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Advancing gender equality for rural women in treed landscapes: 10 years of FTA (Vol. 5, Issue 4)

Advancing gender equality for rural women in treed landscapes: 10 years of FTA (Vol. 5, Issue 4)

15 October, 2021

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Welcome to the October issue of the FTA Newsletter, on the occasion of the International Day of Rural Women (IDRW). This issue is special: as CGIAR research programs are coming to an end in December, this will be the last gender newsletter of the FTA program as we know it. For this reason, we asked our Gender team members to leave us with a personal statement about their experience in this decadal journey.

On the one hand, we look back at the incredible work carried out by the FTA scientific community during these 10 years. On the other hand, we look ahead to future gender research that builds on the lessons learned and achievements of the FTA program in creating more equitable, inclusive and sustainable forest, tree and agroforestry landscapes – especially for rural women.

“Working as part of the FTA Gender team has been an incredible experience. We addressed gender challenges and concerns across different geographies, tackling a broad array of resource governance issues. The achievements and learnings stemming from FTA’s work are tremendous both in terms of conceptual and methodological development. I look forward to leveraging as we continue this collaborative work despite the formal end of FTA.”

Iliana Monterroso, Scientist and Co-coordinator of Gender and Social Inclusion Research

This year’s IDRW theme focuses on the critical role of rural women in “cultivating good for all”. Women are the custodians of household food security, on the front line in fighting extreme malnutrition, poverty and hunger. They are also a huge and underrecognized agricultural labour force worldwide. Yet, systemic barriers discriminate against them and exclude them from important natural resource management and livelihood decisions.

Concerns for gender equality and social inclusion have been carefully integrated in FTA since its very beginning. In addition to conducting research specifically on gender and on women’s and men’s empowerment, FTA has mainstreamed gender throughout its research portfolio, aiming to make transformative change at multiple scales, from local to global levels. Our researchers have worked tirelessly to lift gender-based barriers at all levels, from policies and other formal institutions to social norms and unequal intra-household power relations, to support rural women’s agency.

“The knowledge, partnerships and learning gathered throughout the life of the FTA program confirm that achieving gender equality requires challenging power relations, at the household level, at the community level and within ourselves as researchers. This requires involving men and boys in efforts to empower women and working with households to acknowledge shared and conflicting interests within the home, allowing gender inequalities to be recognized as a constraint to resilience, prosperity and sustainability. FTA has contributed to understanding how a more equal world is good for trees, forests and people.”

Ana Maria Paez Valencia, Gender Specialist

“The FTA Gender cross-cutting theme has provided a rare and essential opportunity for researchers to advance with the gender questions, join critical communities of practice and try new approaches to addressing complex problems that are rooted in the imbalances across the gender spectrum. I hope to see our good work live on through the legacy of FTA gender team collaboration and synthesis research.”

Emily Jeanne Gallagher, Scientist

The partnerships and coalitions, research findings and innovations of FTA, and the change these have effected on the ground will have a long-lasting impact. The talent and resources FTA has invested in supporting the amazing energy and agency of rural women, men and all the other actors championing gender equality, set a clear pathway on which efforts to achieve gender equal and inclusive forests and agroforestry landscapes and societies can be sustained.

Many issues that FTA was designed to investigate were originally dominated by technical or biophysical views and perspectives (such as for instance climate change mitigation, forest land restoration, tree commodity production and preserving forests, and so on). On these issues, FTA has pushed the cursor of policies and approaches to make them more “people-centred”, and especially also more inclusive and more equitable towards women. As we will show in the soon to come series on “FTA Highlights of a Decade”, this has contributed to effectively changing narratives, and to concrete progress on the ground.

We hope that the achievements of FTA’s dedicated scientific community in this area will continue to inspire gender specialists working in tree, forest and agroforestry landscapes for a better world.

Vincent Gitz, FTA Director and Marlène Elias, FTA Gender Research Coordinator

Special feature

A feminist approach to restoration – Interview with Marlène Elias

In a special issue of Ecological Restoration titled “Restoration for whom, by whom: Exploring the socio-political dimensions of restoration”, scientists make the case for exploring these dimensions through the lens of feminist political ecology. We spoke with Marlène Elias, FTA’s Coordinator of Gender Equality and Social Inclusion who was co-guest editor of the special issue. Read more.

News

Gender-transformative pathways in the regreening landscapes of Ghana

As part of Regreening Africa’s effort to meaningfully integrate gender issues, an innovative study was set up to determine whether taking an explicitly gender-transformative approach to land restoration in Ghana would not only foster changes in harmful gender norms and attitudes but also contribute to desirable environmental outcomes. Read more about it here!

From Tree to Fork is growing!

More foods from trees are being added weekly to our FTA campaign on fruits and vegetables, accompanied by incredibly beautiful infographics. The campaign has also been launched in Spanish. Stay updated with our weekly entries, visit the dedicated website!

The rise and fall of rubber: effects on women and livelihoods

Rubber expansion and decline have major implications for Chinese farmers, particularly women, and their livelihoods. In this feature, we examine the impact on women in Xishuangbanna, China’s ‘rubber heartland’. Read more.

Transforming gender norms in land and resource rights

A new research project between a consortium of CGIAR Centres and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) will generate evidence on the potential contribution of different kinds of gender transformative approaches for achieving more equitable and fairer outcomes for men and women in accessing and controlling land and its resources. Read about it!

Shaping a future that ensures women are at the center of the Ghana shea trade

Six villages in Ghana faced with resource, soil and land use changes participated in social learning-oriented activities to explore customary systems of land and tree tenure and women’s access to resources. More about this learning experience.

Food Systems Summit reveals challenges of transforming global food production

Governments, companies and other organizations offered more than 200 commitments at the world’s first food systems summit aimed at addressing unequal access to food in a more sustainable, healthier and equitable way. Read about the UNFSS.

Banner photo by O. Girard/CIFOR. News photos, from top, by: Ana Maria Paez Valencia/ICRAF; ICRAF; Aulia Erlangga/CIFOR; Axel Fassio/CIFOR; Giulio Napolitano/UN Photo.

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Publications

Women's Changing Opportunities and Aspirations Amid Male Outmigration: Insights from Makueni County, Kenya

Onto the Farm, into the Home: How Intrahousehold Gender Dynamics Shape Land Restoration in Eastern Kenya

Disciplines, Sectors, Motivations and Power Relations in Forest Landscape Restoration

Exploring Gender Equity in Ecological Restoration: The Case of a Market-Based Program in Kenya

Equitable and Inclusive Landscape Restoration Planning: Learning from a Restoration Opportunity Assessment in India

Restoration of Urban Water Commons: Navigating Social-Ecological Fault Lines and Inequities

Enhancing synergies between gender equality and biodiversity, climate, and land degradation neutrality goals: Lessons from gender-responsive nature-based approaches

Améliorer les droits et les vies des femmes grâce à une restauration équitable entre les sexes

Ten people-centered rules for socially sustainable ecosystem restoration

Restoration for Whom, by Whom? A Feminist Political Ecology of Restoration

Three Approaches to Restoration and Their Implications for Social Inclusion

Implementation of gender responsive research in development projects

Gender and Ethnicity in Vietnam Agroforestry Landscapes: Lessons for Project Implementation

What Is the Evidence Base Linking Gender with Access to Forests and Use of Forest Resources for Food Security in Low- and Middle-Income Countries? A Systematic Evidence Map

Mainstreaming gender in REDD+ policies and projects in 17 countries

The CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with ICRAF, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR and TBI.

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Two key UN policy processes are now more gender responsive

Two key UN policy processes are now more gender responsive

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Scenes from UN Headquarters during the opening of the 74th General Debate at the United Nations headquarters in New York, on Tuesday 24 September 2019. Photo: UN Women/Amanda Voisard

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FTA research and engagement inform biodiversity and climate change policies

Each year, reports on declining biodiversity and the accelerating impacts of global change become more alarming. But what is often not emphasized is how differently these global challenges affect women and men and how women and men can differently address them.

For example, studies suggest large-scale gender differences in mortality rates associated with natural disasters, particularly where women are socioeconomically disadvantaged and where disasters exacerbate existing patterns of discrimination. But in 2015, only 0.01% of worldwide grant dollars addressed both climate change and gender inequalities.

Gender-blind policies and actions risk increasing and exacerbating inequalities within households, decreasing women’s well-being and creating disincentives for women’s participation, as shown in an FTA study on perceptions of well-being in communities that have taken part in reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) projects.

There is also evidence that gender-equitable policies and projects can lead to better institutional and environmental performance. FTA research has helped contribute to more gender-responsive global policy processes, for example through gender research that influenced the design of policy documents used to inform the negotiation processes in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

“This is a critical juncture,” said Marlène Elias, FTA Gender Research Coordinator. “We have to seize this moment as CBD develops its new strategy (the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework) for the coming decade.”

FTA scientists are collaborating with a network of organizations that have been pushing for more gender-responsive policies for years. Among this constellation of actors, the role of FTA scientists is to bring empirical evidence to the table.

Read publication Women’s participation in forest management: A cross-country analysis

Evolution of engagement

In 2018, based on their submission on gender mainstreaming to the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the UNFCCC secretariat invited FTA scientists to present empirical evidence on the links between gender and climate change at an in-session workshop at the 48th session of the SBI. Concurrently, FTA scientists were invited to join the For All Coalition, which aims to inform gender integration under the United Nations Rio Conventions. FTA was thus one of few research initiatives represented in the coalition, which brings together parties to the Conventions, members of the Conventions’ secretariats, and key gender non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to inform gender integration and negotiations under the Conventions.

Also in 2018, FTA and the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) jointly developed a paper on gender issues under the CBD that served as a background document to the CBD’s 14th Conference of the Parties (COP14). The paper was later submitted as a note by the executive secretary and considered as an agenda item at COP18.

FTA also contributed to a workshop on 1 July 2018 that was co-led by UN Women and the CBD Secretariat, held on the sidelines of the 22nd meeting of the Convention’s Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA-22) and the second meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI-2). Its aim was to strengthen the capacities of Convention delegates to integrate gender into intergovernmental deliberations and the implementation of the Convention, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, and National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs).

A big win at CBD COP14 was the agreement among Parties to a gender-responsive process to develop the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, by systematically integrating gender considerations and ensuring that women and girls are adequately represented in the process. This gave way to renewed efforts among FTA and partners to influence the process, including through an expert workshop held in 2019 in New York, in which FTA participated along with representatives from national governments, civil society organizations and movements, UN agencies and other international organizations. The workshop was one in a series to build consensus around the key elements for a gender-responsive Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.

Iliana Monterroso, a scientist and co-coordinator of Gender and Social Inclusion Research at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR, the FTA lead partner), presented FTA’s research-based recommendations, which were included in the forestry section of the workshop report. Drawing on lessons from gender-responsive forest landscape restoration work, these recommendations were to: recognize land rights, knowledge, and natural resources; build capacity among women through economic empowerment initiatives and green entrepreneurship opportunities and training; create gender parity quotas, including quotas for socially excluded groups; audit women’s contribution to the forest sector; and map existing and pending claims around resources.

“During the presentation, we drew from previous research around REDD+ issues to highlight lessons learned and synergies in order to incorporate gender in the discussion of the upcoming strategy. We highlighted how some of these challenges are not unique to the implementation of restoration or biodiversity agendas but are partly the result of structural gender inequalities that need to be addressed in order to derive the expected outcomes,” said Monterroso.

As the dynamic engagement with the CBD secretariat and expert group evolved, FTA contributed to joint submissions with other participating organizations to inform the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, including during the Regional Consultation of the Group of Latin America and the Caribbean in Montevideo.

FTA and UN Women also co-hosted an expert workshop on the ICRAF campus in Nairobi to formulate key messages for the First Meeting of the Open-ended Working Group (OEWG) on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. The meeting resulted in recommendations to the OEWG for gender-responsive goals, indicators and targets; an accountability framework; and enabling conditions, including capacity-building and finance, for the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, which is currently under revision.

As a result of its strong reputation for gender research and active engagement with the Rio Conventions processes (see Box), FTA has been invited to contribute to several global initiatives to establish and track progress towards gender equality targets. For instance, in the drafting of the Equal Measures 2030 global report, FTA has provided recommendations on gender indicators for the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 on climate change. The report referenced FTA’s submission to the UNFCCC SBI and two FTA studies,[1] and underlined the importance of the inclusion of women in national decision making on climate policies. FTA’s submission was also widely cited in a recent synthesis report on gender and climate change developed by the UNFCCC secretariat. In 2019, FTA scientists also participated in designing and delivering a capacity-building workshop on gender mainstreaming with the UNFCCC Least Developed Countries Expert Group (LEG).

