Land cover and forest health indicator datasets for central India using very-high resolution satellite data.

Satellite imagery has been used to provide global and regional estimates of forest cover. Despite increased availability and accessibility of satellite data, approaches for detecting forest degradation have been limited. We produce a very-high resolution 3-meter (m) land cover dataset and develop a normalized index, the Bare Ground Index (BGI), to detect and map exposed bare ground within forests at 90 m resolution in central India. Tree cover and bare ground was identified from Planet Labs Very High-Resolution satellite data using a Random Forest classifier, resulting in a thematic land cover map with 83.00% overall accuracy (95% confidence interval: 61.25%-90.29%). The BGI is a ratio of bare ground to tree cover and was derived by aggregating the land cover. Results from field data indicate that the BGI serves as a proxy for intensity of forest use although open areas occur naturally. The BGI is an indicator of forest health and a baseline to monitor future changes to a tropical dry forest landscape at an unprecedented spatial scale.

Climate resilience of dry season cereals in India.

India is the world's second largest producer of wheat, with more than 40% increase in production since 2000. Increasing temperatures raise concerns about wheat's sensitivity to heat. Traditionally-grown sorghum is an alternative rabi (winter season) cereal, but area under sorghum production has declined more than 20% since 2000. We examine sensitivity of wheat and sorghum yields to historical temperature and compare water requirements in districts where both cereals are cultivated. Wheat yields are sensitive to increases in maximum daily temperature in multiple stages of the growing season, while sorghum does not display the same sensitivity. Crop water requirements (mm) are 1.4 times greater for wheat than sorghum, mainly due to extension of its growing season into summer. However, water footprints (m3 per ton) are approximately 15% less for wheat due to its higher yields. Sensitivity to future climate projections, without changes in management, suggests 5% decline in wheat yields and 12% increase in water footprints by 2040, compared with 4% increase in water footprint for sorghum. On balance, sorghum provides a climate-resilient alternative to wheat for expansion in rabi cereals. However, yields need to increase to make sorghum competitive for farmer profits and efficient use of land to provide nutrients.

How Social Considerations Improve the Equity and Effectiveness of Ecosystem Restoration.

Ecosystem restoration is an important means to address global sustainability challenges. However, scientific and policy discourse often overlooks the social processes that influence the equity and effectiveness of restoration interventions. In the present article, we outline how social processes that are critical to restoration equity and effectiveness can be better incorporated in restoration science and policy. Drawing from existing case studies, we show how projects that align with local people's preferences and are implemented through inclusive governance are more likely to lead to improved social, ecological, and environmental outcomes. To underscore the importance of social considerations in restoration, we overlay existing global restoration priority maps, population, and the Human Development Index (HDI) to show that approximately 1.4 billion people, disproportionately belonging to groups with low HDI, live in areas identified by previous studies as being of high restoration priority. We conclude with five action points for science and policy to promote equity-centered restoration.

Improved household living standards can restore dry tropical forests.

Despite multiple approaches over the last several decades to harmonize conservation and development goals in the tropics, forest-dependent households remain the poorest in the world. Durable housing and alternatives to fuelwood for cooking are critical needs to reduce multi-dimensional poverty. These improvements also potentially reduce pressure on forests and alleviate forest degradation. We test this possibility in dry tropical forests of the Central Indian Highlands where tribal and other marginalized populations rely on forests for energy, construction materials, and other livelihood needs. Based on a remotely sensed measure of forest degradation and a 5000 household survey of forest use, we use machine learning (causal forests) and other statistical methods to quantify treatment effects of two improved living standards-alternatives to fuelwood for cooking and non-forest-based housing material-on forest degradation in 1, 2, and 5 km buffers around 500 villages. Both improved living standards had significant treatment effects (-0.030 ± 0.078, -0.030 ± 0.023, 95% CI), respectively, with negative values indicating less forest degradation, within 1 km buffers around villages. Treatment effects were lower with increasing distance from villages. Results suggest that improved living standards can both reduce forest degradation and alleviate poverty. Forest restoration efforts can target improved living standards for local communities without conflicts over land tenure or taking land out of production to plant trees.

Land management can contribute to net zero.

The voluntary carbon market needs to embrace changes for the land sector.

Synthesizing habitat connectivity analyses of a globally important human-dominated tiger-conservation landscape.

