Meine Van Noordwijk

• PhD Wageningen, 1987
• Distinguished Science Fellow at Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research

Landowners' conceptualisation of the connection between trees and water matters for their land‐use decisions and the allocation of water resources in general. Tree–water interactions are commonly explored and explained through a biophysical lens where competing demands for water from other land uses, such as plantation forests and horticulture, are...

Background Farmers in water scarce landscapes adapt in response to the erratic weather conditions. Adaptation through irrigation, depend on water access, while impacting on downstream water availability. Competition for scarce water commons among multiple users defines a collective action problem. Farmer land-, and water-use decisions are based on...

Background Coffee-growing communities in Yayu, Southwestern Ethiopia, are perceived to be food secure due to income from coffee production. However, while income ensures caloric sufficiency, it does not necessarily translate into complete food security, especially in terms of nutrient intake. Our study assessed the food and nutrition security of sm...

1. New policies for deforestation-free trade policies, such as the European Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), critically depend on the definition of forest, as mappable land cover and/or as rights-related land use type. Areas with a high tree cover combined with agricultural use and agroforestry are excluded from the official forest definition but a...

More than 40% of the total oil palm area in Indonesia is owned and managed by smallholders. For large plantations, guidelines are available on so-called ‘best management practices’, which should give superior yields at acceptable costs when followed carefully. We tested a subset of such practices in a sample of smallholder plantations, aiming to in...

Restoring hydrological functions affected by economic development trajectories faces social and economic challenges. Given that stakeholders often only have a partial understanding of functioning socio-hydrological systems, it is expected that knowledge sharing will help them to become more aware of the consequences of their land use choices and op...

Water-related conflicts in river catchments occur due to both internal and external pressures that affect catchment water availability. Lack of common understanding of human–water perspectives by catchment stakeholders increases the complexity of human–water issues at the river catchment scale. Among a range of participatory approaches, the develop...

CONTEXT: Protective roles of shade trees for climate-resilient cacao appear to depend on tree-site matching. Agroforestry practices involve a wide range of context-specific management options, which can be complex and pose challenges due to tradeoffs. OBJECTIVE: To assess the benefits and drawbacks, across a range of contexts, of various cacao-bas...

Water-related conflicts in river catchments occur due to both internal and external pressures that affect catchment water availability. Lack of shared understanding by catchment stakeholders increase the complexity of human-water issues at the river catchment scale. Among a range of participatory approaches, the development and use of serious games...

Instrumental and relational values of nature to people affect what is considered and portrayed as rational and aligned with moral foundations. Decision-making on natural resources involves individuals, collectives, and their modes of communication. Effective science-policy interfaces to change the game and transform development trajectories need to...

Use of tropical peatlands as the last frontier for migrant-dependent expansion of industrial agriculture has become problematic, as drainage of peatlands increases fire risk. Haze and health costs attract high-level policy attention. Repairing damage by rewetting requires collective action that is hard to achieve, with a lack of dedicated instituti...

Values held in agricultural extension systems determine which extension goals can be reached. Globally changing socio-ecological contexts require a paradigm shift in agricultural extension systems from a top-down approach dominated by instrumental values to achieve the primary goal of increasing yields, to a more site-specific relational and partic...

In globally coordinated efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), perspectives on instrumental (goal-oriented, ecological–economic) and relational (harmony-oriented, social–ecological) values of nature vary between, but matter to both local and global actors and stakeholders. The (sub)-national motivation to eng...

The few percent of soil organic carbon (SOC) among mineral components form the interface of climate, plant growth, soil biological processes, physical transport infrastructure, and chemical transformations. We explore maps, models, myths, motivation, means of implementation, and modalities for transformation. Theories of place relate geographic var...

Assertion of the validity of the way agents' decision-making remains one of the central epistemological problems in empirical agent-based model (ABM) simulations. Reliable and robust models of individual and group-level decision-making are needed if scenarios are to be relevant for policies with implications in natural resource management. Serious...

Payment for ecosystem service (PES) contracts encounters several challenges, encompassing information asymmetry in determining appropriate pricing, communication gaps involving multiple motivations and the evolving societal norms surrounding sustainability for voluntary contracts. Auctions serve as mechanisms for competitively awarding such contrac...

Smallholder farmers and their agroecosystems in active volcanic landscapes need to deal with and recover from eruptions. Resilience to extreme shocks may increase with system diversity, enhancing food and income security and ecosystem services provision; however, the longer term effects of volcanic ash are rarely assessed. To test the hypothesis th...

Restoring hydrological functions affected by economic development trajectories faces social and economic challenges. Given that stakeholders often have a partial understanding of socio-hydrological systems, it is expected that knowledge sharing among them will help to enhance their understanding of the socio-hydrological system and the consequences...