“One thing we have learned from our engagement in the UNFCCC processes is that there has been a disconnect between the growing body of research on gender and climate change, on one hand, and the really strong demand by Parties and other stakeholders for data to support evidence-based, gender-responsive climate policy and practice, on the other,” said Markus Ihalainen, a senior research officer and co-coordinator of Gender and Social Inclusion Research at CIFOR. “There are many topics that merit further investigation, but we know enough to say that lack of evidence cannot be an excuse for gender-blind climate policy making. FTA has done so much work on this topic, and when we can help it reach the right people and processes, we see that there is a whole lot of interest in taking it up.”

The power of language

One important way of influencing a more gender-responsive agenda is through advocating for more progressive language in policy texts. Since language frames content and approaches, having a common and meaningful language around gender across global policies, such as the Rio Conventions, would facilitate more harmonized and synergistic implementation and monitoring and lead to more positive, impactful changes towards gender equality.

FTA gender experts engage with a wide range of stakeholders to both support evidence-based, gender-responsive policy-making, as well as to provide guidance and tools for effective and equitable implementation and monitoring on the ground.

“We want to make sure that appropriate language – which has been developed through a range of consultations with gender specialists and gender equality advocates and across global policy processes, such as the UNFCCC and the SDGs – is retained and imported into every new effort,” said Elias. “For example, there is an agreed way to refer to the participation of women and marginalized groups as ‘full, effective and meaningful’. Such language has been hard fought for and vetted by gender equity groups.”

Weaving this iteratively developed language on gender throughout global policies that affect rural women – and ensuring that it guides implementation and action on the ground – is a worthwhile effort. To support this effort, FTA gender experts continue to bring the latest science to the discussions among global networks of gender-focused organizations.

[1] CIFOR-FTA (2013). E. Coleman and E. Mwangi, “Women’s Participation in Forest Management: A Cross-country

Analysis,” Global Environmental Change 23 (no. 1): 193-205, February, 2013.

Pham TT and Brockhaus M. (2015). Gender Mainstreaming and REDD+ and PES. CIFOR Gender Climate Brief no. 5. Bogor: CIFOR.

This article was written by Erin O’Connell.

This article was produced by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA). FTA is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with ICRAF, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR and TBI. FTA’s work is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.

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Women's effective participation to build an equal future (Vol. 5, Issue 1)

Women’s effective participation to build an equal future (Vol. 5, Issue 1)

08 March, 2021

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Today we celebrate the 8th of March, International Women’s Day. It is a moment reflect on the progress made and multiply our actions to achieve an ambitious vision of gender equality, critical to the well-being of humanity and the planet we inhabit. We know that despite many efforts worldwide, gender equality is still far from being a reality. This is true not only in some professional areas, geographies, or in the home, but across all areas of life globally. For instance, the recently released UN Secretary-General’s report underlines, among many other considerations, the great gender gap in public sector decision-making positions: there are currently only 22 women Heads of State or Government, and only 24.9% of national parliamentarians are women, globally. Things are even worse if we zoom into the decision-makers steering the response to the current COVID-19 pandemic. An analysis of COVID-19 task forces from 87 countries revealed that only 3.5% of these had gender parity; a particularly stark reality considering that women represent at least 70% of the workforce in the health sector.

The imbalance is not only unjust towards women, but it has repercussions on everyone, leaving Governments unable to respond adequately and holistically to global challenges. Unequal decisional power translates in decisions that are less inclusive and relevant to the needs and interests of some segments of society, and thereby in worse societal outcomes. One needs not only think about COVID-19, similar considerations apply decision-making pertaining to climate change, biodiversity loss, sustainable development, education, conflict resolutions, ethics, and so on. This is why this year’s IDW theme “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world,” focuses on the critical need of supporting women’s right to decision-making and having women leaders, while also honoring the fundamental role of women and girls all over the world in shaping a more equal future; contributions often made from disadvantaged situations.

Social structures that shape asymmetric gender dynamics have been a focus of FTA’s research since the program’s inception. When drafting its renewed Gender Action Plan in 2019, FTA reinstated equal participation as one of its key focus research areas. A recent news article also recalls how FTA contributed to make two UN processes more gender-responsive. In the FTA 2020 Science Conference, one of the technical workstreams dealt with inclusive governance for sustainable landscapes, concentrating discussions on decision-making at the intersection of policy and practice, together with the institutions that support or obstruct inclusion, transparency and accountability in decision-making processes. FTA also substantially re-oriented its work on sustainable value chains to focus on social inclusion and especially gender issues, as testified in the value-chains, finance and investment session of the FTA conference. It was an occasion to highlight the significant research FTA is conducting in this domain, which surfaces pressing challenges as well as possible solutions and strategies to address them.

Unequal gender norms and social structures limit women’s genuine participation and influence, and lead to their overall underrepresentation, in landscape and value chains governance. As we’ve emphasized in a previous newsletter, the COVID-19 crisis has brought a double burden on forest-dependent and rural women, who need to fight on two fronts: they are the first exposed to the socio-economic repercussion of the COVID-19 response and at the same time expected to lead the charge in enhancing their households’ and communities’ resilience.

As a research program, it is our role to investigate and contribute to the strong evidence that women’s equal and effective participation is a key to unlocking solutions to the many environmental and socio-economic crisis humanity faces, and to advance sustainable development and embed justice into the fabric of our societies. For all and for women, let’s use this moment of crisis not to “build back better” but to “build forward better”.

Vincent Gitz, FTA Director and Marlène Elias, FTA Gender coordinator

Special feature

Inclusive governance for sustainable landscapes – all material from the FTA 2020 Science Conference now available!

From 14 to 25 September 2020, FTA ran its fully digital decadal conference, titled “Forest, trees and agroforestry science for transformational change”. It drew more than 520 participants from 69 countries around the world, featuring close to 200 interventions from scientists involved in the FTA program. One of the 6 technical workstreams of the conference, one focused on inclusive governance for sustainable landscapes, with 3 sessions:

Participatory processes in landscape governance and management
Land and forest tenure: implications for sustainable management and inclusion
Landscape and jurisdictional approaches for governance and sustainability

See all workstream contributions and keynote here.

News

FTA research and engagement inform biodiversity and climate change policies

11 February was International Day of Women & Girls in Science

This year’s international day of women and girls in science (11 February 2021) focused on the role of women scientists at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19. FTA acknowledges both the important role of women in the fight against the pandemic and their critical contributions to building forward better, increasing resilience of agricultural systems. FTA had a chat with two of our women scientists, Houria Djoudi and Pamela Tabi, who shared their inspiring stories and wisdom! Read more.

Structuring climate finance to benefit women and alleviate poverty

Scientists with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) have studied five national financing mechanisms in Indonesia to learn more about the way they incorporate gender inclusiveness. Read more.

Addressing gender in forests and climate change actions

The importance of women’s participation in successful climate action initiatives and the sustainable management of forest resources has been proven many times. Recent work by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and others demonstrate strong evidence of the positive effects of women’s inclusion in forest management groups on both governance and conservation outcomes. Find out how.

New guide aims to accelerate forest tenure pathways to gender equality

Forest tenure reform in the global south has often failed to be gender-responsive, but there is a growing call to take up this challenge to activate effective change. A new guide created by scientists with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) aims to make the process more accessible. The guide recommends a three-step process, billed as “analyze, strategize, and realize,” to support interventions in local and national contexts. Read more.

Banner photo by O. Girard/CIFOR. News photos, from top, by: Amanda Voisard/UN Women; Arnauld Chyngwa/CIFOR; Aulia Erlangga/CIFOR; Icaro Cooke Vieira/CIFOR; Mokhamad Edliadi/CIFOR.

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Publications

Making climate finance work for women and the poor: Insights from national climate finance mechanisms in Indonesia

Leveraging climate finance for gender equality and poverty reduction: A comparative study

Forest tenure pathways to gender equality: A practitioner’s guide

Understanding gender dynamics in the context of rural transformation processes: An East Kalimantan case study

Enhancing women’s rights and lives through gender-equitable restoration in Burkina Faso

Gender-responsive project implementation within the Resilient Food Systems Programme

Fit for purpose? A review of guides for gender-equitable value chain development

Embodied engagement with gender and agrobiodiversity: Leveraging transformative moments in multidisciplinary teams

Climate finance and gender on the ground: Insights from mitigation and adaptation interventions in Indonesia

Video

Confronting climate change with gender inclusive financing

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Independent evaluation shows FTA's progress towards targets

Independent evaluation shows FTA’s progress towards targets

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In 2020, the CGIAR Advisory Services Shared Secretariat (CAS) commissioned independent reviews of the CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs). The evaluation of the Forests, Trees and Agroforestry CRP was completed in December 2020 and is now available on the CAS website https://cas.cgiar.org/evaluation/crp-2020-fta.

CAS Secretariat’s evaluation of FTA **[PDF]**

The purpose of the review was to assess the extent to which FTA is delivering quality of science and demonstrating effectiveness in relation to its theory of change. The review focuses on activities and results of the second phase of FTA, from 2017 to 2019.

According to the review, FTA showed high scientific productivity and strong implementation performance in phase II and is likely to make significant progress toward most of its planned end-of-program targets.

The review found that the close collaboration between FTA partners, its independent and efficient governance, and the effective prioritization and management of resources resulted in a high level of programmatic value-added. Strong partnerships with universities and research institutions, and collaboration between scientists were also found to have strengthened the CRP.

Going forward, the review recommended that the most important impact pathways for FTA should continue to be: its positive influence on government and on international policy processes and that the program should find ways to conserve and protect the significant value-added it has built beyond 2021.

The FTA Independent Steering Committee and Management Team have released a letter on their perspectives following this extensive independent review. You may read their letter here.

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Building back better: the fundamental need to prioritize rural women (Vol. 4, Issue 4)

Building back better: the fundamental need to prioritize rural women (Vol. 4, Issue 4)

15 October, 2020

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Originally dubbed as the “biodiversity super-year”, 2020 will unfortunately be remembered for something quite different: the outbreak of COVID-19. In addition to the tragic loss of human life and the unleashing of an economic recession, one of the pandemic’s immediate and distressing effects has been to exacerbate inequalities. Women, and especially rural women, who lack the resources and safety nets needed to buffer shocks, have been comparatively extremely hard hit by the pandemic and its response.

In many world regions, rural men and women, compared to urban populations, live far away from quality healthcare structures as well as basic infrastructure, including water and sanitation and essential medicines. But then, compared to rural men, gender norms and institutions further hinder rural women’s mobility and access to public health resources, information and services. Studies have shown that rural women are taking on an even greater share of care work as a consequence of the pandemic, that they are experiencing an increase in domestic violence, and that they are more likely than men to lose their jobs or source of employment. Simply put, despite the fact that COVID-19 seems to be more fatal for men than women, rural women are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and the consequences of the sometimes very harsh outbreak management responses.

It is long known and proven that women and girls play a crucial role in the agricultural work force. Moreover, they carry out most domestic work, and are at the heart of their communities’ organization, maintaining social cohesion and shaping intrahousehold dynamics. Importantly, they are also the custodians of their household’s food security and nutrition, and critical to its resilience. Yet, these contributions -together with the challenges women face to deliver on those- are consistently underrecognized and undervalued.

These realities reinforce the urgency and motivation of FTA’s work. As a research program with a key focus on policies, governance and institutions, FTA places gender equality concerns at the heart of its research to “build back better” and more resilient landscapes and livelihoods for all.

As you, FTA newsletter readers, know well, FTA recognizes gender equality as an inherent human right, and a fundamental part of achieving all of its objectives. Rather than merely addressing the symptoms of gender inequality (e.g. unequal participation, income), we need to devise transformative approaches that tackle the underlying causes, such as formal rules (e.g. policies and regulations) and informal rules (e.g. social norms, power relations), of inequality.

In that regard, FTA, as a partnership working globally but in very different contexts, has adopted one constant, not negotiable, objective across all geographies: to support women and girls’ involvement in decision making, control of resources, and control over their own labor and destiny. Only by solving pervasive inequalities in these and other areas will we be able to venture on a solid path towards equitable development and resilient landscapes.

As Reverend Martin Luther King once wrote: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” These words resound with wisdom and truth as global, national, and local communities struggle to cope with COVID-19.

Research and action to document and address inequalities linked to gender, rurality, socio-economic status, and other factors of marginalization was a prominent theme in FTA’s Scientific Conference, which ran from 14-25 September 2020. Interventions across six technical workstreams highlighted how social equality can be an engine for sustainability, and canvassed transformational ways to move forward. The conference was an occasion to showcase the significant body of FTA work in this area.

