About This Project

Climate change is exerting a substantial impact on agriculture-based livelihood communities such as Indonesia. Most of the economy of the local communities relies on monoculture (e.g. rice) which is related to massive use of fertilisers, strong dependence on fossil fuels, and soil erosion. In this context, the goal of the project is to develop a spatial optimization framework to identify the optimal location and required features of regenerative agricultural systems replacing monocultures.

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What is the context of this research?

Unprivileged communities lack sufficient access to food in total or in the variety of food needed to fulfil daily nutritional requirements. Their condition is threatened by climate change due to its adverse effects on food access, utilisation, and price stability. The association between extreme weather conditions and food price increases has been already documented. Climate change will keep on increasing food insecurity and inequalities between and within communities. In this scenario, regenerative agriculture’s ability to contribute to food security and counter climate change is widely claimed, but extensive studies that develop and explore country-wide scenarios with the wealth of available high-resolution spatially-detailed datasets, are lacking.

What is the significance of this project?

This project will enable farmers, policymakers and civil society, to explore the alternative scenarios in which monoculture croplands are replaced by regenerative agriculture systems and their role in countering inequalities and mitigating climate change at the community level all over Indonesia. This, in turn, contributes to informing decision making by land managers, farmers and policymakers.

Although the project will be focused on Indonesia, the approaches and the tools that will be developed and used are meant to be replicable and scalable elsewhere. Hence, the analysis will be based on open access data and all the data and code will be made freely available on Github, allowing anyone to use or adapt the framework.

What are the goals of the project?

The project has two main goals. First to provide a planning-oriented, inequality-focused analysis of Indonesia’s food security and accessibility. Second, to develop a spatial framework to identify the optimal location and required features (e.g size, agronomic productivity) of regenerative agricultural systems to replace monocultures and ensure food accessibility to the nearest local communities.