Climate change, agriculture and forest conservation: Future land use trade-offs for coffee production in Costa Rica

Natalia Aristizabal, Rubenstein School of Natural Resources, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, Kelley Langhans, Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Roger Madrigal, Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE), Turrialba, Costa Rica and Taylor Ricketts, Gund Institute for Environment, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT

Background/Question/Methods
Climate change in the tropics can substantially affect biodiversity and farming livelihoods. The natural distribution of suitable land for tropical crops, such as coffee, is shifting, following cooler temperatures higher in the mountains. Similarly, the distribution of bee pollinators is changing, provoking mismatches between coffee production and pollination services. Climate change projections show that in the next 40 years, the remaining protected mountainous forests will become suitable coffee production areas in Costa Rica. These changes can create conflict between biodiversity conservation and coffee production for land use decision-makers at the farm and national levels. Thus, this project analyzes the trade-offs between coffee production and other ecosystem services in areas of predicted conflict under three land-use policy scenarios. A scenario prioritized coffee production over forest conservation, another prioritized forest conservation over coffee production, and the last scenario was a hybrid approach between these two models. Based on the current distribution of coffee crops, we first used environmental niche modeling to predict suitable land for coffee production under different climate change scenarios until 2050. Next, using published information and experts’ knowledge on the use of habitat and floral resources by bees in Costa Rican coffee farms, we used InVEST models to predict pollination services under the three aforementioned land-use scenarios. Finally, we assessed the trade-offs in ecosystem services between native forest conversion for coffee production and conservation of native forests in Costa Rica.
Results/Conclusions
Our models indicate that prioritizing land for coffee production will reduce crop pollination services and likely impact other forest ecosystem services. On the other hand, prioritizing only forest conservation will reduce areas suitable for coffee production, impacting farmers whose livelihoods depend on coffee production. Thus, our results support a hybrid model in which both coffee production and pollination services are prioritized. This project provides land-use decision-makers an informed baseline of predicted climate change impacts for coffee production and national forest conservation stated goals. The integration of current knowledge of bee biology, landscape ecology, and ecosystem service science toward finding optimal land-use models represents a robust framework for safeguarding biodiversity conservation and farming livelihoods. Future work on this topic should focus on farming adaptation to climate change and the social implications for farmers whose land will become less suitable for coffee production. Also, trade-off analyses should incorporate the complexity of changes in bundles of ecosystem services.