The current pandemic will not deter us. FTA scientists are renewing efforts to generate data and technical, social and institutional innovations that can support change towards a more gender-equal world; and to honor and support the resilience of rural women in the wake of COVID-19.

Vincent Gitz, FTA Director and Marlène Elias, FTA Gender coordinator

Special feature

Building just societies and resilient landscapes alongside rural women

When women are able to participate in decision-making and equitably share resources and benefits, policies and projects in the forest sector often see increased buy-in and improved outcomes; while initiatives that ignore gender difference or exclude women tend to reinforce or even exacerbate existing inequalities.
Read the interview with our Gender and Social Inclusion scientist Markus Ihalainen here.

Natural rubber and climate change

Natural rubber has a key role to play for both adaptation and mitigation of climate change as an important land user (≈14 Million ha), a producer of renewable materials (i.e. latex and rubberwood), and as a major economic activity.

The International Rubber Study Group ( IRSG ) in collaboration with CIFOR/FTA, CIRAD and the International Rubber Research and Development Board (IRRDB) has organised a workshop on “Climate Change and Natural Rubber Systems” to review scientific knowledge about impacts of climate change on natural rubber, potential means for its adaptation and what can be its contribution to mitigation of climate change.

All presentations and videos can be accessed here.

Virtual launch of the Global Assessment Report on 15 October 2020!

A new and most comprehensive scientific assessment presented by the Global Forest Experts Panel (GFEP) on Forests and Poverty reveals critical links between forests, trees and poverty alleviation. The report makes a valuable contribution to achieving the first and foremost of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals aimed at ending poverty. This is even more important in light of the current pandemic under which efforts to fight poverty have suffered a severe setback. The International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO), on behalf of the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF), established the Panel in the framework of the GFEP Initiative.

Thursday, 15 October 2020 4-5:30 pm CEST

News

Men in forests: New book shatters stereotypes

In a candid new memoir, Colfer, now a senior associate at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and a visiting scholar in the Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, shares her personal perspective to better elaborate reflections on 50 years of research into gender and forests.

She overturns some of the generally accepted parameters which have largely defined gender studies, suggesting that the habits and practices of men warrant greater consideration than they have received to date. Read more here.

Sentinels of social transformation in Borneo

The recently published BSSL report focuses on two study blocks in the Kapuas Hulu Regency of West Kalimantan on Borneo. Straddling the equator, Borneo is the third largest island in the world, more than three times larger than Great Britain and seven times the size of Cuba. With 73 percent forest cover and two national parks, the report describes Kapuas Hulu as part of the “last forest frontier”. Read our long-form and download the report here.

Burkina Faso: Rural women’s perspectives on COVID-19

Association Tiipaalga, working with the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, spent time listening to rural Mossé women living in two communes (Zitenga and Dapelogo) of the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso discuss their lives and experiences in this period of COVID-19. Find out what they said.

FTA, PIM and WLE working together on forest and landscape restoration

Despite the high level of political engagement and the wide range of organizations involved in restoration projects from local to global levels, beyond some success stories, restoration is not happening at scale. Research is urgently needed to design, develop and upscale successful restoration approaches. As part of this effort, FTA, PIM and WLE publish a synthesis of a survey of CGIAR’s projects on restoration.

‘Learning how to learn’ is crucial for researchers in the field

When a team of scientists set out to study women’s participation in community forest management in communities in Nicaragua, they faced a quandary. Men tended to dominate the workshops and meetings. How could they encourage more equitable participation if the women didn’t attend or speak up? Find out!

FTA at GLF Bonn 2020

Did you miss our session on the Contribution of Forests, Trees and Agroforestry to Sustainable Food Security and Nutrition in a time of crisis at GLF Bonn 2020? Full video and all presentations available here.

Sharing a vision: youth, women and the future of fine flavor cacao

On July 24th, the FFC project hosted the first dialogue of its kind as part of the virtual 163rd anniversary celebration of La Convencion province, home to cacao Chuncho. Over 300 participants (average age 25 years) listened in as each of the presenters provided a unique perspective from their successful careers in fine flavor cacao. Find out more here.

FTA proposes a typology of interventions and situations for guiding land restoration

The objective of the paper is to uncover the diverse understanding and perspectives about “restoration” and to construct a typology that can help to clarify contrasts, similarities and possible synergies. It aims to facilitate upscaling of restoration by allowing better alignment between restoration goals and means ith the priorities of the people who live in, and gain their long-term livelihoods from, the landscapes to be restored. Find out more here.

Under fire: Five myths about wood fuel in sub-Saharan Africa

Despite the environmental cost of using firewood and charcoal for meal preparation and to meet other energy needs, more than 60 percent of families in sub-Saharan Africa have no alternative to wood, making it a significant contributor to forest degradation throughout the region. The solution is not simply to ban the use of wood fuel without offering alternatives, say scientists at CIFOR. Read what they propose.

Banner photo by O. Girard/CIFOR.

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The CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with Bioversity International, CATIE, CIRAD, ICRAF, INBAR and TBI.

FTA thanks all donors who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund.


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Q+A: Building just societies and resilient landscapes alongside rural women

Q+A: Building just societies and resilient landscapes alongside rural women

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Article originally posted on Forest News.

Gender equality key to sustainable resource management, says Markus Ihalainen

Rural women play an essential role in using and managing natural resources in forest and tree-based landscapes across the world — at least they should.

When women are able to participate in decision-making and equitably share resources and benefits, policies and projects in the forest sector often see increased buy-in and improved outcomes; while initiatives that ignore gender difference or exclude women tend to reinforce or even exacerbate existing inequalities, according to a 2017 brief from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

Even so, the forestry sector has historically given limited attention to gender dynamics, said Markus Ihalainen, senior research officer at CIFOR. Although changes are occurring, much work remains to adequately address the social structures and power relations that produce or reinforce inequalities.

While gender equality is a human right and a fundamental condition for achieving sustainable development goals, women remain at a disadvantage, often wielding less power than men.

Decision-making, accessing benefits from forest and tree resources and the capacity to respond effectively to changes such as deforestation or degradation in forest and tree-based landscapes are some areas where rights may be curtailed, he said during an interview to mark the International Day of Rural Women on Thursday.

–> Read also How is the CGIAR supporting rural women?

“A crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic has made things more difficult for everyone, for example, but we also know that such challenges are often compounded by inequalities that may disproportionately increase vulnerabilities or decrease the adaptive capacities of certain groups,” explained Ihalainen, who has been involved in gender research with CIFOR since 2014.

To address these challenges, Ihalainen and other researchers in the forestry sector try to understand how roles, rights and responsibilities are divided between local men and women, particularly with regard to land use.

Policies that emerge from research recommendations should measure how benefits are shared, while also accounting for various other gender-related risks, he said.

Rural women’s contributions to development and conservation need to be supported by fair remuneration for their work and access to resources; they should be recognized as critical stakeholders in sustainable natural resource governance.

Ihalainen shared additional insights about his work in FTA:

Q: What makes this field interesting for you?

A: I think there are a number of things that make the research on gender and environment interesting. First, for anyone who wants to see a more equal world, it’s pretty hard to ignore the pervasiveness of gender inequality virtually across the globe. In rural areas, we see rapid transformations shaped by political, socioeconomic and environmental changes – especially climate change. Our work shows that, if left unchecked, many of these trends risk reinforcing or even exacerbating gender inequality.

The forestry sector in particular has historically given limited attention to gender, but I think this is slowly starting to change. People are increasingly interested in understanding what they can do to enhance equality through their work. Being a part of and able to support this process by providing relevant evidence and recommendations is a great motivating factor for me.

Q: Do you encounter challenges studying rural women as a male researcher?

A: I think understanding these things is just as important for men as for women.

It’s not really about studying rural women per se, but about understanding how different social structures and power relations at different levels produce or reinforce inequalities; these inequalities often disproportionately affect rural women. We are all part of those structures whether we want to be or not. We all shape social structures through our actions or lack thereof.

I think that one of the most important contributions of feminist theory has been its critique of so-called scientific objectivity – the idea that the researcher is just a neutral observer of reality. Our ideas are not void of our biases; they are influenced by our background and social status, and most people, I hope, who have done field research in a cross-cultural setting could think of a time when they felt the research situation was influenced by the social dynamic between the respondent and the researcher. As a white male working on gender research mainly in Africa, this definitely goes for me too, so I’ve really learned the importance of working with a socially diverse team. A diverse research team is important not just to overcome the sometimes difficult power dynamics in interviews, but also because of the richness that different perspectives bring to the analysis.

Q: In your opinion, what are the top issues facing rural women today?

A: Many of the broader trends that are shaping or compounding challenges faced by rural women are issues that affect us all, but the distribution of outcomes is shaped by many intersecting power dynamics, including gender. The COVID-19 pandemic is an example of this. For instance, studies are suggesting that as a consequence of the pandemic, many rural women are taking on a disproportionate share of care work. Mobility restrictions and value chain disruptions may disproportionately affect many female-dominated occupations, including marketing and casual agribusiness labor.

Additionally, female farmers often have unequal access to information technology when compared with their male counterparts. This can make it harder for women to connect with other value chain actors, particularly when physical mobility is restricted.

Climate change is of course another pressing issue. As a result of longstanding efforts by researchers and advocacy groups, there is finally a relatively common recognition of the fact that gender dynamics and inequalities influence how rural women and men experience and cope with climate change — though there is still a long way to go in terms of making sure that recognition leads to effective action on the ground.

So there are definitely many challenges facing rural women that require urgent action, such as enhancing rural women’s access to resources and markets or improving their job security and extending social protection. But those challenges are also symptoms of fundamentally unequal social structures.

Because of various inequalities, many rural women are more exposed to negative impacts of events in general, including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and other threats. While there is an urgent need to address those impacts, we must not lose sight of the broader structures and systems that keep rural women in a position where they remain more vulnerable. Otherwise any new arrangements are like a band-aid solution – no matter whether they are related to restoration, renewables or any strategy – they will end up reproducing the same inequalities.

As we’re rethinking our production systems and values in order for society to stay within Kate Raworth’s doughnut — a set of social and planetary boundaries for humanity to thrive in the 21st century — we really need to make sure gender equality is at the core of these efforts.

Q: What inspires you about the rural women that you have encountered during your research?

A: There are so many women I have met who show incredible resilience and innovation — often under dire circumstances. So although it is really important to highlight the structures that shape the challenging circumstances rural women face, the way in which media often frames rural women as passive victims does not do them justice. In other words, a focus on marginalization, tends to perpetuate a framing of women as passive — rather than as active authors of their own destinies. They should be supported through the creation of structures and supporting processes that enhance their abilities to exert their agency and challenge the structures that limit that space. However, taking steps to recognize women’s agency must go beyond human interest stories and translate into real and meaningful engagement with rural women and their aspirations.

Q: How can rural women contribute to the transition to a resilient, low-carbon society?

A: I think it’s important to recognize the contributions of rural women and men in managing natural resources. For instance, a study led by the Rights and Resources Initiative found that Indigenous peoples manage nearly 300 billion metric tons of carbon stored above and below ground on their lands. Other studies by CIFOR and others have demonstrated that gender-inclusive resource user groups often perform better in terms of governance and conservation outcomes.

However, it’s equally important to recognize that although the rural poor in low-income countries are not to blame for the climate emergency the world is facing, they are often the ones facing the gravest impacts and, as mentioned earlier, those impacts are often differentiated by gender and other social factors. That’s why we emphasize the need for a just transition, with gender equality as a core objective.

A just transition requires ensuring that rural women have options and means to cope with the impacts of climate change, as well as making sure they have the rights, resources and necessary support to effectively participate in a low-carbon society in ways that contribute to their empowerment and well-being.

Q: What messages do you hope people take from the International Day of Rural Women?

A: This day was established to recognize the role that rural women play in enhancing rural development. Yet despite their crucial role in agricultural production and in ensuring household food security, gender inequalities — often influenced by intersecting socioeconomic factors — continue to disproportionately disempower rural women. While there have been numerous global commitments and agendas to enhancing gender equality, progress has been slow. The imminent transition towards more resilient, low-carbon societies and production systems also provides an opportunity to take a leap in terms of gender equality, but that requires equity and justice to be at the core of our strategies. There is a lot of data and evidence to draw on; now we need action!

Q: What projects are you particularly excited about and where can we learn more?

