Land degradation is a global challenge that affects lives and livelihoods in many communities. Since 1950, about 65% of Africa's cropland, on which millions of people depend, has been affected by land degradation caused by mining, poor farming practices and illegal logging. One-quarter of the land area of Ethiopia is severely degraded. As part of interventions to restore ecosystem services, exclosures have been implemented in Ethiopia since the 1980s. But the lack of tools to support prioritization and more efficient targeting of areas for large-scale exclosure-based interventions remains a challenge. Within that perspective, the overarching objectives of the current study were: (i) to develop a Geographic Information System-based multicriteria decision-support tool that would help in the identification of suitable areas for exclosure initiatives; (ii) to provide spatially explicit information, aggregated by river basin and agroecology, on potential areas for exclosure interventions and (iii) to conduct ex-ante analysis of the potential of exclosure areas for improving ecosystem services in terms of increase in above-ground biomass (AGB) production and carbon storage. The results of this study demonstrated that as much as 10% of Ethiopia's land area is suitable for establishing exclosures. This amounts to 11 million hectares (ha) of land depending on the criteria used to define suitability for exclosure. Of this total, a significant proportion (0.5–0.6 million ha) is currently under agricultural land-use systems. In terms of propriety river basins, we found that the largest amount of suitable area for exclosures falls in the Abay (2.6 million ha) and Tekeze (2.2 million ha) river basins, which are hosts to water infrastructure such as hydropower dams and are threatened by siltation. Ex-ante analysis of ecosystem services indicated that about 418 million tons of carbon can be stored in the AGB through exclosure land use. Ethiopia has voluntarily committed to the Bonn Challenge to restore 15 million ha of degraded land by 2025. The decision-support tool developed by the current study and the information so generated go toward supporting the planning, implementation and monitoring of these kinds of local and regional initiatives.

中文翻译：

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多标准决策支持系统，用于评估埃塞俄比亚基于圈地保护的潜力

土地退化是影响许多社区生活和生计的全球性挑战。自 1950 年以来，数百万人赖以生存的非洲约 65% 的农田受到采矿、不良耕作方式和非法采伐造成的土地退化的影响。埃塞俄比亚四分之一的土地面积严重退化。作为恢复生态系统服务干预措施的一部分，自 1980 年代以来，埃塞俄比亚一直在实施封闭措施。但是，缺乏工具来支持优先考虑和更有效地针对大规模基于封闭的干预措施的区域仍然是一个挑战。从这个角度来看，当前研究的总体目标是：(i) 开发一个基于地理信息系统的多标准决策支持工具，有助于确定适用于公开倡议的区域；(ii) 提供按流域和农业生态汇总的空间明确信息，关于可能进行封闭干预的区域，以及 (iii) 开展事前在增加地上生物量 (AGB) 生产和碳储存方面，分析禁区在改善生态系统服务方面的潜力。这项研究的结果表明，埃塞俄比亚多达 10% 的土地面积适合建立保护区。这相当于 1,100 万公顷 (ha) 的土地，具体取决于用于定义封闭适宜性的标准。在这一总数中，很大一部分（0.5-60 万公顷）目前处于农业用地系统之下。在适当流域方面，我们发现最大的适宜围护面积在阿拜河流域（260万公顷）和特科泽河流域（220万公顷），它们是水电大坝等水利基础设施的所在地，受到威胁。通过淤积。事前生态系统服务分析表明，约 4.18 亿吨碳可以通过封闭土地使用储存在 AGB 中。埃塞俄比亚已自愿承诺到 2025 年恢复 1500 万公顷退化土地的波恩挑战。当前研究开发的决策支持工具和由此产生的信息将用于支持此类地方和区域的规划、实施和监测倡议。