Understanding and governing spillovers and leakage

Abstract

The session’s goal is to progress on measuring, quantifying, understanding and developing solutions to address the conservation threats related to telecouplings, such as those embodied in trade flows. This presentation discusses one specific type of linkage between distant places, i.e., land-use spillovers defined as situations where land-use changes or interventions on land use (policy, program, new technologies…) in one place result in effects on land use in another place. We highlight leakage as one specific form of spillover caused by a land-use intervention, such as an environmental conservation policy, which triggers land-use change elsewhere, thereby reducing the overall benefit of the local intervention. We present a recent theoretical effort synthesizing the different pathways of some major forms of spillovers including leakage, and the conditions under which these different pathways may occur. We then discuss current operational advances in improving the tracking and transparency of supply chains in order to possibly identify and respond to leakage, and discuss how such transparency efforts may deliver on improving the sustainability of international supply chains of agricultural commodities. We then discuss how these concepts help understand movements of supply chains and land-use changes in Southern Africa. For that purpose, we present remote-sensing based maps of land-cover and land-use changes in Northern Mozambique, and relate these maps to telecoupling flows of agricultural and forestry products trade and financial investments from and to Mozambique, and to spatially-explicit data on protected areas, land use policies and different land tenure.