A: There are a number of projects that I think are really interesting. Pending COVID-restrictions, we are starting field work in Ghana to study the gender dynamics across different palm oil production systems. I am also working on charcoal value chains in a number of African countries, it’s been really interesting to learn that women are actually participating a lot more than what the conventional wisdom dictates. We are also wrapping up a longitudinal analysis of women’s agricultural labor force participation in Indonesia. A lot of interesting findings coming out – stay tuned for the paper coming out soon. Finally, in partnership with EnGen Collaborative and a number of organizations in the GLF gender constituency, we are currently developing an online learning module on gender-responsive forest and landscape restoration. This feels very timely in these teleworking times, but we think this will be a really useful and engaging tool for different restoration stakeholders to enhance their capacities on gender mainstreaming even in the post-COVID world.

By Daniela Silva. This research is part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA). FTA is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with Bioversity International, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR, ICRAF and TBI. FTA’s work is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.

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Sentinels of Social Transformation in Borneo

Sentinels of Social Transformation in Borneo

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A bird view of a typical swidden landscape in Batang Lupar (Yves Laumonier/CIFOR)

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We often think about man’s effect on the environment nowadays. We rarely stop to think about man’s effect on man.

Tracking the state of the world’s forests over the decades is, of course, extremely important, but what about the forest communities – are they also flourishing? Indeed, you could make a case that any forest hosting an impoverished community is a forest that, however flourishing today, tomorrow is destined for the ax. That is why, when an international team of social and environmental scientists got together to create a long term tropical forest monitoring project, they made sure to give it two arms of equal strength, the better to collect both environmental biophysical data and human socio-economic data.

By combining these two seams of data, researchers and policymakers are able to make long range predictions about effects in both directions. That is why this ambitious project is called Sentinel Landscapes.

Yves Laumonier, senior scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research, explains: “The Sentinel Landscapes are a long term research network to monitor not only biophysical data, but also social transformation in the landscape, especially for the livelihood of indigenous people and people who are still dependent on the forest.”

The Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) research program of the CGIAR, led by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), has selected eight Sentinel Landscape research sites across the tropics, each site carefully chosen to represent different positions on the forest transition curve.

*Forest Transition Curve – HLPE (2017), adapted from CIFOR (2011)*

The forest transition curve describes how pristine primary forest is gradually cleared for timber, agriculture or development and how, at a certain point, this deforestation peaks and is replaced by the regrowth of secondary forest, planting of agroforestry or timber, leading to a degree of environmental recovery in the landscape.

With significant areas of standing ancient forest, the Heart of Borneo is perched at the top of the curve. But even here, crawling over the horizon, we see the tracks of bulldozers.

In Sentinel Solutions for the Anthropocene, we explored how long-term biophysical monitoring is a “global health check” for the tropics and how, in the Nicaragua-Honduras Sentinel Landscape, that data is being used to track forest degradation and climate change.

In this long read, we turn our attention to Borneo and look at how the different socio-economic contexts revealed by the Sentinel Landscape project affect forest conservation in one of the last forest frontiers.

Borneo: The Last Forest Frontier

*The Borneo-Sumatra Sentinel Landscape report [**download it in pdf here**]*

The Borneo-Sumatra Sentinel Landscape (BSSL) unfolds over four sites on two of Indonesia’s largest islands, from the almost pristine forests of Kapuas Hulu on Borneo to the more developed plantations of rubber and oil palm on Sumatra.

Yves Laumonier is lead author of the BSSL report. “We have other sites in Indonesia that are much more transformed or degraded,” he explains, “but we can imagine that Borneo shows the original state of the forest.”

Batang Lupar, Borneo: Aerial view of the Danau Sentarum National Park wetlands, a unique ecosystem of interconnecting seasonal lakes, peat swamps, and periodically inundated freshwater swamp forests. (Yves Laumonier/CIFOR)

However, Laumonier also warns that oil palm plantations are expanding near the biodiversity corridor between the two national parks, creating both economic opportunities and conflicts.

Degraded swidden landscapes on steep slopes and poor soils in Mentebah, Borneo: Improved road infrastructure has brought a different context for the mostly Malayu population. Gold mining is an important source of income and, although the area is more “developed”, inequality is also higher than in the villages of Batang Lupar. (Yves Laumonier/CIFOR)

Lost without water

Between the two study blocks, Batang Lupar in the north and Mentebah in the south, lies the Danau Sentarum National Park: “a unique wetlands system with many lakes and swamp forests,” according to Laumonier. “Water fluctuation can be ten metres,” he continues. “During the rainy season some trees are underwater!”

The two sites were specifically chosen for their position as sentinels of the wetlands. As the report states: “Any transformation of these landscapes may have an impact on the integrity of the wetland ecosystem and on the communities living there.” This is significant because the wetlands are fed by the Kapuas River, the longest in Indonesia, sprawling over an area bigger than the countries of Costa Rica and Denmark put together.

The river is ecologically important, teeming with a rich diversity of fish, flora and fauna from the dense mountain rainforests to the alluvial delta where the Kapuas is swallowed by the South China Sea. But it is no less essential to human existence: a livelihood for fishermen and farmers, a shipping superhighway for passengers and freight, and a water reservoir that nourishes the whole of West Kalimantan province.

Indeed, the significance of the river to the people of Kapuas Hulu is not restricted to its magnitude, diversity or even the yield of its fruits. The indigenous Iban Dayak don’t navigate by the cardinal points – north, south, east or west – they navigate by reference to the natural world – uphill, downhill, upstream or downstream. The Iban are quite literally lost without water.

“We need this research”

Long term ecological monitoring projects aren’t new, but Sentinel Landscapes are the first to attempt such an undertaking in the tropics. “In Europe you have the Pan European Ecological Network, a large network of long term ecological research,” Laumonier says. “There is also something similar in the US. But in the tropics, it’s not existing.”

Given that tropical forests account for approximately half of the planet’s aboveground carbon and its critical importance for conserving the planet’s biodiversity, this is surprising, to say the least. “The key for me is to focus on the tropical belt,” Laumonier says. “We need this research. If you want to monitor climate change impact on the forest, and you don’t have long term data, it’s very difficult.”

However, long term monitoring projects in the tropics are not as straightforward as in the highly industrialized environments of Europe and North America. “Many ecological science methods used in Europe are not suitable for the tropics,” Laumonier says. “The tropics have the highest ecological biodiversity, and this makes monitoring much more complex than in Europe.”

Research in remote, pristine forests

It’s not only the scientific methods that need to be rewritten for the context. The practicalities of on site research are complicated too. “Pristine forests are only found nowadays in very remote areas that are difficult to access,” Laumonier says. “This is a burden on research. In Europe, you simply get in your car and go there.”

Even when the researchers reached the remote villages of Kapuas Hulu, that wasn’t the end of their challenges.

Alfa Simarangkir is a private consultant who helped collect the data from the socio-economic household surveys. “It took a long time to do the interviews in Batang Lupar especially,” she says. “Not many people speak Bahasa and they had difficulty understanding what we wanted to do.” Indeed, the BSSL report notes that, without a local partner who spoke the Iban dialect, the survey would have been impossible.

As well as the language barrier, Simarangkir and the rest of the team ran into trouble collecting even the most basic data, like the size of household land plots or what year a particular farm was opened. “We tend to use hectares, but in Batang Lupar they have their own local units and you can’t necessarily compare one unit with their neighbour’s,” Simarangkir says. “They also have difficulties remembering the precise timing of events. They don’t have that way of thinking. It took us one week to survey ten households!”

With 139 households to survey in Batang Lupar and another 300 in Mentebah, the socio-economic element of the Sentinel Landscape research was a heroic undertaking that compensated Laumonier, Simarangkir and their team with fascinating revelations.

*FTA Socio-economic surveys in Kapuas Hulu*

The Iban Dayak of Batang Lupar: from headhunting to oil palm

“Borneo is one of the most forested of the Sentinel Landscape sites, so it’s a bit special,” Laumonier says. “But the local community of Batang Lupar are also quite special: the Iban Dayak.” The Iban are renowned as ferocious warriors, notorious for severing the heads of their enemies, smoking them over a fire and keeping them as grisly mementos – a practice, thankfully, long since ended.

They do still live in traditional longhouses, however. “These longhouses are not isolated individual houses, they are connected apartments, originally to protect themselves from the enemy,” Laumonier explains. “The shared longhouses mean that cohesion in the group is very high.”

*Late afternoon gathering in a longhouse in Batang Lupar (Alfa Simarangkir/CIFOR)*

The Iban, at least in Batang Lupar, also still live lives that “depend on the forest”, according to Laumonier. They practice swidden agriculture (also known as slash-and-burn or fire-fallow), clearing land for cultivation by cutting and burning the existing vegetation – mostly old fallows rather than primary forest.

But with intense international scrutiny of the annual Indonesian forest fires, this traditional farming method has become problematic. “To avoid excessive haze in the region, the Iban ancestral technique of using fire to clear their fields has recently been forbidden,” Laumonier says. “But the big fires you see in the news are never caused by the indigenous people: they know very well how to control their fires. The big fires you see every dry season are caused by the big industrial companies.”

*Kapuas Hulu vegetation maps 2000-2010-2019*

Laumonier argues that the ban on swidden agriculture is based on an outdated theory of conservation. “In the 1980s, many governments and even conservationists wanted to get rid of agriculture in the forests,” he explains, “but now a lot of people think it’s not that bad, especially for biodiversity.”

“After one or two years of cultivation, the Iban leave the land fallow for regeneration,” Laumonier continues. “If the cycle is not too short – 10 or 15 years – the secondary forest has recovered and biodiversity is already very high.”

The light environmental touch of this traditional practice has a modern downside. “These people are living in subsistence,” Laumonier says. As development spreads even into the furthest reaches of Kapuas Hulu, traditional ways of living are being eroded by the temptation to cash in on the forest.

“The Iban plant rubber as a cash crop, but unfortunately the market price is very low and they can be tempted to shift to oil palm,” Laumonier says. “The oil palm companies are advancing little by little, sometimes with conflict, sometimes not,” he adds. “Many Iban are resisting the oil palm and in the peat swamps there’s a government-imposed moratorium on clearing – but it still happens.”

Mentebah: the road, the rubber and the gold

Batang Lupar and Mentebah are only 100km apart, but the local inhabitants could hardly live in more different situations.

*Aerial view of gold mining impact on landscapes in Mentebah (Alfa Simarangkir/CIFOR)*

“The tendency of some research is to work in one village and draw conclusions for whole region,” Laumonier says. “The advantage of the Sentinel Landscapes is that we get representative data for the larger region, such as districts.”

The most striking geographical difference between Batang Lupar and Mentebah districts is that, where Batang Lupar is relatively remote and hard to access, Mentebah lies on the main road between Sintang and the administrative capital of Kapuas Hulu, Putussibau. From this simple detail comes a cascade of socio-economic differences between the two sites. As Simarangkir says of Mentebah: “There is a really different way of living there. The road has given a huge opportunity to them.”

*Secondary forests in Mentebah (Yves Laumonier/CIFOR)*

The road has also brought outsiders to the district. “In Mentebah, people from Java are given land by the government,” Simarangkir says. “The population is diverse compared to Batang Lupar.”

Simarangkir explains that the families in Batang Lupar depend more on natural resources, while those in Mentebah largely earn their living from other employment opportunities. In particular: tapping for rubber and mining for gold.

*Traditional gold mining activity in Mentebah – this activity havs desastrous effects on the riparian forest and the quality of the river water (Yves Laumonier/CIFOR)*

“The gold mining is illegal,” Simarangkir says. “When one of the respondents showed me some gold he had already made into a block, he told me that he would be in serious trouble with the police if they caught him.”

Despite the potentially lucrative gold industries, the socio-economic survey also discovered that there was significantly greater food insecurity in Mentebah, and that inequality was more extreme between the haves and the have-nots.

The curse of capitalism?

“In Mentebah you need money to buy your daily needs,” Simarangkir explains, “but in Batang Lupar I think they are lucky. They grow vegetables. If they need fish, they go to the river. If they need meat, the men go hunting. You don’t need money to buy food in Batang Lupar.”

*Iban man working on traditional Bemban basketry (Alfa Simarangkir/CIFOR)*

The road is both a blessing and a curse for the people of Mentebah, as access to the markets of Sintang and Putussibau draws farmers away from their fields to the cash crops.

“Not many people in Mentebah concentrate on the productive landscape any more,” Simarangkir says. “Most of them work more on rubber plantations – but the rubber price fluctuates.” Without the guarantee of a stable price for rubber, a family’s fortunes in Mentebah can collapse from one year to the next in a way that the diversified subsistence farming of Batang Lupar would not.

The financial lure of rubber and gold means that the fields of Mentebah are less productive too. “In Mentebah, people might not have the time and labour to open fields because they are gold mining instead,” Simarangkir says. “In Batang Lupar they stay in the villages and have time to work in the fields.”