Twenty-five years since foundational publications on valuing ecosystem services for human well-being1,2, addressing the global biodiversity crisis³ still implies confronting barriers to incorporating nature’s diverse values into decision-making. These barriers include powerful interests supported by current norms and legal rules such as property ri...

The Life Frames of Values, recently endorsed by Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, articulate four different ways nature matters to people living in, from, with, and as nature. These frames distinguish value perceptions of, and ways to communicate about, the living world. We look to expand understandin...

Degrading soils reduce the tolerance to a variable and changing climate; managing soil fertility is key to climate change adaptation. Rural communities of the Kara River Basin in Togo see soil and climate issues as closely linked. To identify local solutions to adapt to climate and land-use-change-induced soil fertility decline, this study employed...

Volcanic ash deposition disrupts soil surface hydrology. Our previous study showed that soil infiltration was reduced eightfold after a volcanic eruption in various land-use systems adjacent to Mount Kelud (Indonesia). Yet, soil macroporosity was relatively unchanged, indicating soil hydrophobicity. We tested the hypothesis that hydrophobicity or...

Dependable supplies of clean water, as provided by springs, have attracted human settlements inducing the emergence of local institutions to protect water sources as a common good, often along with surrounding forests or tree cover. Instrumental values of nature as a source of clean water used to be embedded in relational values of sacred forests t...

Ecological restoration with a multispecies and multifunctional approach can accelerate the re-establishment of numerous ecosystem services. The challenges with land that is degraded, damaged, or destroyed post-mining are the low productivity of soil and the high potential for contaminants. Herein, we evaluated the multispecies and multifunctional a...

Mitigadaptation, tree-based synergy between the global climate change mitigation and adaptation agendas, has been slowly emerging in the 30 years of climate science–policy interaction with its various ups and downs, false starts and ever-increasing urgency of bending the climate curve. The potential contribution of agroforestry to the climate chang...

Nationally determined contributions (NDCs) have emerged as the main tool for defining, communicating, and potentially reporting contributions of “parties” to the Paris Agreement on climate change. Agroforestry has been identified as a key part of most developing country NDCs; hence, it is a potentially important contributor to global climate object...

An inventory of nearly 10 billion individual trees has been compiled for the African drylands, estimating biomass and carbon stocks. The data will aid dryland restoration projects and assessments of the land carbon budget. An inventory of nearly 10 billion individual trees.

The impacts on food security of a transition from agriculture focused on local consumption to the participation in global markets are uncertain, with both positive and negative effects reported in the literature. In Ethiopia, coffee production for global markets has attracted growers from across the country to the coffee-forest zones. From a nation...

Soil organic matter (SOM) is a crucial component of soil, through which physical, chemical, and biological characteristics interact in a local context. Within the forest category, the conversion of natural forests to monoculture plantations has raised concerns in Indonesia over the loss of soil functions, similar to conversion to agriculture. In na...

Kusumawati IA, Mardiani MO, Purnamasari E, Batoro J, van Noordwijk M, Hairiah K. 2022. Agrobiodiversity and plant use categories in coffee-based agroforestry in East Java, Indonesia. Biodiversitas 23: 5412-5422. Beyond documenting the ethnobotanical knowledge by managers of complex agroforestry systems, the actual use of such knowledge in adapting...

Kusumawati IA, Mardiani MO, Purnamasari E, Batoro J, van Noordwijk M, Hairiah K. 2022. Agrobiodiversity and plant use categories in coffee-based agroforestry in East Java, Indonesia. Biodiversitas 23: 5412-5422. Beyond documenting the ethnobotanical knowledge by managers of complex agroforestry systems, the actual use of such knowledge in adapting...

Tree rings depend on seasonal variation in radial tree growth. Where they can be identified, their interannual variation may reflect climate variability. Compared to its use in temperate and boreal regions, tree-ring analysis has been less applied in tropical Africa, with weaker seasonality. Daniellia oliveri often forms the tallest trees in agrofo...

Certification aims to restore consumer trust in value chains, addressing social and environmental issues of public concern. Indonesian policies support coffee farmers to follow 'good agricultural practice' to increase global market access, expecting its standards to gain global recognition. Cost-benefit evaluation of certification requires accounti...

This is the final text version of Chapter 1. A laid-out version of the full assessment report will be made available in the coming months.

This is the final text version of Chapter 4. A laid-out version of the full assessment report will be made available in the coming months.

Mardiani MO, Kusumawati IA, Purnamasari E, Prayogo C, van Noordwijk V, Hairiah K. 2022. Local ecological knowledge of coffee agroforestry farmers on earthworms and their relation to soil quality in East Java (Indonesia). Biodiversitas 23: 3344-3354. Farmers manage their land-based on their understanding of biotic and abiotic factors, including soil...

