The main issues in prospecting development strategies for rural agroforest landscapes in developing countries are related to:

• non-linear baseline trajectories;
• trade-offs between economical utilities and environmental services; and,
• additionality or change compared to baseline scenario.

The FALLOW Model has been developed as a tool to prospect the likely baseline trajectory and the likely shifts of some scenarios on development strategies from the baseline. The strategies may indicate:

• losses in both economical and ecological values (collapse);
• gains in economical value but loss in ecological value (red development);
• gain in ecological value but loss in economical value (conservation); or,
• gains in both economical and ecological values (green development).

How does it work?

The FALLOW Model simulates land use/cover change dynamics due to local responses on external drivers with various feedback loops, and assesses the consequences of the resulting land use mosaics on economical utilities (welfare and food security) and environmental services (carbon stocks, watershed functions and biodiversity).

How the model has been applied?

1. Which Development Strategy will you use: True Development or Pseudo Development?

There are two strategies currently practised by development agencies for the development of tree-based land-use systems in developing countries: a project-based approach and a programmatic approach. Both approaches involve regulations and interventions in order to speed up the adoption of tree-based land use systems by farmers.

The project-based approach is bounded by temporal and spatial boundaries, done through the provision of incentives and top-down rules, without any substantial effort to remove the real constraints. Thus, this approach can potentially reverse the development process from its normal trajectory. 

The programmatic approach is done through substantial removal of real constraints that restrict farmers, including, among others: accessible markets, legal tenure arrangements, availability of reliable technical information and local investment.

The FALLOW Model was applied to four landscapes in Indonesia  Muara Sungkai (MS) and Way Tenong (WT) in Lampung, Sumatra; Sidenreng Rappang (SR) in South Sulawesi; and Sebuku (SB) in East Kalimantan, to test the internal consistency of the hypothesis that farmer-led development of tree-based land-use systems in response to a programmatic approach (blue circles) can convert degraded forest lands at low public cost and form an attractive alternative to the project-based approach (red triangle).  Relative additionalities on carbon and welfare from the baselines were used to assess each development strategy.

From the results, most of project-based approaches will likely gain carbon but lose welfare, while most of programmatic approaches will likely gain both carbon and welfare. Results are given by van Noordwijk et al. (2008).

2. S-curve story of subsidy for development.

The impacts of subsidies to boost the development of rubber-based systems in initially grassland area of Muara Sungkai, Lampung, Sumatra, was prospected using the FALLOW Model.  Without subsidies, it is impossible that the landscape could be transformed into rubber agroforests.  But, using the model, we also found that subsidies should obey the law of S-curve. Results are given by Suyamto et al.

3.  Sugarcane potentially creates contagious corridor for fire spread.

Boosting the development of sugarcane plantation would likely increase the fire risk to the landscape. Results are given by Suyamto et al. (2005).

How to use it?

• The FALLOW Model is a raster-based spatially explicit model with spatial resolution of one ha, temporal resolution of one year and socio-economical resolution of one community, applicable for rural agroforested landscapes.
• The model uses PCRaster (http://pcraster.geo.uu.nl) as the main platform.
• Your computer should have operating system of Microsoft Windows XP Professional, version 2002 or later, which processor having at least 3.2 GHz of speed and 496 MB of RAM, and which hard disks having at least 15 GB of free space

How good is it?

• Spatial goodness of fit of simulated land use: 41 to 70%.
• Relative area difference of simulated land use: 10 to 19%.
• Uncertainty of simulated carbon stocks: -1 to 4 Mg.ha-1.

 

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