Despite their rice paddies, Simarangkir found that most households in Mentebah still have to buy rice. “They cannot predict the harvest,” she explains. “In Batang Lupar, one household can own many different land plots and they can rotate their crops. But in Mentebah they don’t rotate at all because they don’t have as much land. This is one reason why the harvest in Mentebah is not so good: you need to give time for the land to recover.”

Another striking difference between the two districts is that women own significantly more land in Batang Lupar than in Mentebah.

The women landowners of Batang Lupar

The BSSL socio-economic survey found the women owned nearly a third of all land plots in Batang Lupar, whereas women in Mentebah owned less than a fifth. Again, the road, rubber and gold of Mentebah offer clues to why this might be.

*Iban woman working on traditional Bemban basketry (Alfa Simarangkir/CIFOR)*

“Many of the women in the Batang Lupar come from the nearest village. In Mentebah, women come from cities all over Indonesia,” Simarangkir explains. This break in communal continuity and in the line of inheritance is one reason why women might own more land in Batang Lupar.

But Simarangkir speculates further: “I’m thinking that much of the land previously owned by women in Mentebah has already been sold because households can’t rely on unstable farm products like rubber,” she says. “Instead they rely on illegal gold mining. Sometimes they get a lot of money, but if not then they have to sell whatever they can – including, perhaps, their land.”

“There is a really different way of living there,” she says again.

The question is: how can the Sentinel Landscapes help the people of Kapuas Hulu navigate between these two different ways of life, between the equitable and ecologically sustainable subsistence farming of traditional Batang Lupar and the potentially lucrative market infrastructure of Mentebah?

Conservation or infrastructure: a false choice?

“At their best, Sentinel Landscapes give evidence to decision makers that something is going wrong with the environment,” Laumonier says. “For example, we can quickly see degradation of the forest because there are fewer and entirely different birds.”

“But,” Laumonier adds, “that evidence might not convince decision makers to change course because they – quite rightly – also want to develop and build hospitals and schools.”

It may seem that, with two national parks, Kapuas Hulu is environmentally well-protected, but it is not that straightforward.

“There are two national parks in Kapuas Hulu and that’s quite unique for Indonesia,” Laumonier explains. “Local authorities will say that they have been told to do this for conservation, but that the national parks are also the reason they have no money and no infrastructure.”

There has been a lot of international pressure on Indonesia to protect the forests of Borneo, with high profile campaigns, such as that to save the orangutan, driving the government to establish the national parks in Kapuas Hulu.

There are promising signs that Indonesian conservation efforts are being rewarded. Global Forest Watch recently reported that Indonesian primary forest loss in 2019 fell for the third consecutive year, despite a harrowing fire season. Deforestation is now 40 percent lower than the average annual loss between 2002 and 2016.

The same report indicates that conservation efforts have been even more successful in forests with protected status, bolstered by the announcement last year that the moratorium on forest clearing for palm plantations or logging will become permanent. According to 2016 figures from the Indonesian government, 49 percent of forests are protected in one way or another.

However, Laumonier suggests that choosing between the extremes of conservation and infrastructure is a false choice. “The solution is not always a national park,” Laumonier argues. “We can still do conservation with agroforestry and we can do more to connect the forest fragments. These measures may be as efficient as a national park.”

“In some places around the world, national parks aren’t working because the populations living next to the park are very poor and they don’t see the benefit of conservation,” Laumonier explains. “We have to find a trade-offs between conservation and development.”

Finding that balance isn’t easy – it would be impossible without environmental, cultural and socio-economic insights from the Sentinel Landscapes.

By David Charles. This article was produced by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA). FTA is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with Bioversity International, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR, ICRAF and TBI. FTA’s work is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.

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Young scientists’ training builds foundation for future forests, trees and agroforestry research

Young scientists’ training builds foundation for future forests, trees and agroforestry research

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Intensive training for young scientists demonstrates key angle of capacity development and value of investments for longer term returns

Shaping a sustainable future

For a group of students in the Democratic Republic of Congo, university learning took on a whole new dimension when they were selected to participate in an innovative capacity development program involving the University of Kisangani (UNIKIS), Forests and Climate Change in the Congo (FCCC) and supported by scientists from CIFOR, ICRAF, CIRAD, University of Cambridge, Musee Royale d’Afrique Centrale and Jardin Botanique de la Belgique.

More than 180 students have since graduated with master’s degrees, while 35 students have successfully defended article-based theses obtaining a PhD. A total of more than 40 peer-reviewed articles have been published by UNIKIS graduates since FCCC was introduced.

Melissa Rousseau with MSc students Chalay Azenge Bokoy and Muyisa Mbusa Wasukundi at the wood biology laboratory in Yangambi – DRC. Photo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR

During the four-year, capacity development and governance-focused project, novel teaching methods, joint local and international supervision of students, staff training and an annual “Science Week” held alongside a media training event, which led to a Green Journalists’ Network were introduced.

“This is what capacity building is all about,” said Wardell, who coordinated the program from 2013 to 2016. “A solid education creates a solid foundation on which to develop skills and human resources to better address national and sub-national development objectives.”

Another capacity development program in East Africa financed by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), currently supports 11 Ph.D. candidates with fellowships, but has a broader reach, funding other students and a variety of projects.

In 2015, CIFOR and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), joined forces to design the CIFOR-USAID Indonesia Forestry Fellowship Program. It helps train a new generation of Indonesian environmental scientists, managers and leaders.

Through the program, students joined masters-degree, multi-disciplinary graduate programs at U.S. universities to study forestry, biodiversity, economics, natural resources governance. Students chosen through the program’s competitive selection process studied on site at four universities recognized for their leadership in forestry and environmental education, including: Northern Arizona University; the University of Missouri; the University of Florida and Yale University. Between 2015 and 2019, 20 students graduated and returned to Indonesia.

Other initiatives include ICRAF’s African Plant Breeding Academy of the African Orphan Crops Consortium and training guide of forest genetic resources, which incorporates a Biodiversity International’s gender research fellowship program. Courses and technical workshops hosted by the Global Landscapes Forum Landscape Academy and the Wageningen University & Research Center for Development Innovation have been well-attended and will continue, while the ICRAF-led “Stakeholder Approach to Evidence and Risk-Informed Decision making” serves as a framework for long-term relationship building to integrate research into policy processes.

These initiatives and others support strengthening partnerships and aligning priorities with both National Agricultural Research Systems and new networks, including the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Africa and the African Network for Agriculture, Agroforestry and Natural Resources Education.

Pisciculture workshop in Yanonge – DRC. Photo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR

Media training courses and science workshops related to covering forestry, trees, and agroforestry are also under development. An infusion into the media workforce of journalist experts who have been exposed to natural resource management theories can inspire new ideas and methods for delivering messages to the general public.

Let’s not forget the younger generations! Ennviromental awareness campaign at a primary school in Yangambi – DRC. Photo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR

Training and capacity development of staff, partners, stakeholders, journalists and students is a key point of the theory of change of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests Trees and Agroforestry.

Yet, while capacity development has resoundingly been recognized as a vital part of the theory of change, further human and financial resources are required to fully facilitate the adoption of research results into development policy and practice, Wardell said.

“Organizational capacities remain one of the most significant bottlenecks in the research and development sector,” he said. “Thwarting the overall lack of capacity and inadequate use of existing capacities are enormous challenges for research, analysis and development practice, especially in Least Developed Countries.”

This is why the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) developed a specific plan of action.

FTA Capacity Development Plan of Action 2020-2021 [**PDF available**]

FTA’s Capacity Needs Assessment Report [**PDF available**]

Following a consultative process that began in 2018, it details a roadmap to support people, organizations and societies to obtain, strengthen and maintain capabilities so they can set and achieve their own development objectives over time. It follows a capacity needs assessment jointly authored by CIFOR principal scientist Andrew Wardell and the late Mehmood Ul-Hassan (1964-2020), who was head of capacity development at World Agroforestry (ICRAF) from 2012 until March. Mieke Bourne and Sabrina Chesterman with the Stakeholder Approach to Risk Informed and Evidence-based Decision-making (SHARED) at ICRAF were also authors.

Overall aims include contributing to the overall CGIAR Strategy and Results Framework (SRF) and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through five “flagship” themes:

Tree genetic resources to bridge production gaps and promote resilience
Enhancing how trees and forests contribute to smallholder livelihoods
Sustainable global value chains and investments for supporting forest conservation and equitable development
Landscape dynamics, productivity and resilience
Climate change mitigation and adaptation opportunities in forests, trees and agroforestry

“Building agroforestry and forestry capacity both within our institutions and with our national partners and future researchers, technical staff, media and policy makers is critical for achieving our ambitions goals and for bringing about real and lasting change – this plan of action will help guide these capacity development efforts,” Bourne said.

This article was produced by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA). FTA is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with Bioversity International, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR, ICRAF and TBI. FTA’s work is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.

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Sentinel Solutions for the Anthropocene

Sentinel Solutions for the Anthropocene

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The NHSL team of researchers in El Tuma

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This article is a longform, part of a new series of FTA blogs aiming at providing in-depth analysis of mature FTA projects. By consulting/interviewing all the scientists involved in the study, these longforms give a detailed overview of specific projects, augmented by the comments from the scientists who developed them. This longform is issued in conjunction with International Mother Earth Day 2020.

A peculiar perspective on the first reports from the pioneering Sentinel Landscapes program

We are living in the Anthropocene.

Sometime in the 1950s, it is proposed, we finally broke from 11,650 years of history and entered a entirely new epoch. Rather than glacial advance and retreat, this epoch is defined by the industrial activity of humankind.

Deforestation, soil erosion, construction, river dams and nuclear weapons will leave permanent relics in the stratigraphy of the earth: as deposits in the sedimentary record, as ghostly technofossils, or as lethal fallout signatures.

Due to human activity, global rates of extinction are perhaps 100-1000 times above the normal background rate. At the same time, invasive species introduced or unwittingly spread by humans are homogenizing global ecosystems. Claims of a sixth major extinction event are not exaggerated and the cause, most scientists agree, is human.

Fossil fuels and land use changes have led to a precipitous rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. The oceans are acidifying; the polar ice caps are melting; the consequences are daunting.

There are two possible responses – if we rule out burying our heads in the degraded soil – either we wait for nature to overthrow industry or we apply our human ingenuity, so often the curse of ecological wellbeing, to its restoration.

But how can we hope to turn things around if we do not know what is driving deforestation and degradation? Or if we do not know how many trees we have or how quickly they are disappearing? Or if we do not fully understand the consequences we face if forests disappear from the landscape?

To develop interventions that will work, the first step is knowing what is going on there, and for this we need data, credible data, large data, multi-year data.

Medical research has epidemiological studies that monitor large cohorts of the population over long periods of time to track global health and help predict and eliminate disease. What does forest conservation have? Sentinel Landscapes.

Sentinel Landscapes: A health check for tropical land use

Driven by the Forests, Trees and Agroforestry’s (FTA) program led by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the Sentinel Landscapes initiative is an audacious commitment to collect data on biophysical, social, economic and political dimensions across and monitor respective indicators across a network of eight carefully chosen tropical forest landscapes over extended periods of time.

Using the same standardized methodologies, this data promises to provide common ground for comparison – and, crucially, extrapolation. The Sentinel Landscapes program is the global health check that we desperately need so that we can face climate change, land degradation, poverty and food security with clear vision.

The idea for Sentinel Landscapes was hatched during conversations between colleagues at World Agroforestry (ICRAF) and CIFOR in 2011 and 2012. Since those first conversations, more and more academic organizations have joined the FTA program and participated to the Sentinel landscapes initiative, including Agricultural Research for Development (CIRAD), Bioversity International, Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE) and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture. In the words of one scientist, it has always been “super collaborative”.

Sentinel Landscapes have now been established across borders in Borneo-Sumatra, the Nile-Congo, Cameroon, the Mekong, West Africa, Western Ghats in India and the Western Amazon. But the first to report, in February 2020, was the Sentinel Landscape of Nicaragua-Honduras.

Sentinel Landscapes combine GIS data with on-the-ground samples and surveys

The Nicaragua-Honduras Sentinel Landscape

Sentinel Landscape stocktaking pilot study: Report Nicaragua-Honduras [**pdf**]

The lead author of the report is Norvin Sepúlveda at CATIE, who is coordinating the Nicaragua-Honduras Sentinel Landscape (NHSL).

The NHSL is a “mosaic of forests, agricultural land, cattle ranches and agroforestry systems” covering an area the size of the Republic of Ireland or twice the size of the Netherlands.