Participatory integrated assessment (PIA) emerged as a response to conventional integrated assessment methods in the mid-to-late 1990s. PIA is based on the tenet that more inclusive stakeholder involvement may lead to increased accountability and legitimacy in decision-making, greater levels of trust and social learning between participants, and im...

Biomass is fundamental to circular agricultural systems. Estimates of above- and below-ground biomass on agricultural land based upon IPCC Tier 1 estimates are compared with an updated carbon density map based on remote sensing, with results indicating the methodology and initial estimations are robust. Two scenarios are evaluated to estimate carbo...

Background and purpose Volcanic eruptions of pyroclastic tephra, including the ash-sized fraction (< 2 mm; referred to as volcanic ash), have negative direct impacts on soil quality. The intensity (deposit thickness, particle-size distribution) and frequency (return period) of tephra deposition influence soil formation. Vulnerability and subsequent...

The Indonesian state forest managers have accepted farmer-managed coffee agroforestry in their estates as part of their social forestry program. Access by local farming communities to state-owned plantation forestry supports public motivation to maintain forest cover. However, balancing the expectations and needs of forest managers with those of th...

Key highlights • Oil palm is native to West Africa with local (‘artisanal’) processing of palm oil, from where it spread and expanded globally as an essential commodity for several industries. • In Africa, oil palm production systems include agro-industrial plantations, contract plantations, and independent production systems, the latter either as...

The urgent global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions depends on political commitments to common but differentiated responsibility. Carbon footprints as a metric of attributable emissions reflect individually determined contributions within, and aggregated national contributions between, countries. Footprints per unit product (e.g., of food, feed...

In order to facilitate hydrological restoration, initiatives have been conducted to promote tree growth in degraded and rewetted peatlands in Indonesia. For these initiatives to be successful, tree seedlings need to be able to survive flooding episodes, with or without shade. We investigated the survival rates and the formation of adventitious root...

Backgrounds and aims Litter protects the underlying soil, depending on litterfall and decomposition, but dynamics of the standing litter stock in agroforestry systems remain poorly understood. We aimed to unravel effects of litter quality, temporal patterns, microclimate, and a possible home-field advantage (HFA) on standing litter dynamics across...

Until recently, many so-called neglected and underutilized species (NUS) were not present in global markets despite playing a pivotal role in the local livelihoods in their places of origin. Today, some NUS receive substantial global interest and face growing global demands. Sudden increases in consumer demand trigger prices to rise; land-use chang...

A main question in restoration of degraded forests and forest landscapes recovering from logging and fire is what to expect from natural regeneration through surviving propagules in the soil or seed sources and associated dispersal agents from the surrounding landscape mosaic, as alternative to tree planting. Tree diversity in secondary forests may...

Peatlands are shaped by slow litter decomposition, but threshold decomposition rates that allow peat formation remain unclear. Can agroforestry in the tropics be compatible with paludiculture that allows peat formation? We explored the determinants of litter decomposition in wet agroforests adjacent to tropical peatlands in Central Kalimantan (Indo...

In Indonesian development policy, soil security is primarily understood as part of food security, expansion of the plantation economy, and resettlement schemes rather than as soil-related Sustainable-Development-Goal concerns for health, water, energy, jobs, protection from disasters, changing climates, life in water and life on land. A recent pape...

Metrics of hydrological mimicry ('mimetrics') reflect similarity in ecological structure and/or functions between managed and natural ecosystems. Only the land-surface parts of hydrological cycles are directly visible and represented in local knowledge and water-related legislation. Human impacts on water cycles (HIWC) can, beyond climate change, a...

In order to facilitate hydrological restoration efforts, initiatives have been conducted to promote tree growth in degraded and rewetted peatlands in Indonesia. For this initiatives to be successful, tree seedlings need to be able to survive flooding episodes, with or without shade. We investigated the survival of different shading and water levels...

Background and PurposeAbove- and belowground organic inputs feed decomposer communities in the soil enhancing soil organic matter (C org ) formation, depending on the vegetation, soil, contextual factors and human management of (agro)ecosystems. Plant-soil feedback in volcanic ash rapidly increases C org during transformation to Andisols. We quanti...

Multi-level landscape governance refers to the combination of rules and decision-making processes which are carried out by various types of actors at various levels ranging from local to global levels that have an interest in the landscape; and together shape the landscape's future. Like other tropical peatlands in Indonesia, Pelang Landscape in Ke...

Agroforestry generally contributes to rural food and nutrition security (FNS). However, specialization on commodity-oriented agroforestry practices or management strategies can weaken local food sourcing when terms of trade fluctuate, as is the case of coffee in Ethiopia. Hence, this study assessed the trade-offs that smallholder farming households...

