideration of the extent of individual costs that farmers will incur over time then farmers tend to abandon the initiative as soon as the support or funding from the project ends.
There are also TonF interventions that take a long time to mature but with no direct or tangible benefits to farmers, even though they provide other ecosystem services. In such cases, there is a mismatch between farmers’ expectations (in terms of benefits) versus the common good or the broader goals for the community or landscape. If you don’t think of the sustainability of your project and the support that is needed in the long term then that project dies. And that is when you have the classic farmer assertion, 'Oh, these guys came, gave us free seedlings, we planted them and then they left. I didn’t have the time to look after these trees and in any case they were competing for space with my coffee.' This is how these interventions die out.
Our aim is to make the long-term costs of trees on farms more transparent. This can help inform policy dialogue within the context of the CBD and the NBSAPs as well as the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Our goal is to promote the realization that trees on farms can be a tool that governments can use to achieve the international targets that have been set.
This project is part of the International Climate Initiative. The German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) supports this initiative on the basis of a decision adopted by the German Bundestag.
World Agroforestry (ICRAF) is a centre of scientific and development excellence that harnesses the benefits of trees for people and the environment. Knowledge produced by ICRAF enables governments, development agencies and farmers to utilize the power of trees to make farming and livelihoods more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable at multiple scales. ICRAF is one of the 15 members of the CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food-secure future. We thank all donors who support research in development through their contributions to the CGIAR Fund.