Maintaining diversity in mosaic landscapes

Because of its rugged terrain, low population density, and previous political and economic isolation, Laos still holds considerable shares of multifunctional landscapes. Characterized by smallholder agriculture, old-growth, secondary, and riverine forests, as well as aquatic habitats, these landscapes have high levels of bio- and agrobiodiversity, and they provide many and varied benefits to people both locally and far away. They also constitute a key ecological infrastructure in addition to the formally protected areas. The economic development blueprint in Laos over the past twenty years has been based on the paradigm of “turning land into capital”. This has influenced national policies, leading to a homogenization of the landscape, with large-scale commercial crop plantations increasingly becoming the dominant form of agricultural land use. The associated loss of biodiversity and erosion of the landscape’s multifunctional services undermine local people’s nature-based livelihoods and resilience. Moreover, they affect the provision of ecosystem services – including water purification, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and provision of nutritious food – also for more distant actors.

Southeast Asia Challenge — Photo by: Anne Fritzenwanker, @Travelbee_photo

Our goal

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To maintain diverse and multifunctional landscapes in order to maximize co-benefits between nature and people, secure resilience against climate change, and halt biodiversity loss.

Co-design of solutions and stewardship

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As the establishment of the Hub Southeast Asia and the activities in Laos were still in their early stages, the focus in 2022 was on demonstrating the value of maintaining multifunctional landscapes in terms of co-benefits and trade-offs among agriculture and economic development, biodiversity, climate change mitigation, and livelihood security. The scientific work centered on gathering, integrating, and analyzing data and information in order to quantify and spatially delineate the supply of and the various demands for ecosystem services. The resulting knowledge provides a valuable basis for the upcoming co-design and visioning process that will serve to identify and launch new incubator projects.

Projects underway

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Rewarding agrobiodiversity through value chains
The goal of this project is to showcase and preserve agrobiodiversity in multifunctional landscapes for the benefit of people and nature. To achieve this, we are developing innovative approaches to building inclusive and sustainable value chains, with a particular emphasis on non-timber forest products (NTFP). In 2022, we laid the foundations for creating such value chains. We contacted and talked with various actors from government, civil society, and the private sector to collect ideas on potential value chains, actors, and locations. Further, we established a partnership with Swisscontact in Laos to jointly conduct a co-design process with relevant actors in the second trimester of 2023. We started a national database of agrobiodiversity champions in Laos that will later be used as a tool to enhance exchange and learning between these actors, also as an approach to scaling. Finally, we re-designed the online platform of the local Pha Khao Lao partner initiative to better integrate knowledge on multifunctional landscapes and more explicitly showcase their value within the overall awareness creation mandate of Pha Khao Lao.

Quantifying values of ecosystem services
Quantifying and spatially representing supply of the bundle of ecosystem services provided by landscapes is an essential step toward effectively communicating the values of landscape functions to different stakeholders. It is also a prerequisite for analyzing what services will be lost, and to whom, if multifunctional landscapes are transformed into more monofunctional large-scale commercial production landscapes. Using high-resolution digital information bases on environmental, agricultural, and social aspects, a range of different provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural ecosystem services were modeled and quantified spatially across the whole of Laos. The results of a participatory household survey in Savannakhet province in Southern Laos provided detailed insights into the demand for different ecosystem services from different parts of a landscape. The resulting rich knowledge base provides a unique basis for discussions among actors on the values of different services that the ecosystems of specific landscapes provide, and on potential winners and losers in different development scenarios.