School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailablePatterns of infringement, risk, and impact driven by coal mining permits in Indonesia(SPRINGER, 2024-02)Coal mining is known for its contributions to climate change, but its impacts on the environment and human lives near mine sites are less widely recognised. This study integrates remote sensing, GIS, stakeholder interviews and extensive review of provincial data and documents to identify patterns of infringement, risk and impact driven by coal mining expansion across East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Specifically, we map and analyse patterns of mining concessions, land clearing, water cover, human settlement, and safety risks, and link them with mining governance and regulatory infractions related to coal mining permits. We show that excessive, improper permit granting and insufficient monitoring and oversight have led to deforestation, widespread overlaps of concessions with settlements, extensive boundary and regulatory violations, lacking reclamation, and numerous deaths. As the world's largest thermal coal exporter, Indonesia's elevated coal infringements, risks, and impacts translate to supply chain, sustainability, and human rights concerns for global coal markets.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableReconciling oil palm and ecosystems(NATURE PORTFOLIO, 2023-05)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableFlexible conservation decisions for climate adaptation(CELL PRESS, 2022-06-17)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGlobal drivers of change across tropical savannah ecosystems and insights into their management and conservation(Elsevier BV, 2022-12-01)All tropical savannahs are experiencing extensive transformation and degradation, yet conservation strategies do not adequately address threats to savannahs. Here, using a recently published ecosystem intactness metric, we assess the current condition of tropical savannahs across Earth, finding that <3 % remain highly intact. Moreover, their overall levels of protection are low, and of the protected savannahs, just 4 % can be considered highly intact while the majority (>60 %) are in poor condition. In order to address the clear mismatch between the decline in tropical savannah ecosystems’ condition and the response to manage and conserve them, we reviewed the current drivers that lead to tropical savannah degradation and identified conservation approaches being used to address them. Many successful conservation approaches address multiple drivers of change but are applied across small areas. We argue these approaches have the potential to be up-scaled through integrated land-use planning.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableOptimal restoration for pollination services increases forest cover while doubling agricultural profits(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2023-05)Pollinators are currently facing dramatic declines in abundance and richness across the globe. This can have profound impacts on agriculture, as 75% of globally common food crops benefit from pollination services. As many native bee species require natural areas for nesting, restoration efforts within croplands may be beneficial to support pollinators and enhance agricultural yields. Yet, restoration can be challenging to implement due to large upfront costs and the removal of land from production. Designing sustainable landscapes will require planning approaches that include the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of pollination services flowing from (restored) vegetation into crops. We present a novel planning framework to determine the best spatial arrangement for restoration in agricultural landscapes while accounting for yield improvements over 40 years following restoration. We explored a range of production and conservation goals using a coffee production landscape in Costa Rica as a case study. Our results show that strategic restoration can increase forest cover by approximately 20% while doubling collective landholder profits over 40 years, even when accounting for land taken out of production. We show that restoration can provide immense economic benefits in the long run, which may be pivotal to motivating local landholders to undertake conservation endeavours in pollinator-dependent croplands.
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ItemManaging risk and uncertainty in systematic conservation planning with insufficient information(WILEY, 2022-01)Abstract Recent advances in systematic conservation planning make use of modern portfolio theory (MPT)—a framework to construct and select optimal allocation of assets—to address the challenges posed by climate change uncertainty. However, these methods are difficult to implement for fine‐scale conservation planning when the information on future climate scenarios is insufficient. Insufficient information makes the estimators of the key inputs in the optimisation procedure unreliable leading to technical problems for the construction of optimal asset allocation. We identify three statistical methods—constant correlation model, the Ledoit–Wolf approach and the weighted non‐negative least‐squares approach—that can overcome the lack of sufficient information and enable the use of MPT for fine‐scale conservation planning. We illustrate the use of the three methods for identifying efficient portfolio allocation strategies, that is, strategies that give minimum amount of risk for a chosen level of return or maximum return for a chosen level of risk, using case studies of wetland conservation planning in North America and coastal conservation planning in Australia. We compare conservation planning strategies with complete information using standard portfolio theory and with insufficient information using the three methods to highlight their advantages and disadvantages. We find the Ledoit–Wolf and weighted non‐negative least‐squares approaches perform well and can identify risk‐return outcomes that are close to those identified with complete information. The methods presented in this study broaden the range of cases where the application of MPT is possible in conservation planning to enhance its uptake and lead to more efficient allocation of conservation resources.
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ItemRising floodwaters: mapping impacts and perceptions of flooding in Indonesian Borneo(IOP Publishing Ltd, 2016-06)The roles of forest and wetland ecosystems in regulating flooding have drawn increasing attention in the contexts of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. However, data on floods are scarce in many of the countries where people are most exposed and vulnerable to their impacts. Here, our separate analyses of village interview surveys (364 villages) and news archives (16 sources) show that floods have major impacts on lives and livelihoods in Indonesian Borneo, and flooding risks are associated with features of the local climate and landscape, particularly land uses that have seen rapid expansions over the past 30 years. In contrast with government assessments, we find that flooding is far more widespread, and that frequent, local, events can have large cumulative impacts. Over three years, local news agencies reported floods that affected 868 settlements, 966 times (including 89 in urban areas), inundated at least 197 000 houses, and displaced more than 776 000 people, possibly as many as 1.5 million (i.e. 5%-10% of the total population). Spatial analyses based on surveys in 364 villages show that flood frequency is associated with land use in catchment areas, including forest cover and condition, and the area of wetlands, mines (open-cut coal or gold mines), and oil palm. The probability that floods have become more frequent over the past 30 years was higher for villages closer to mines, and in watersheds with more extensive oil palm, but lower in watersheds with greater cover of selectively-logged or intact forests. We demonstrate that in data-poor regions, multiple sources of information can be integrated to gain insights into the hydrological services provided by forest and wetland ecosystems, and motivate more comprehensive assessment of flooding risks and options for ecosystem-based adaptation.