Straddling the border of two countries, the NHSL encompasses the largest remaining forest area in Central America and hosts at least twelve different ecosystems, including cloud forest, premontane humid tropical forest and pine savannahs.

According to the new report, as well as astonishing botanical and fauna diversity, the landscapes of the NHSL also sustain 822,175 farm families and 21,000 indigenous peoples.

Different kind of “forest transitions” do take place in the area, representing different situations along the “forest transition curve” concept coined by FTA.

The “forest transition curve” concept (FTA, 2011)

Nicaragua is currently plummeting down the “forest transition” curve, with forest cover being lost at an increasingly rapid rate. Meanwhile, Honduras is a late-transition country, with deforestation slowing in whatever small fraction of forests remain.

It would be impossible to survey such a vast territory in its entirety, so as part of the Sentinel Landscapes (SL) monitoring sampling methodology, the NHSL team selected four study blocks, two in Nicaragua and two in Honduras, which each represent different points on the forest transition curve. Each block is 100 sq km.

The concept of the SL was to integrate three different standardized methodologies to collect:

biophysical data
political and institutional data and
socio-economic data.

These harmonized data collection modules were coordinated by the Research Methods Group (RMG) at ICRAF. The work on biophysical methods began in West Africa in 2005, with the research of Tor-Gunnar Vågen of ICRAF

“We chose the four sites using GIS data and a special set of criteria,” Sepúlveda explains, “so that we got a range of different sites and a combination of diverse farm typologies and conservation issues.”

In Nicaragua, the El Tuma La Dalia study block is mountainous terrain, largely cultivated with coffee, but with some pine and cloud forests. Also in Nicaragua, Columbus Mine is less cultivated with staple cereal crops, but has more forest and is known for its tropical humid climate.

Across the border in Honduras, Rio Platáno is primarily forest with little cultivation, whereas the Rio Blanco study block, nestled in a valley, is mostly pasture for livestock with only small pockets of surviving forest.

Beyond case studies: the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework

Tor-Gunnar Vågen is now head of the GeoScience lab at ICRAF, based in Nairobi, Kenya. For the past fifteen years, Vågen and soil systems scientist Leigh Ann Winowiecki, have worked to implement the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF).

A systematic method for collecting data and measuring land degradation, the LDSF builds up a biophysical baseline that covers key indicators including land use, land cover, land degradation, soil health, topography and impact on habitat..

But the real strength of the LDSF is in its consistency: it can be applied to any landscape and will give standardized and thus comparable data.

Before the LDSF, most forest conservation data was based on case studies that answered a specific question in a specific location. Although very useful, case study data makes it impossible to compare contexts or to generalize, and impossible to answer questions like ‘What role do trees have on farms in different locations and contexts?’ or ‘What is the potential for soil to sequester carbon in different locations and contexts?’

As a standardized, randomized data collection method, the LDSF solves this problem and helps scientists compare and scale up their localized findings into potentially globally-applicable conclusions.

“Applying the same framework and then replicating this across most major ecosystems means we can start answering the bigger questions,” Vågen says. “We can look at the larger patterns.”

At the start of the Sentinel Landscapes program in 2012, Vågen and Winowiecki trained the local field teams in Nicaragua and in Honduras so that data collection would be consistent.

Tracking degradation and climate change

From the biophysical baseline indicators, Sepúlveda, Vågen, Winowiecki and their fellow authors expect the NHSL to suffer badly from the impacts of climate change, particularly when it comes to the flow and contamination of the water supply.

The geographical location of Nicaragua and Honduras make both countries vulnerable to extreme weather events and a pattern of freak rainstorms alternating with withering drought is becoming more common.

In late 2007, Hurricane Felix destroyed almost 510,764 ha of forest in northeastern Nicaragua – that’s an area four times the size of New York City.

Of course, it is not only Nicaragua-Honduras that faces the challenges of climate change. The eight Sentinel Landscapes scattered across the tropics are critical for monitoring the progress of climate change with a consistent methodology, over long time periods.

But seeing climate change impacts is irrelevant if not looked through the lenses of land-use and land-use change impacts. Although the forest is now in recovery, the NHSL report found that slash and burn agriculture and livestock are encroaching on former forest landscapes.

“One thing that isn’t looked at enough is the interaction between climate change and land degradation,” Vågen says. “When we started out, the focus was more on land degradation per se: soil erosion, loss of soil function and the reduction in soil quality due to land-use change. But of course this data has many other applications and understanding the impacts of climate change is one of them.”

The data, published in the FTA Sentinel Landscapes portal, warn that vulnerable ecosystems may collapse in mere decades once they hit a tipping point of human-induced degradation, combined with the impacts of climate change.

“The ability of a landscape to adapt to changes in climate is affected by land degradation and, of course, degraded land can contribute to emissions.”

The Sentinel Landscapes program tracks this degradation, but the data also points to solutions.

Sentinel solutions: Soil organic carbon

The Sentinel Landscapes data offers remarkable insights into where governments, municipalities and farmers can optimize their landscapes from multiple perspectives, including carbon capture and protection from erosion, and the potential for virtuous circles.

“For example, we see higher tree densities in non-eroded soil,” Winowiecki says, “and higher soil organic carbon in non-eroded landscapes.”

Most people know that forests can act as carbon sinks, but of the total carbon found in terrestrial ecosystems nearly 80 percent is actually stored in the soil. Soil carbon reservoirs are also at risk, and the team has published widely on the link between land degradation and soil organic carbon.

Furthermore, Rattan Lal, director of Ohio State University’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Center, estimates that, with cultivation, the world’s soil has lost up to 70 percent of its original carbon stock. If researchers could find a way to maximize soil organic carbon sequestration, then that would be a significant blow in our Herculean labor to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

According to the new report, soil organic carbon levels are low across all four of the NHSL study blocks. Even small increases in soil organic carbon, when multiplied over large areas, would make a measurable difference – as well as increasing overall soil quality.

“One of the things we’re able to do now is map soil organic carbon over very large areas and look at the potential for storage of carbon in the soil,” Vågen explains.

Combining field data collected with the LDSF and remote sensing imagery from satellite, Vågen and his team are able to produce maps of key soil and land health indicators at a scale relevant to farmers and decision makers, for example at 30 meter resolution, with high accuracy (using the Landsat satellite imagery, the resolution is 30 meter squared).

“We can say what the trends are and what the potential is to store carbon in the soil,” Vågen says. “And we can do that down to the level of individual farmers.”

Of course, this information, however precise, would mean nothing at all unless the farmers could do something about it.

Winowiecki, a specialist in soil organic carbon, has good news: “With good land and landscape management we can increase soil organic carbon,” she says. “But the data shows wide variation, even within one site, so it’s important that we tailor the management to each specific farm.”

It sounds like a lot of work, but it should come as no surprise that there is no “one size fits all” solution.

“We talk a lot about ‘Options by context’,” Winowiecki says. “That means developing local options for the local context.”

Different areas can vary enormously, not only by physical environment, but also by local governance and even household structure. These factors go beyond the LDSF method and the second strand of the Sentinel Landscape approach is a socio-economic survey that attempts to capture the wider context in which the landscape is embedded.

“For any intervention to work,” Winowiecki says, “you have to understand the context and that’s exactly what the Sentinel Landscapes have done.”

Context is everything

The socio-economic surveys was every bit as impressive an undertaking as the biophysical baseline study of the LDSF. The development of the socio-economic methodology and design of the household module was coordinated by Anja Gassner, while the subsequent analysis of data generated for all the landscapes was led by Brian Chiputwa (both with the Research Methods Groups at ICRAF) in consultation with CATIE.

The socio-economic surveys were designed to capture baseline information on households’ production systems, livelihood portfolios, asset endowment and use of natural resources such as forests. This data was then used to construct various indicators that can be used as proxies for household’s dependency on natural resources (land, water and forests), food security and nutrition and poverty status. These indicators can provide important insights into household economic activities.

Based in Costa Rica, CATIE agroforestry scientist Arlene López-Sampson helped analyze the reams of NHSL data. “You can’t just look at the condition of the trees and ignore the people,” López-Sampson says, “because they are constantly choosing among options and it’s them we need to address. Sentinel Landscapes are relevant because they recognize the importance of people as agents of change and bring them back into the equation.”

An example of Household Module Instrument used for the NHSL household surveys [**pdf**]

Teams of researchers spoke to 849 households in dozens of communities across the four study blocks of the NHSL, spending 3-5 days in each village, conducting interviews and workshops that explored in detail the relationship between people and landscape.

“There are a lot of people involved and we need the trust of the local municipalities and grassroots organizations,” López-Sampson says. “It’s very context dependent. What’s happening in Nicaragua is different to what’s happening in Honduras and to what’s happening in other parts of the world.”

Norvin Sepúlveda coordinated the field teams in Nicaragua and Honduras: “A combination of GIS and household data is very important to give us a better idea of what is happening,” he says. “While the GIS did the overview, we were face to face with the people, taking information directly from them.”

Sepúlveda gives a good example of how the dual approach works. “In one area, the GIS showed patches of forest left,” he says. “So we went to the household to find out why: it was to protect the water supply.”

Trees act like giant sponges, collecting and filtering rainwater before releasing it gradually into streams and rivers. Take away the trees and you get flash floods, soil erosion and a sharp reduction in water quality.

“It’s very important for us to find out why forest is left standing,” Sepúlveda says. “It often depends on a farmer’s education, on the state of his land, and on whether he has legal rights to the land.”

And so we come to the thorniest issue faced by the NHSL team: conflict and governance.

Within the socio-economic surveys, the institutional mapping and natural resource governance activities were implemented using the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) methodology, developed by Scientists at the University of Michigan, USA.

“The one big challenge”

“The major challenge of the whole project was operating in the border,” Sepúlveda says. “Lack of governance there is the one big challenge.”

“In Nicaragua, El Tuma La Dalia is doing well with restoration, earning some extra money for coffee farmers,” Sepúlveda explains. “But at Columbus Mine, the deforestation has been very bad.”

Columbus Mine is the home of the Tasba-Pry indigenous group and, according to the report, their practice of communal land ownership, although recognized by the government, is coming into conflict with the growing population of settlers who pursue private ownership.

It is a similarly mixed story in Honduras: “At Rio Platáno they are approaching forest management, which is good,” Sepúlveda says. “But in Rio Blanco livestock is taking down all the forest that is left.”

Rio Platáno is home to several different indigenous groups, whose land rights have not been recognized by the government. As a result, the NHSL study reports, they have fallen victim to land grabs.

“We also have problems there with drug trafficking,” López-Sampson says. “It’s really hard to work in that kind of geography because it’s not only about land management; it’s also about organized criminal activities.”

But of course these kinds of challenges are not unique to the NHSL and researchers must understand the whole picture in order to change behaviors.

“We chose a combination of both different contexts and people,” Sepúlveda explains. “It makes for a contrast to the other agricultural sites, which are more stable.”

Sentinel solutions: Making change happen

The Sentinel Landscapes program is a breathtaking display of the research possible when scientists from different disciplines collaborate at every scale, from collecting soil samples on the ground to capturing remote sensing data from space to conducting focus group discussions with farmers or interviewing individual farmers on their farms.

Discussion groups with farmers and local communities in Rio Blanco

“We need a lot of people to do our work,” López-Sampson says. “The coordination of knowledge is really important: between academics, but also among the local organizations who are doing all the interventions we try to promote so that we all have healthy ecosystems.”

The team hopes that the work they have done in the NHSL can help Honduras move further up that forest transition curve and encourage Nicaragua to bottom out their deforestation sooner rather than later.

“Trees are now part of the agenda,” López-Sampson says. “Trees are now seen as important to have on the farms, not only to provide timber, but as part of local community strategies to provide incomes and help maintain a healthy ecosystem by providing a link between the landscape and the agroforestry system.”

Meanwhile, Vågen is ambitious about the future: “Using LDSF we can accurately track changes over time and create bespoke interventions for specific plots and specific farmers to maximize land conservation, biodiversity and soil organic carbon capture.”

It is clear that the long term monitoring of the Sentinel Landscapes approach is absolutely necessary to bring clarity to the slow processes of landscape management and climate change.

“Five, ten years isn’t long enough,” Sepúlveda concludes. “I really hope these projects carry on, in order to see restoration, in order to see people change their minds and in order to see the new generations make change happen.”

The ultimate goal of the Sentinel Landscapes approach is to build up on these diverse data over longer periods and be able to integrate the socio-economic, biophysical and political indicators. For example, with long-term data, it will be interesting to map out causal links between household poverty levels (see diagram below) and land degradation over time in the four sites; and how these vary through different governance structures across communities.

