Mohamad Rois Ridlo

University of Florida

My career was a natural progression from my forays into local forests. Like many foresters, I grew up in a rural area, witnessing that my surrounding environment could benefit from forests. These experiences sparked my interest in forestry education, and I proceeded from there. When the general public in Indonesia thinks about forestry, I believe they immediately think of deforestation and environmental destruction; essentially they think we are the bad guys. Luckily for them we are the opposite of that. We want to make sure the forests are here for future generations to enjoy as we do.

I loved working at the local level, but I found myself craving more of a leadership role. I was drawn to the USAID-CIFOR Fellowship program. It provided me with an opportunity to study abroad and it was a life changing experience during which I discovered endless possibilities for learning and growth.

The program has positively broadened my horizons and increased my knowledge about the interlinkage between nature, society and economics around the world, which really help me to improve my logical and analytical thinking in natural resource management. Over time, my career has moved closer to conservation, leading to my current position at USAID Indonesia. I came to recognize that conservation and natural resources production are not mutually exclusive. In fact, in many cases, the combination of conservation along with production can lead to greater gains in both areas. These are skills that any leader needs to possess to meet the diverse needs of sustainability in a much changing world.

THESIS
Land Use Planning with Respect to Ecosystem Services Trade-offs and Palm Oil Expansion

Meeting growing demand for food and fiber production while balancing the environmental and climate change mitigation is a critical challenge for Indonesia. Sustainable development requires the conservation of resources with proper management. Efforts to improve governance of natural resources are constrained by the reality on the ground, including poor land use planning. A landscape precautionary approach should be prioritized so that multiple benefits within landscape can be maximized while mitigating biodiversity and ecosystem services losses. Integrated trade-off analysis and evaluation of current landscape land use planning have not yet been conducted in Ketapang District, West Borneo, Indonesia.

To address this problem, we identify formalized management and landscape governance solutions to promote a more sustainable landscape transition. The study broadly assessed how to integrate the ecosystem services concept into District land use plan for balancing the provisioning service (palm oil production) and other ecosystem service (water yield, sediment retention, carbon storage and habitat quality) benefits at a landscape scale. We identify and analyze the impacts of land-use change, simulated ecosystem services change under various land use plan scenario and analyzed trade- 11 offs between ecosystem services. The study demonstrated the importance of understanding pattern, extent, and intensity of land use configuration for delivery of ecosystem services and the influence of context specific details of oil palm expansion. Our scenario analysis shows with taking account environmental and crop production criteria into land use consideration, could positively increase oil palm production while minimized negative impacts on other ecosystem services. The outputs of the analysis can help to identify and evaluate various land use policy options and to give a better understanding to the stakeholders on potential outcomes on different land use management scenario that possibly effect to the landscape ecosystem services.

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