Will Passive Protection Save Congo Forests?

RESEARCH ARTICLE Will Passive Protection Save Congo Forests? Gillian L. Galford1*, Britaldo S. Soares-Filho2, Laura J. Sonter1, Nadine Laporte3 1 The Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, University of Vermont, 617 Main Street, Burlington, Vermont, 05405, United States of America, 2 Centro de Sensoriamento Remoto, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Av. Antônio Carlos 6627, Belo Horizonte, 31270–901, Minas Gerais, Brazil, 3 The Woods Hole Research Center, 149 Woods Hole Road, Falmouth, Massachusetts, 02540, United States of America * a11111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Galford GL, Soares-Filho BS, Sonter LJ, Laporte N (2015) Will Passive Protection Save Congo Forests? PLoS ONE 10(6): e0128473. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0128473 Editor: Ben Bond-Lamberty, DOE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, UNITED STATES Received: July 31, 2013 Accepted: April 27, 2015 Published: June 24, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Galford et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Google.org, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the NASA Applied Sciences Program (Grant NNX12AL27G), the Congo Basin Forest Fund, and the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. Britaldo Soares-Filho receives support from Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Climate and Land Use Alliance. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Abstract Central Africa’s tropical forests are among the world’s largest carbon reserves. Historically, they have experienced low rates of deforestation. Pressures to clear land are increasing due to development of infrastructure and livelihoods, foreign investment in agriculture, and shifting land use management, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC contains the greatest area of intact African forests. These store approximately 22 billion tons of carbon in aboveground live biomass, yet only 10% are protected. Can the status quo of passive protection — forest management that is low or nonexistent — ensure the preservation of this forest and its carbon? We have developed the SimCongo model to simulate changes in land cover and land use based on theorized policy scenarios from 2010 to 2050. Three scenarios were examined: the first (Historical Trends) assumes passive forest protection; the next (Conservation) posits active protection of forests and activation of the national REDD+ action plan, and the last (Agricultural Development) assumes increased agricultural activities in forested land with concomitant increased deforestation. SimCongo is a cellular automata model based on Bayesian statistical methods tailored for the DRC, built with the Dinamica-EGO platform. The model is parameterized and validated with deforestation observations from the past and runs the scenarios from 2010 through 2050 with a yearly time step. We estimate the Historical Trends trajectory will result in average emissions of 139 million t CO2 year-1 by the 2040s, a 15% increase over current emissions. The Conservation scenario would result in 58% less clearing than Historical Trends and would conserve carbon-dense forest and woodland savanna areas. The Agricultural Development scenario leads to emissions of 212 million t CO2 year-1 by the 2040s. These scenarios are heuristic examples of policy’s influence on forest conservation and carbon storage. Our results suggest that 1) passive protection of the DRC’s forest and woodland savanna is insufficient to reduce deforestation; and 2): enactment of a REDD+ plan or similar conservation measure is needed to actively protect Congo forests, their unique ecology, and their important role in the global carbon cycle. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0128473 June 24, 2015 1 / 19 Will Passive Protection Save Congo Forests? Introduction Changes in land use, such as deforestation and forest degradation, are a major source of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, second only to the burning of fossil fuels [1]. Tropical ecosystems are the primary source of emissions from land use change and the greatest uncertainty in emissions stems from African tropical forests [2]. Carbon emissions in the tropics come primarily from three hotspots: first, industrial-scale agriculture and cattle ranching in the Amazon; next, industrial palm oil plantations in SE Asia; and finally, household slash-and-burn agriculture in Africa [3]. Deforestation in Africa accounts for 19% of greenhouse gas emissions from land use change [4] but has gained little attention to date, although African forests as the second largest aboveground carbon reservoir in the world [5]. African forests experience a net loss of 3.4 million ha year-1, a rate that has remained stable over the last decade, but is likely to accelerate rapidly in the near future as demands for timber products and agricultural land increase [6]. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the frontier of deforestation in Africa [7] where 22 billion metric tons of carbon are stored in the aboveground live biomass of its forests and woodland savannas [5]. Rapid deforestation here will not only lead to local losses of ecosystem services and goods, it may also result in large carbon emissions. In the DRC, patterns of deforestation and its direct and indirect causes were not well understood in academic or policy literature until the 2000s [7–9]. Widespread mining and commercial logging are now known to be direct causes of forest loss. The spatial correlation between mining and commercial logging is low, as their footprints are limited to areas much smaller than the extent of deforestation observed by Potapov et al. [10]. Small-scale, direct factors for deforestation include extensive smallholder farming and harvest of trees for charcoal and fuel. Smallholder clearings often nucleate around commercial logging and mining as new road infrastructure provides fresh access to tracts of forest. Demands on forests from smallholder farms are likely to increase in coming decades due to a growing population whose food supply is increasingly insecure. The extent of hunger in the DRC has gone from “alarming” to “extremely alarming” over the last two decades [11] as population doubled. By 2025, it is expected to increase ~150% from its current figure of 74 million [12]. An increasingly hungry, growing population may turn to clear cutting forests and savanna woodlands to produce more food (extensification). The pressure to reduce rotation times for fields will lead to declines in soil fertility. In the DRC, dependence on subsistence farming, combined with low market access for (...truncated)