Page - 16 - in options, Volume summer 2021

A burgeoning collaboration is exploring how to balance complex tensions over land use and other interlinked environmental issues. As a vast and remarkably diverse archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, and the world’s fourth most populous country, Indonesia faces very complex environmental questions. “The urgency of addressing climate change, sustainable land use, and inclusive development were apparent to the government, but conventional approaches seemed to not be working,” says Yos Sunitiyoso of the Bandung Institute of Technology in Jakarta, Secretary of Indonesia’s IIASA National Member Organization. “Systems analysis is ideally suited to tackle such interlinked challenges, which led Indonesia to join IIASA in 2012. There were high expectations that IIASA could help us develop solutions to the pressing issues around sustainable development.” Chief among these issues is forest management. Indonesia holds more than 100,000 km2 of tropical rainforest, behind only Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo; and agriculture is the main source of income for a large and growing population. Inevitably, this creates a clash over land use. Much natural forest has been replaced with palm oil plantations and other farmland, and there are many areas of burned forest and land in various states of abandonment or degradation. The RESTORE+ project is using systems analysis to reveal the trade-offs between economy and ecology. “Our aim is to move beyond the simplistic argument: “conserve forest” vs. “exploit forest”,” says IIASA researcher Ping Yowargana. “We need a higher-quality discussion, acknowledging both economic pressure and value in conservation.” The project is mapping vegetation across the country, then modeling how restoration options could affect crop yields, carbon stocks, and biodiversity, and finally using that to project the outcome of different policy scenarios. When discussions with stakeholders began, it became clear that this process would not be simple. “It was natural for us to start by saying, let’s identify where degraded areas are, then see what we can do,” says Yowargana. “But our stakeholders would respond, ‘that is an oil plantation generating income for the people, why do you call it degraded?’ So we abandoned the concept of degraded land. Instead, we make maps of restoration potential. This involves classifying land cover into 10 categories, such as agroforestry, rubber monoculture, and logged forest (also known as secondary forest).” The mapping project uses crowdsourcing. A platform called Urundata displays satellite images and asks people to classify land cover. Workshops with Indonesian remote-sensing experts provide insights into more sophisticated image interpretation. Results from both Urundata and the workshops inform an algorithm, which generates detailed land-cover maps of Indonesia. Stakeholder input has also led to a more inclusive list of restoration options, including commercial options, such as agroforestry with oil palms, as well as reforesting with natural vegetation. The final stage of the project will be to model various future scenarios. One focuses on conciliatory approaches such as agroforestry, another on strong policy enforcement. Other scenarios explore restoration using market-based mechanisms. The IIASA GLOBIOM model, tailored to Indonesia, will project outcomes for the economy, land cover, and climate. These policy scenarios result from a back-and-forth dialogue with the Ministry of National Development Planning, part of their close collaboration with IIASA. Early stages of RESTORE+ informed the Ministry’s 2017 Low Carbon Development Initiative report, which set a national agenda for green development. “The challenges the ministry gave us were a great lesson in policy-science interaction: what’s important is not only what the scientists think is important,” says Florian Kraxner, IIASA Agriculture, Forestry, and Ecosystem Services Research Group Leader. MEMBER SINCE: 2012 INDONESIA AND IIASA visits by researchers, advisors, and diplomats from Indonesia to IIASA Indonesians have participated in conferences and meetings 26 224 16 Options www.iiasa.ac.atSummer 2021