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A social and ecological assessment of tropical land uses at multiple scales: the Sustainable Amazon Network
Citation:
Gardner, T., J. Ferreira, J. Barlow, A. Lees, L. Parry, I. Vieira, E. Berenguer, R. Abramovay, B. Hughes, AND Phil Kaufmann. A social and ecological assessment of tropical land uses at multiple scales: the Sustainable Amazon Network. PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. Royal Society, London, Uk, 368:11, (2013).
Impact/Purpose:
A major area of research within EPA’s ORD is to develop approaches to evaluate ecosystem services and the tradeoffs involved in alternate management or development scenarios. A goal of this type of research is to understand the tradeoffs of various actions in terms of the sustainability of their outcomes. This manuscript is not part of the EPA’s ecosystem services or sustainable development research. Rather, it is a description of a newly initiated international program with parallel goals; this program applied some of the EPA’s NARS design and field methods in collecting aquatic resource data over the last two years. In this manuscript, the authors present the Sustainable Amazon Network (Rede Amazônia Sustentável, RAS): a multi-disciplinary research initiative involving more than 30 partner organizations working to assess both social and ecological dimensions of land-use sustainability in eastern Brazilian Amazonia. The research approach adopted by RAS offers three advantages for addressing sustainability problems: (1) the collection of synchronized and co-located ecological and socioeconomic data across broad gradients of past and present human use; (2) a nested sampling design to aid comparison of ecological and socioeconomic conditions associated with different land uses across local, landscape and regional scales; and (3) a strong engagement with a wide variety of actors and non-research institutions. The RAS datasets can help reconcile social-ecological objectives and reveal trade-offs between farming and conservation at multiple spatial scales by combining data on socioeconomic and ecological values. The authors describe how this data will be helpful to assess how changes in management incentives or regulatory conditions will influence relative ecological and socioeconomic costs and benefits.
Description:
Science has a critical role to play in guiding more sustainable development trajectories. Here we present the Sustainable Amazon Network (Rede Amazônia Sustentável, RAS): a multi-disciplinary research initiative involving more than 30 partner organisations working to assess both social and ecological dimensions of land-use sustainability in eastern Brazilian Amazonia. The research approach adopted by RAS offers three advantages for addressing sustainability problems: (1) the collection of synchronised and co-located ecological and socioeconomic data across broad gradients of past and present human use; (2) a nested sampling design to aid comparison of ecological and socioeconomic conditions associated with different land uses across local, landscape and regional scales; and (3) a strong engagement with a wide variety of actors and non-research institutions. Here we elaborate on these key features, and identify the ways in which RAS can help in highlighting those problems in most urgent need of attention, and in guiding improvements in land-use sustainability in Amazonia and elsewhere in the tropics. We also discuss some of the practical lessons, limitations and realities faced during the development of the RAS initiative so far.