As ecological data and associated analyses become more widely available, synthesizing results for effective communication with stakeholders is essential. In the case of wildlife corridors, managers in human-dominated landscapes need to identify both the locations of corridors and multiple stakeholders for effective oversight. We synthesized 5 independent studies of tiger (Panthera tigris) connectivity in central India, a global priority landscape for tiger conservation, to quantify agreement on landscape permeability for tiger movement and potential movement pathways. We used the latter analysis to identify connectivity areas on which studies agreed and stakeholders associated with these areas to determine relevant participants in corridor management. Three or more of the 5 studies' resistance layers agreed in 63% of the study area. Areas in which all studies agree on resistance were of primarily low (66%, e.g., forest) and high (24%, e.g., urban) resistance. Agreement was lower in intermediate resistance areas (e.g., agriculture). Despite these differences, the studies largely agreed on areas with high levels of potential movement: >40% of high average (top 20%) current-flow pixels were also in the top 20% of current-flow agreement pixels (measured by low variation), indicating consensus connectivity areas (CCAs) as conservation priorities. Roughly 70% of the CCAs fell within village administrative boundaries, and 100% overlapped forest department management boundaries, suggesting that people live and use forests within these priority areas. Over 16% of total CCAs' area was within 1 km of linear infrastructure (437 road, 170 railway, 179 transmission line, and 339 canal crossings; 105 mines within 1 km of CCAs). In 2019, 78% of forest land diversions for infrastructure and mining in Madhya Pradesh (which comprises most of the study region) took place in districts with CCAs. Acute competition for land in this landscape with globally important wildlife corridors calls for an effective comanagement strategy involving local communities, forest departments, Appendix 1 and infrastructure planners. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Ten facts about land systems for sustainability.

Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, general, empirical support. These facts help to explain the challenges of achieving sustainability in land use and thus also point toward solutions. The 10 facts are as follows: 1) Meanings and values of land are socially constructed and contested; 2) land systems exhibit complex behaviors with abrupt, hard-to-predict changes; 3) irreversible changes and path dependence are common features of land systems; 4) some land uses have a small footprint but very large impacts; 5) drivers and impacts of land-use change are globally interconnected and spill over to distant locations; 6) humanity lives on a used planet where all land provides benefits to societies; 7) land-use change usually entails trade-offs between different benefits-"win-wins" are thus rare; 8) land tenure and land-use claims are often unclear, overlapping, and contested; 9) the benefits and burdens from land are unequally distributed; and 10) land users have multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideas of what social and environmental justice entails. The facts have implications for governance, but do not provide fixed answers. Instead they constitute a set of core principles which can guide scientists, policy makers, and practitioners toward meeting sustainability challenges in land use.

Firewood, forests, and fringe populations: Exploring the inequitable socioeconomic dimensions of Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) adoption in India.

Liquified petroleum gas (LPG) is an important clean fuel alternative for households that rely on burning biomass for daily cooking needs. In India, Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) has provided poor households with LPG connections since 2016. We investigate cooking fuel use in households to determine the impact of the policy in the Central Indian Highlands Landscape (CIHL). The CIHL has a large population of marginalized social groups, including Indigenous, Scheduled Tribe, Schedule Caste, and Other Backward Caste people. We utilize survey data from 4,994 households within 500 villages living in forested regions collected in 2018 and a satellite-derived measure of forest availability to investigate the household and ecological determinants of LPG adoption and the timing of this adoption (pre- or post-2016). In addition, we document patterns of firewood collection and evaluate the extent to which households acquiring LPG change these activities. The probability of cooking with LPG was lowest for marginalized social groups. We observe that households recently adopting LPG, likely through PMUY, are poorer, more socially marginalized, less educated, and have more forest available nearby than their early-adopter counterparts. While 90% of LPG-using households continue to use firewood, households that have owned LPG for more years report spending less time collecting firewood, indicating a waning reliance on firewood over time. Policies targeting communities with marginalized social groups living near forests can further accelerate LPG adoption and displace firewood use. Despite overall growth in LPG use, disparities in access to clean cooking fuels remain between socioeconomic groups in India.

Declining diversity of wild-caught species puts dietary nutrient supplies at risk.

