Returning croplands to forests is a sustainability gold standard to mitigate climate change impacts and promote conservation.
Returning croplands to forests is a sustainability gold standard to mitigate climate change impacts and promote conservation. That is, new research shows, unless you’re a poor farmer.
“Those sweeping conservation efforts in returning cropland to vegetated land might have done so with an until-now hidden consequence: it increased the wildlife damage to remaining cropland and thus caused unintended cost that whittled away at the program’s compensation for farmers,” said Hongbo Yang, lead author in a recent paper in the Ecological Economics journal.
Yang, who recently earned a PhD at from Michigan State University (MSU) and is currently a research associate at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and his colleagues analyzed the reforestation achieved via programs that encourage, and compensate, farmers to convert their cropland to forests via China’s enormous Grain-to-Green Program (GTGP).
The research found that even as newly regrown forests are sucking up greenhouse gases, they’re also sheltering critters bent on destroying crops. And while farmers were compensated, they ultimately took a financial beating. Not only did they find that converting a portion of their fields brought wildlife that much closer to their remaining crops, but they were also now farming smaller areas and thus recognizing lower yields.
Read more at Michigan State University
Image: A farmer in the Szechuan Province of China tends to his remaining crops after returning a portion of his cropland to be reforested. (Credit: Hongbo Yang, Michigan State University)