The Economist recently published an interesting report in 2017 titled “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data”. With adequate investment and if collected in a dynamic, responsive and consistent way, big data approaches that monitor and integrate indicators from diverse disciplines such as the natural and social sciences, can lead to more complete and actionable set of insights for better adaption and mitigation strategies against climate change. Initiatives such as the SL could well be the next oil in future.

“A warning shot”: Sentinel Landscapes research and Coronavirus

At the time this article was written, all the NHSL scientists were already all working from home (be it in Costa Rica, Nicaragua or Kenya), in a global attempt to slow the transmission of coronavirus. “Our heavy reliance on industrial agriculture, with large, uniform herds, makes us vulnerable to outbreaks,” Vågen says. “The information we can provide, such as landscape diversity, could be a valuable contribution down the road.”

As animals and people are forced into closer proximity either in landscapes because wildlife habitats are anthropized, or through wild food markets, the probability of a virus making the leap to humans increases.

Vågen warns that ecological degradation makes diseases such as Covid-19 much more likely and, in our hyper-connected world, we need to start paying closer attention.

“It’s one of those up and coming things that we need to be looking at,” Vågen says. “And not just coronavirus, but other diseases,” he adds. “For me, it’s a warning shot. It’s something that we need to understand better, how it relates to the state of our planet in general.”

In times past, sentinels were flesh and blood watchers responsible at all hours to warn their kinsfolk of any approaching existential threat – whether wild beast, enemy army, fire or plague.

Today, our most valuable sentinels are scientific: the ice core samples that warn us of global heating; the remote sensing data that warn us of deforestation.

The Covid-19 outbreak shows what can happen when we have no sentinels – or, worse, when we ignore them. Without sufficient, credible warning, our society becomes extremely vulnerable to unseen existential threats.

The United Nations has sworn to dedicate the coming decade to halting ecosystem degradation and restoring already degraded ecosystems. But if science is to guide us safely through the Anthropocene, then we need to support our scientific watchers through continuous monitoring programs like Sentinel Landscapes.

More crucially, we need to listen.

Selected references

Chiputwa, B., Ihli, H.J., Wainaina, P., Gassner, A., 2020. Accounting for the invisible value of trees on farms through valuation of ecosystem services, in: Rusinamhodzi, L. (Ed.), The Role of Ecosystem Services in Sustainable Food Systems. Elsevier Inc., pp. 229–261. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-816436-5.00012-3

Chiputwa, B. 2016. An exploratory guide on constructing socioeconomic indicators for the Sentinel Landscape Project: The case of the Nicaragua-Honduras Sentinel Landscape. Nairobi, Kenya: World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), 56 p. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8GL6bTxo5ekMXRzN003ck1hV1E/view

Chiputwa, B., Spielman, D.J., Qaim, M., 2015. Food Standards, Certification, and Poverty among Coffee Farmers in Uganda, World Development Vol. 66, pp. 400–412. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X1400271X

Coulibaly, J.Y., Chiputwa, B., Nakelse, T., Kundhlande, G., 2017. Adoption of agroforestry and the impact on household food security among farmers in Malawi. Agric. Syst. 155, 52–69. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308521X17303001

FTA, 2011. CGIAR Research Program 6 – Forests, Trees and Agroforestry: Livelihoods, Landscapes and Governance Proposal. Document available here

Pramova, E.; Lavorel, S.; Locatelli, B.; Colloff, M.J.; Bruley, E. 2020. Adaptation in the Anthropocene: How we can support ecosystems to enable our response to change, CIFOR. https://doi.org/10.17528/cifor/007588

Sepúlveda N, Vågen T-G, Winowiecki LA, Ordoñez J, Chiputwa B, Makui P, Somarriba E and López-Sampson, A. 2020. Sentinel Landscape stocktaking pilot study: Report Nicaragua-Honduras. Working Paper 2. Bogor, Indonesia: The CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA). https://doi.org/10.17528/cifor/007537

Vågen, T.-G.; Winowiecki, L.A. Predicting the Spatial Distribution and Severity of Soil Erosion in the Global Tropics using Satellite Remote Sensing. Remote Sens. 2019, 11, 1800. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/11/15/1800

Vågen, Tor-G., Winowiecki, L., Tondoh, J.E., Desta, L.T. and Gumbricht, T. 2016. Mapping of soil properties and land degradation risk in Africa using MODIS reflectance. Geoderma. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2015.06.023

Winowiecki, L., Vågen, T-G. and Huising, J. 2016. Effects of land cover on ecosystem services in Tanzania: A spatial assessment of soil organic carbon. Geoderma. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016706115000816)

Vågen, T-G and Winowiecki, L. 2013. Mapping of soil organic carbon stocks for spatially explicit assessments of climate change mitigation potential. Environmental Research Letters. 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/015011

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FTA's new Gender Equality and Social Inclusion Agenda and Action Plan 2020-2021

FTA’s new Gender Equality and Social Inclusion Agenda and Action Plan 2020-2021

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At a food fair in Luwingu, Zambia, in April 2017, women display items they regularly forage and cultivate.

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A Revised Research Agenda and Action Plan 2020-2021 for FTA on Gender Equality and Social Inclusion has just been released

Since its very beginning in 2011, gender and social inclusion have been a core area of research and action for the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA).

Gender equality is a human right and a necessary condition for reaching sustainable development worldwide. Significant inequalities based on gender and other types of discrimination affect who has voice and can influence, and who benefits or suffers losses in rapidly transforming forest, tree and agroforestry landscapes. While being fundamentally unjust, these inequalities also have the undesirable side effect to hamper the achievement of fundamental development and environmental outcomes, such as the Sustainable Development Goals.

The first phase of FTA (2011-2015) had a robust institutional architecture in place for gender mainstreaming. The FTA Gender Strategy produced in 2013 was one of the first to be approved by the Independent Science and Partnership Council and the Consortium office. As FTA’s research agenda has evolved over time, so too has the program’s portfolio of gender and social inclusion research, to address emerging global challenges and reflect the latest thinking and innovations in the field.

The new FTA Gender Research and Action Plan 2020-2021 [**pdf**]

The revised version of this strategy, called Gender Equality and Social Inclusion – A Revised Agenda and Action Plan for the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry 2020-2021 draws on the program’s tradition of quality gender research and its experience strengthening gender integration across program activities and processes. Building on and complementing its original efforts and strategy, FTA continues to view gender integration in research as a fundamental part of doing good science (European Commission 2011), and approaches gender as a theme that cuts across every aspect of the FTA research portfolio.

FTA’s revised agenda and action plan lays out a transformative approach that actively addresses structural barriers and schemes that (re)produce gender inequalities. The aim is a deep, lasting and pervasive transition that moves beyond individual women’s self-improvement toward more equal power dynamics and structures that affect men’s and women’s capacities to:

control assets and resources;
value and distribute unremunerated labor; and
meaningfully participate in decision making at the household and community levels and beyond.

From a normative perspective, FTA recognizes gender equality as an inherent human right. This means that FTA advances gender equality throughout its portfolio for its intrinsic rather than merely instrumental value: equality is not seen primarily as a mechanism to deliver greater impact, but as an essential and indivisible condition for all human beings.

In the new research agenda and action plan, there is also an explicit commitment to adopting an intersectionality lens to analyze how gender intersects with other factors of social differentiation, such as age or generation, socioeconomic status or ethnicity. This allows FTA to shine a light on and work more comprehensively on other forms of marginalization that all together shape livelihood and resource management decisions, governance and dramatically determine the inequitable distribution of benefits from tree-based systems. In this regard, the research program gives renewed attention to the aspirations and livelihoods of youth in forest, tree and agroforestry systems.

The Revised Research Agenda and Action Plan is characterized by two main, mutually supportive strands of work. The first strand focuses on knowledge generation and delivering quality gender, social inclusion and youth research, and the second on strengthening gender integration along FTA’s impact pathways, including how the program engages with a wide range of stakeholders.

Theory of change of gender integration in FTA

Broken down in main points, this Revised Research Agenda and Action Plan will enable FTA to:

Lay out the pathways through which FTA contributes to the CGIAR’s efforts to achieve the Intermediate Development Outcome (IDO) ‘Equity and inclusion achieved (gender and youth)’;
Generate an empirical evidence base on the structural barriers that (re)produce gender inequalities in forest and agroforestry landscapes and develop innovations to transform discriminatory structures and norms;
Strengthen capacities for delivering a high volume of quality, impactful research that will foster gender equality as well as other sought FTA outcomes;
Build partnerships to mainstream gender in processes (e.g. around restoration, climate change or inclusive business models) and multilateral environmental agreements and agendas (e.g. Rio Conventions) of concern to FTA.

This refocused Revised Research Agenda and Action Plan offers new opportunities for framing transformative and impactful research to enable change toward more equitable and sustainable forest, tree and agroforestry systems.

FTA hopes that it will inspire other research programs in constructing their social and gender inclusiveness strategy.

References

European Commission. 2011. Toolkit: Gender in EU-funded research. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.

Written by Marène Elias and Ana Maria Paez Valencia from the FTA Gender cross-cutting theme. The CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with Bioversity International, CATIE, CIRAD, ICRAF, INBAR and TBI.

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Outcome Evaluation Approach – 5 Case Studies from FTA

Outcome Evaluation Approach – 5 Case Studies from FTA

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Yordana Yawate, carries a sack of sago pith to be filtered on the banks of the Tuba river in Honitetu village, Maluku province, Indonesia. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/CIFOR

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Two recent publications discuss how to effectively assess the impact of transdisciplinary (TDR) research and apply these methods to 5 case studies.

The creation of the CGIAR Research Programs (CRP) was aimed to increase the social, economic, and environmental impacts of research. These programs have intentionally developed broader and deeper partnerships with a wide range of policy and development actors (i.e., international conservation and development organizations, NGOs, policy actors, other stakeholders), as well as with other researchers and research organizations. These efforts mirrored a shift in the broader research environment toward more engaged, problem-centred research. Such research, known variously as Transdisciplinary Research (TDR), Mode 2 Research, and Sustainability Science, among other terms, actively involves stakeholders to help ensure the relevance of the research, incorporate a broader range of expertise in the research process, and promote the co-generation of knowledge with research users.

In theory, engaged TDR approaches should help address complex sustainability problems and contribute to more and better outcomes. However, the increased complexity of these approaches makes impact assessment even more challenging than for traditional research approaches. Research impact assessment is chronically challenged by the fact that the uptake and use of research-based knowledge is incremental, with multiple steps and other intervening factors, often with long time-lags. Measuring and attributing impact are difficult. CGIAR research impact assessment has typically attempted to measure the benefits of improved technologies generated by CGIAR research; this assumes that the main contributions of the research are bundled within an improved plant variety or other technology package. TDR deliberately aims to contribute to several impact pathways simultaneously, by supporting capacity-building and empowerment among partners, facilitating dialogue and political processes, co-generating knowledge that will be implemented directly by partners, as well as through more conventional research products. However, empirical evidence of whether and how transdisciplinary approaches contribute to (more) effective scientific and social outcomes remains limited.

CIFOR Senior Associate Scientist Brian Belcher and his team in the Sustainability Research Effectiveness Program (SRE) at Royal Roads University have developed methods to assess TDR. The SRE Program has also conducted a series of case studies of completed FTA research projects to investigate the link between transdisciplinary research and societal effects. They recently published two papers to share lessons from their work.

A refined method for theory-based evaluation of the societal impacts of research [**pdf**]

“A refined method for theory-based evaluation of the societal impacts of research” (Belcher et al., 2020) provides a detailed description of concepts and a method for assessing the relationship between research processes, outputs, and outcomes. The Outcome Evaluation Approach uses an actor-centred Theory of Change as the analytical framework, and accounts for complexity by recognizing the role of other actors, context, and external processes in change. The article provides stepwise guidance on how to:

document a theory of change;
determine data needs and sources;
collect data;
manage and analyze data; and
present findings.

The paper responds to the need for appropriate methods to demonstrate (for accountability) and analyze (for learning) whether and how research projects contribute to change processes, in an effort to make research more effective in addressing complex sustainability challenges.

Linking transdisciplinary research characteristics and quality to effectiveness [**pdf**]

“Linking Transdisciplinary Research Characteristics and Quality to Effectiveness: A Comparative Analysis of Five Research-for-Development Projects” (Belcher et al., 2019) reports lessons from outcome evaluations [1] of five FTA projects. The five projects:

Brazil Nut Project (BNP)
Sustainable Wetlands Adaptation and Mitigation Program (SWAMP)
Fire and Haze Indonesia (F&H)
Global Comparative Study on Forest Tenure Reform-Peru (GCS-FTR), and
Support to the Development of Agroforestry Concessions in Peru (SUCCESS)

represent a wide range of research approaches, social and policy contexts, and outcomes. Each case study used the Outcome Evaluation Approach described in Belcher et al. (2020) to document the project’s Theory of Change and assess whether and how outcomes were realized. The analysis also used Belcher et al.’s (2016) Transdisciplinary Research Quality Assessment Framework (QAF) to characterize each project by the degree to which its design and implementation conformed with transdisciplinary criteria.