Increased agricultural use of tropical peatlands has negative environmental effects. Drainage leads to landscape-wide degradation and fire risks. Livelihood strategies in peatland ecosystems have traditionally focused on transitions from riverbanks to peatland forests. Riparian ‘Kaleka’ agroforests with more than 100 years of history persist in the...

Agroforestry, land use at the agriculture-forestry interface that implies the presence of trees on farms and/or farmers in forests, has a history that may be as old as agriculture, but as an overarching label and topic of formal scientific analysis, it is in its fifth decade [...]

Agroforestry as active area of multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research aims to bridge several artificial divides that have respectable historical roots but hinder progress toward sustainable development goals. These include: (1) The segregation of “forestry trees” and “agricultural crops”, ignoring the continuity in functional properties and...

Fire and overgrazing reduce aboveground biomass, leading to land degradation and potential impacts on soil organic carbon (SOC) and total nitrogen (TN) dynamics. However, empirical data are lacking on how prescribed burning and livestock exclusion impact SOC in the long-term. Here we analyse the effects of 19 years of prescribed annual burning and...

Tree establishment to restore degraded boreal post-mining lands is challenged by low soil productivity, a harsh microclimate, and potentially high contaminant levels. The use of mixed vegetation can facilitate the microclimate but increase competition for soil resources. A statistical accounting of plant–plant interactions and adaptation to multisp...

Agroforestry (AF)-based adaptation to global climate change can consist of (1) reversal of negative trends in diverse tree cover as generic portfolio risk management strategy; (2) targeted, strategic, shift in resource capture (e.g. light, water) to adjust to changing conditions (e.g. lower or more variable rainfall, higher temperatures); (3) veget...

Production landscapes depend on, but also affect, ecosystem services. In the Rejoso watershed (East Java, Indonesia), uncontrolled groundwater use for paddies reduces flow of lowland pressure-driven artesian springs that supply drinking water to urban stakeholders. Analysis of the water balance suggested that the decline by about 30% in spring disc...

More than 500 lakes in Indonesia have been recognized as important parts of local economies and, at least in some cases, identity, but there is little literature on resource management and collective action. By reviewing literature and using a 'serious game', this paper aims to (1) review some of the currently used generic frameworks for understand...

A systematic approach to tree planting and management globally is hindered by the limited synthesis of information sources on tree uses and species priorities. To help address this, the authors ‘mined’ information from 23 online global and regional databases to assemble a list of the most frequent tree species deemed useful for planting according t...

Natural regeneration depends on surviving propagules in the soil, seed sources from a surrounding landscape mosaic, and dispersal agents. We compiled and analyzed four sets of case studies varying in degree of disturbance, for secondary forests recovering from logging, fire, and conversion to agroforest in Sumatra or Kalimantan (Indonesia) on miner...

The way the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted human lives and livelihoods constituted a stress test for agroecosystems in developing countries, as part of rural–urban systems and the global economy. We applied two conceptual schemes to dissect the evidence in peer-reviewed literature so far, as a basis for better understanding and enabling ‘building back...

The shea tree, Vitellaria paradoxa, shields people, crops and livestock in West African parkland agroforestry systems from climate variability. Accurate estimates of accumulated biomass of such key species may support ways to secure financial incentives within global climate policies. In this quest, variation in allometric relations used for biomas...

The conversion of natural forests to different land uses still occurs in various parts of Southeast Asia with poor records of impact on ecosystem services and biodiversity. We quantified such impacts on earthworm diversity in two communes of Quang Nam province, Vietnam. Both communes are situated within buffer zones of a nature reserve where remain...

The shea tree, Vitellaria paradoxa, shields people, crops and livestock in West African parkland agroforestry systems from climate variability. Accurate estimates of accumulated biomass of such key species may support ways to secure financial incentives within global climate policies. In this quest, variation in allometric relations used for biomas...

The rubber agroforestry experiments in Jambi started with the theory of change that productive clonal rubber could be economically used in low-labour intensity rubber agroforests, allowing selective retention of forest species or planted fruit trees in interrows. At the end of what was expected to be a 25-year production cycle we revisited the farm...

Forests and trees have a major role to play to advance the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development and address major global challenge such as: climate change, deforestation, forest and land degradation, biodiversity erosion, poverty and food insecurity. Over the last ten years, with the Bonn Challenge, the New York Declaration on Forests, the UN De...

Forests, trees and agroforestry are part of major land-use transitions worldwide, with an impact on the balance between the global issues of planetary boundaries and local concerns about livelihoods and peoples’ rights. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include complex trade-offs between various local and global interests in forests or de...