Although biodiversity loss adversely influences a variety of ecosystem functions, how declining wild food diversity affects nutrient supplies for people is poorly understood. Here, we analyze the impact of declining biodiversity on nutrients supplied by fish using detailed information from the Peruvian Amazon, where inland fisheries provide a critical source of nutrition for many of the region's 800,000 people. We found that the impacts of biodiversity loss on nutrient supplies depended on compensation, trophic dynamics, and functional diversity. When small sedentary species compensated for declines in large migratory species, fatty acid supplies increased, while zinc and iron supplies decreased. In contrast, the probability of failing to maintain supplies or nutrient supply risk increased when species were nutritionally unique. Our results show that trait-based regulations and public health polices need to consider biodiversity's vital role in sustaining nutritional benefits for over 2 billion people dependent on wild foods across the globe.

Groundwater depletion will reduce cropping intensity in India.

Groundwater depletion is becoming a global threat to food security, yet the ultimate impacts of depletion on agricultural production and the efficacy of available adaptation strategies remain poorly quantified. We use high-resolution satellite and census data from India, the world's largest consumer of groundwater, to quantify the impacts of groundwater depletion on cropping intensity, a crucial driver of agricultural production. Our results suggest that, given current depletion trends, cropping intensity may decrease by 20% nationwide and by 68% in groundwater-depleted regions. Even if surface irrigation delivery is increased as a supply-side adaptation strategy, which is being widely promoted by the Indian government, cropping intensity will decrease, become more vulnerable to interannual rainfall variability, and become more spatially uneven. We find that groundwater and canal irrigation are not substitutable and that additional adaptation strategies will be necessary to maintain current levels of production in the face of groundwater depletion.

Substitution of inland fisheries with aquaculture and chicken undermines human nutrition in the Peruvian Amazon.

With declining capture fisheries production, maintaining nutrient supplies largely hinges on substituting wild fish with economically comparable farmed animals. Although such transitions are increasingly commonplace across global inland and coastal communities, their nutritional consequences are unknown. Here, using human demographic and health information, and fish nutrient composition data from the Peruvian Amazon, we show that substituting wild inland fisheries with chicken and aquaculture has the potential to exacerbate iron deficiencies and limit essential fatty acid supplies in a region already experiencing high prevalence of anaemia and malnutrition. Substituting wild fish with chicken, however, can increase zinc and protein supplies. Chicken and aquaculture production also increase greenhouse gas emissions, agricultural land use and eutrophication. Thus, policies that enable access to wild fisheries and their sustainable management while improving the quality, diversity and environmental impacts of farmed species will be instrumental in ensuring healthy and sustainable food systems.

Food security and livelihoods of post-resettlement households around Kanha National Park.

Globally, conservation efforts have moved millions of people out of protected areas since the 1970s, yet quantitative studies on post-resettlement well-being remain a challenge due to poor documentation. Since 2008, the Indian forest department records demographic and financial details at the household level under standardized guidelines for resettlement. Here, we examine the food security of approximately 600 households' post-resettlement from Kanha National Park (KNP) in central India between 2009 and 2014. We compare food security of resettled households with host community households with a total of 3519 household surveys, conducted over three seasons within one year. We measure food security using food consumption scores (FCSs), coping strategies index (CSI) and household hunger scale (HHS). Food insecurity is widespread in the landscape, with over 80% of households reporting poor or borderline FCSs year-round. Additionally, we recorded food insecurity increases in monsoon for all households regardless of resettlement status. Results indicate that resettled households are comparable to their host community neighbors in FCS and all households use mild coping strategies to combat food insecurity. While widespread, food insecurity in the KNP landscape is not acute with very few (<10) reports of severe hunger (as measured by the HHS). Almost all foods are market bought (>90%) and sometimes supplemented by gathering locally prevalent greens or from kitchen gardens (forest dependency for food was negligible). Accruing assets and diversifying incomes from non-labor avenues would alleviate food insecurity for all households. The patterns of market dependence and food security associated with diversified stable incomes around protected areas is in contrast with many studies but is likely to occur in similar human-dominated landscapes.

