Climate change mitigation in agroforest landscapes through sustainable sourcing policies (CAFSUS)

Project summary

The sustainable development goal 15.2 calls for global action to end deforestation and restore degraded forests, which is key to reducing the adverse impacts of climate events especially in low-income countries. A recently issued EU deforestation regulation (EUDR) restricts import of commodities and products associated with deforestation, including coffee. The EUDR enters an already saturated environmental governance space, comprising government regulation, certification schemes and landscape approaches to sustainability, opening the questions about its impact for trade partners. By design, the anticipated positive impact of the EUDR should be a reduced rate of deforestation and forest degradation, but negative socio-economic and environmental consequences could arise, including reallocation of exports, shifting production to unsuitable areas, or raising market barriers, which can perpetuate inequalities and increase livelihood risks. This project will therefore examine the implications of the EUDR for: landscape cover, household livelihoods, value chain structures, and systems of global environmental governance applying the advanced social and data science methods to high-resolution satellite and primary data from the coffee value chain. The project aims to incorporate insights from global value chain theory more forthrightly into a model of global environmental governance, using the results of physical landscape change assessment and household-level livelihoods analysis as decisive components. The project is implemented between University of Copenhagen, University of Sydney, National Economics University in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, and Development and Policies Research Center. This interdisciplinary partnership is crucial for obtaining unique geo-spatial, qualitative, and quantitative data; strong capacity building, including education of PhD and MSc students; generation of policy-relevant research, and dissemination and uptake of the project findings in climate mitigation and environmental governance strategies. Anticipated scientific outputs of the project include peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, policy briefs, and newspaper articles, jointly written by project participants from Vietnam and Denmark.