Shedding light on the evidence blind spots confounding the multiple objectives of SDG 2.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 consists of five targets ranging from the eradication of hunger and malnutrition to doubling productivity of small-scale farmers and ensuring sustainable and resilient food production systems. Trade-offs and synergies arise between strategies to achieve any one of these targets, which complicates the use of evidence to guide policies and investments since most analyses focus solely on one objective. This gives rise to 'blind spots' in the evidence base, where acting to achieve one objective can have strong impacts on achieving others, hampering attempts to establish a systematic approach to attaining the multiple objectives of SDG 2. Here, we focus on three key blind spots that arise from potential interactions between increasing agricultural productivity and enhancing the sustainability of food production systems, eradicating hunger and malnutrition, and increasing the resilience of food production systems to climate change. Incorporating the consideration of synergies and trade-offs into policy-making is also essential; however, there is relatively little evidence of this occurring in national policies to date.

Assessing the sustainability of post-Green Revolution cereals in India.

Sustainable food systems aim to provide sufficient and nutritious food, while maximizing climate resilience and minimizing resource demands as well as negative environmental impacts. Historical practices, notably the Green Revolution, prioritized the single objective to maximize production over other nutritional and environmental dimensions. We quantitatively assess outcomes of alternative production decisions across multiple objectives using India's rice-dominated monsoon cereal production as an example. We perform a series of optimizations to maximize nutrient production (i.e., protein and iron), minimize greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and resource use (i.e., water and energy), or maximize resilience to climate extremes. We find that increasing the area under coarse cereals (i.e., millets, sorghum) improves nutritional supply (on average, +1% to +5% protein and +5% to +49% iron), increases climate resilience (1% to 13% fewer calories lost during an extreme dry year), and reduces GHGs (-2% to -13%) and demand for irrigation water (-3% to -21%) and energy (-2% to -12%) while maintaining calorie production and cropped area. The extent of these benefits partly depends on the feasibility of switching cropped area from rice to coarse cereals. Based on current production practices in 2 states, supporting these cobenefits could require greater manure and draft power but similar or less labor, fertilizer, and machinery. National- and state-level strategies considering multiple objectives in decisions about cereal production can move beyond many shortcomings of the Green Revolution while reinforcing the benefits. This ability to realistically incorporate multiple dimensions into intervention planning and implementation is the crux of sustainable food production systems worldwide.

Inadequate Zinc Intake in India: Past, Present, and Future.

BACKGROUND: India has made important strides in reducing nutritional deficiencies over the past several decades. However, for micronutrients such as zinc, previous studies have suggested a worsening situation, contrary to most other dietary indicators. Adding to this burden, higher carbon dioxide (CO2) levels of 550 ppm, projected to potentially occur within decades, could reduce the zinc content of many staple crops. OBJECTIVE: To assess the historical prevalence of inadequate zinc intake, as well as to estimate the future prevalence attributable to rising CO2. METHODS: Seven household food consumption surveys between 1983 and 2012 were used to calculate total dietary zinc, phytate, and absorbable zinc intakes and to assess the prevalence of historic inadequacy in zinc intake. The added nutritional effect of elevated CO2 on zinc intake is then modeled. RESULTS: Prevalence of inadequate absorbable zinc intake has increased from 17.1% (15.3%-19.0%) in 1983 to 24.6% (22.3%-27.1%) in 2011-12, corresponding to an additional 82 million people consuming inadequate zinc than would have otherwise if 1983 rates had persisted. These increases in inadequacy have been driven by a relatively constant zinc intake being increasingly insufficient to meet a 5% growth in zinc requirements due to the aging of the population. Reaching 550 ppm CO2 by 2050 could potentially increase the prevalence of inadequate zinc intake by another 3.9 percentage points (2.1-5.8), corresponding to 65 million additional people having inadequate zinc intake. CONCLUSIONS: The persistently worsening trend for zinc-opposite most other measures of human nutrition-shows that it may pose an ongoing risk unless addressed.

Fires, Smoke Exposure, and Public Health: An Integrative Framework to Maximize Health Benefits From Peatland Restoration.

Emissions of particulate matter from fires associated with land management practices in Indonesia contribute to regional air pollution and mortality. We assess the public health benefits in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore from policies to reduce fires by integrating information on fire emissions, atmospheric transport patterns, and population exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5). We use adjoint sensitivities to relate fire emissions to PM2.5 for a range of meteorological conditions and find that a Business-As-Usual scenario of land use change leads, on average, to 36,000 excess deaths per year into the foreseeable future (the next several decades) across the region. These deaths are largely preventable with fire reduction strategies, such as blocking fires in peatlands, industrial concessions, or protected areas, which reduce the health burden by 66, 45, and 14%, respectively. The effectiveness of these different strategies in mitigating human health impacts depends on the location of fires relative to the population distribution. For example, protecting peatlands through eliminating all fires on such lands would prevent on average 24,000 excess deaths per year into the foreseeable future across the region because, in addition to storing large amounts of fuel, many peatlands are located directly upwind of densely populated areas. We also demonstrate how this framework can be used to prioritize restoration locations for the Indonesian Peatland Restoration Agency based on their ability to reduce pollution exposure and health burden. This scientific framework is publicly available through an online decision support tool that allows stakeholders to readily determine the public health benefits of different land management strategies.

Aligning conservation efforts with resource use around protected areas.

A large number of economically disadvantaged people live around protected areas. Conservation efforts that focus on poverty alleviation, work on the premise that an increase in household wealth decreases use of forest resources. We surveyed 1222 households across four tiger reserves to test the paradigm that an increase in assets leads to reduced forest use and we also assess the effects of other socio-economic factors. We find that increase in assets may reduce Non-timber Forest Product (NTFP) collection, but may not necessarily reduce livestock numbers or use of wood as a cooking fuel. Households that faced more economic setbacks were more likely to state that they wanted more livestock in the future. Education is positively associated with choosing Liquefied Petroleum Gas as a cooking fuel in the future. We find site and resource-specific variation. Fifty percent of all households (range across sites: 6-98) want to collect NTFP while 91% (range: 87-96) want to retain or own more livestock over the next 5-10 years. Understanding current and future resource use will help plan context-specific conservation efforts that are better aligned with reducing specific pressures around protected areas.

Targeting restoration sites to improve connectivity in a tiger conservation landscape in India.

BACKGROUND: Maintaining and restoring connectivity between source populations is essential for the long term viability of wide-ranging species, many of which occur in landscapes that are under pressure to meet increasing infrastructure needs. Identifying barriers in corridors can help inform conservation and infrastructure development agencies so that development objectives can be achieved without compromising conservation goals. Here, we use the tiger landscape in central India as a case study to identify barriers, associate them with existing infrastructure, and quantify the potential improvement by restoring or mitigating barriers. Additionally, we propose an approach to categorize linkages based on their current status within and between Protected Areas (PAs). METHODS: We generated a hybrid landuse-landcover map of our study area by merging datasets. We used least-cost methods and circuit theory to map corridors and generate linkage metrics. We mapped barriers and used the improvement score (IS) metric to quantify potential improvement by restoring or mitigating them. Based on criteria that represent the status of corridors between-PAs and populations within-PAs, we ranked linkages into one of four categories: Cat1-linkages that currently have high quality and potential for tiger connectivity and should be maintained, Cat2W-linkages where focus on habitat and tiger populations may improve connectivity, Cat2B-linkages where focus on reducing barriers between PAs may improve connectivity, and Cat3-linkages where effort is needed to both reduce barriers between PAs and improve tiger populations and habitat within PAs. We associated barriers with infrastructure and present maps to show where restoration or mitigation measures can be targeted to have the highest potential impact. RESULTS: We mapped 567 barriers within 30 linkages in this landscape, of which 265 barriers intersect with infrastructure (694 km of roads, 150 km of railway, 48 reservoirs, 10 mines) and 302 barriers are due to land-use or gaps in forest cover. Eighty-six barriers have both roads and railways. We identified 7 Cat1, 4 Cat2w, 9 Cat2b, and 10 Cat3 linkages. Eighty surface mines and thermal power plants are within 10 km of the least-cost paths, and more coal mines are closer to connectivity areas where linkages are narrow and rank poorly on both axes. DISCUSSION: We present spatial and quantitative results that can help conservation practitioners target mitigation and restoration efforts. India is on the path to rapid economic growth, with infrastructure development planned in biodiversity-rich areas. The mitigation hierarchy of avoiding, minimizing, and offsetting impacts due to proposed development projects can be applied to corridors in this landscape. Cross-sectoral cooperation at early stages of project life-cycles to site, design, and implement solutions can maintain connectivity while meeting infrastructure needs in this rapidly changing landscape.