Each project had a deliberate focus on moving beyond knowledge production to influence policy and practice. To do that, the projects employed a variety of strategies that crossed disciplinary bounds and engaged a range of partners and stakeholders at different levels. The results demonstrate that projects employing more transdisciplinary characteristics make more diverse contributions as they tend to leverage more diverse mechanisms of change. The participation of various system actors contributed to projects’ relevance and strongly contributed to the uptake and use of the research. Projects that invested most in developing and facilitating participation (e.g., the Global Comparative Study on Forest Tenure Reform-Peru and the Support to the Development of Agroforestry Concessions in Peru projects) were the most successful in generating social learning and building coalitions. Projects that employed the most traditional scientific models (e.g., the Brazil Nut Project and the Sustainable Wetlands Adaptation and Mitigation Program) but still invested in outreach and engagement, were able to realize significant outcomes. Research project efforts to support social processes helped translate and broker knowledge outputs and made substantial additional contributions through capacity-building, initiating and supporting discourse, and relationship-building.

Given the results, it is clear that research aiming to influence policy and practice change should consider integrating and reflecting on TDR characteristics more intentionally from the early planning stages and throughout the whole research process. This new Outcome Evaluation Approach will help linking outcomes, outputs and TDR more effectively, justifying the need for more transdisciplinary science, with an increase in overall results and global benefits.

[1] Two individual project outcome evaluation reports have been published (Brazilian Nut, SWAMP), while the others are forthcoming (F&H, GCS-FTR, SUCCESS).

FTA is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with Bioversity International, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR, ICRAF and TBI. FTA’s work is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.

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For a food system at risk, women are key yet often overlooked

For a food system at risk, women are key yet often overlooked

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Members of a women's group in Nigeria. Photo by C. de Bode/CGIAR

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Originally published on CGIAR.org

As the world celebrates International Women’s Day, and the 25^th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the most progressive roadmap for the empowerment of women and girls, everywhere, Dr. Claudia Sadoff, CGIAR Gender Champion and Director General of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), declares that our climate change-ravaged food systems cannot wait for the gradual progress of gender quality in her op-ed in The Independent.

From locust swarms, hurricanes, wildfires and emerging famines, climate-related disasters are taking places around the world and our fragile food systems are on the front line.

Our food systems are in need of urgent support, and rural women play a critical role in reversing the problem. Research has found that rural women are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change, yet their significant contributions to food systems receive only a fraction of the focus they deserve.

Rural women are hamstrung by gender bias in food systems, home life, economics and culture. Barriers to accessing finance, insurance, high-quality seed, fertilizer, additional labour and markets result in women producing 20-30 percent less per hectare than men.

Women’s unpaid daily household tasks are often backbreaking and time-consuming. Women are responsible for collecting water and fuel for cooking and tending kitchen gardens and family-owned livestock. With African women producing up to 80 percent of food for their household, these women have less opportunity to grow and sell foods at market to improve their financial position.

Breaking free of this gender bias requires a rethink on how rural women are reflected in, and participate in, society at large, says Sadoff in her Op-Ed for International Women’s Day, published in the Independent on the 7^th of March.

So, what does this rethink look like? How can we enable women and, in the process, strengthen our food systems?

Sadoff has summarized this huge undertaking into three key steps. (1) Ensure rural women can invest in productivity in their farms, (2) ease the burden of daily household tasks, and (3) build research systems and cultures to be more gender equitable in the long run.

Through One CGIAR and the Generating Evidence and New Directors for Equitable Results (GENDER) Platform, we are proud to say that we are working together to achieve these three objectives. Closing the gender gap completely will not happen in a generation but taking steps towards achieving greater gender equality will help to build the resilience of our food systems, bolster rural economise and improve rural livelihoods.

With UN Women, One CGIAR supports #GenerationEquality, for the benefit of all.

‘For a food system at risk, women are key yet often overlooked,’ by Claudia Sadoff (IWMI) was originally published on 7^th March, 2020 in the Independent.

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IWD2020 – Ensuring equal rights for women, enabling them to achieve their potential (Vol. 4, Issue 2)

IWD2020 – Ensuring equal rights for women, enabling them to achieve their potential (Vol. 4, Issue 2)

03 March, 2020

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This year’s UN theme of International Women’s Day, I am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights, underlines the fact that, despite global advances in many different areas, the world is still far too many decades away from achieving gender equality. Importantly, 2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, probably the most forward looking agenda for women’s rights and empowerment ever signed. So, this is a significant moment to look back at targets, take stock of what has been achieved and what still needs to be done. The year 2020 is a time to rethink our actions, from local to broader global interventions aimed at achieving gender equality and promoting the human rights of all women and girls.

Gender equality is a fundamental human right. Moreover, the current challenges faced in agriculture, natural resource management, biodiversity conservation and restoration within the context of climate change can only be addressed if we achieve full equality. This is why gender equality has always been high on FTA’s agenda. As FTA’s overall research agenda has evolved over the years, so too has the Program’s portfolio of gender and social inclusion research. For this reason, FTA has been working on a new Gender and Social Inclusion Research Agenda and Action Plan, which draws on a tradition of quality gender work within FTA centers and complements FTA’s original Gender Strategy (2013). This new document reflects thematic evolutions in FTA and methodological developments in gender research and praxis. It features an increased attention to the nexus between gender and generation (including ‘youth’), and efforts to make FTA’s research increasingly transformative. Stay tuned as this new Research Agenda and Action Plan will be available on www.foreststreesagroforestry.org in the coming weeks.

In our previous gender-focused newsletter (October 2019) we very sadly announced the loss of Dr Esther Mwangi, a staunch advocate for rural women’s rights, who led the crafting of FTA’s original Gender Strategy. Esther had been overseeing a longstanding research initiative on the progress of forest tenure reforms in Uganda and Kenya. This research has recently been published in the form of a collection of info briefs, which we share with you in her memoriam.

Realizing women’s rights means also that education, science and research must provide them with equal opportunities. Last 11th of February, on the occasion of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, Violet Chanza Black, a research assistant working on gender at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, shared her personal experience of struggles and determination to obtain equal education as boys in her village. Violet was born in Mulanje, rural Malawi. Her early years involved considerable commuting from her village to the capital city (Lilongwe) to allow her to follow courses. Violet succeeded in achieving her objectives and now holds an MSc in Development Economics, majoring in Human Development and Food Security from the University of Roma Tre. Follow this link to hear Violet’s story – one shared by so many girls around the world – and views on gender equality.

You will find Violet’s compelling interview and, other updates on FTA gender research as well as developments in some priority research areas of FTA in this edition of the newsletter. We hope that these stories and FTA’s work in general will inspire you to reframe your actions towards a gender-equal world; one we all should contribute to and enjoy.

Vincent Gitz, FTA Director, and Marlène Elias, FTA Gender Research Coordinator

Special feature

Equal education rights: not an option

For the international day of women and girls in science (11 February) FTA sent out statements from our Flagship 1 Leader Ramni Jamnadass and Violet Chanza Black, a gender research assistant at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. Both stories talked about the struggle and ultimately the empowerment that these women obtained through education. Violet’s statement was somewhat extremely provoking. So we decided to find out more.

News

Ethiopian forests: a story of women

Rural women of Ethiopia are the backbone of the community and have a deep relationship with forests. However, because they are not part of community decision making, they are not playing the positive role they could in rebuilding and protecting ecosystems amid the growing threat of climate change. "Deforestation has already become not only a question of development but a question of survival." Learn more about Ethiopia's efforts to regreen its land and the need to empower the invisible warriors: women.

Gender perspectives on agroforestry cocoa production in Ecuador and Perú. Ideas towards an inclusive and sustainable intensification

Two examples of agroforestry focused on cocoa production – one in Ecuador, the other in Peru – show the benefits of the agroforestry systems to achieve food sovereignty, resilience against the effects of climate change and especially empowerment of women who still represent a vulnerable group, being marginalized from production decisions within the context of the peasant family hierarchy and often neglected by assistance programs. Interesting read (Spanish only).

Women’s place in Africa’s growing charcoal sector

The growing charcoal business in sub-Saharan Africa has often been seen as a male-dominated occupation, with few studies exploring gender dynamics. In reality, women are present throughout the value chain —from production to transport, sale and retail— and they play a vital role in sustaining rural livelihoods, especially in times of duress. See how.

Restoring Forests, Restoring Communities: Lessons from Shinyanga

The story begins in Shinyanga, northern Tanzania, with a landscape restoration project that is – or perhaps was – held up as a bright example of successful collaboration between government, conservation scientists and local communities. Priscilla Wainaina, agricultural economist at World Agroforestry (ICRAF), led a research team to investigate what made the Shinyanga restoration so successful. Read the full story.

Analyzing progress of forest tenure reforms in Kenya and Uganda

A collection of briefs just released by CIFOR presents findings on the progress of forest tenure reforms in Uganda and Kenya, following the research of our deeply missed Esther Mwangi. Some of the primary questions tackled by the research were: Are these reforms helping to conserve forest resources and providing livelihood returns for local people? Are they improving land tenure security? What are the impacts on the rights of the poor, specifically women and ethnic minorities, and their access to forests and trees? What are the bottlenecks and is anything missing? What lessons and insights for policy and practice can already be drawn? Find out here.

How climate finance and technology could better integrate women

Amid frustrated negotiations around Article 6 guidance on emissions counting and carbon markets, U.N. COP25 climate talks delivered a decision on a five-year enhanced Lima Work Program on Gender. The work program, initially embedded into the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2014, is a commitment to advance gender balance and integrate gender considerations. Read the report here.

Banner photo by O. Girard/CIFOR. Special feature and news photos, from top, by: CIFOR; N. Elkington/CIFOR; CIFOR; A. Gonzalez/CIFOR; L. A. Duguma / ICRAF; O. Girard/CIFOR; J. Mollins/CIFOR.

Contact us

foreststreesagroforestry.org

Recent publications

Where are the women? A review and conceptual framework for addressing gender equity in charcoal value chains in Sub-Saharan Africa

Workshop on Gender and Indigenous Women's Rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Protecting Rights to Land and Forests

Understanding and protecting our forest tenure rights and privileges: A guide to training of local community leaders in Uganda

Guidelines on sustainable forest management in drylands of Ethiopia

From Tree Planting to Tree Growing: Rethinking Ecosystem Restoration Through Trees

Unpacking 'gender' in joint forest management: Lessons from two Indian states

Assessing the Livelihood Vulnerability of Rural Indigenous Households to Climate Changes in Central Nepal, Himalaya

Sustainable Development Goals: Their Impacts on Forests and People

Book of Abstracts: 4th World Congress on Agroforestry

Perspectivas de género sobre la producción de cacao agroforestal en Ecuador y Perú. Ideas para una intensificación inclusiva y sostenible

Videos

Gender Equality & Malnutrition Transformation

International Women’s Day 2020: FTA interview with Violet Chanza Black

Podcasts

How to catalyze gender equitable change (Markus Ihalainen)

Gender power relationships (Houria Hjoudi)

The CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with Bioversity International, CATIE, CIRAD, ICRAF, INBAR and TBI.

FTA thanks all donors who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund.


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International Women's Day 2020 - Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights

International Women’s Day 2020 – Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights

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Ramni shared her experience being the first woman from her community to obtain a PhD, something unseen before. Ramni’s long-standing fight to include nutrition in research is also featured in CGIAR’s gender campaign.

Violet’s statement was somewhat more provoking. It highlighted her personal struggle against both her teachers and her parents in obtaining a fundamental right: her education!

Her story was so compelling that we decided to find out more, and we contacted her for an interviewe. A video is also available, to help disseminate Violet’s story, as well as her views on gender equality. There is a lot to learn! This is a story of success, despite the odds – unfortunately so many girls around the world are not so fortunate. We hope this will inspire them never to give up fighting for their fundamental rights, and of course adults to always support them, all over the world.

Violet now holds an MSc in Development Economics, majoring in Human Development and Food Security from the University of Roma Tre. You may read her Master thesis here.

Interview full text

FTA – For the international day of women and girls in science you made a very strong statement, based on your personal experience [Educating a girl should never be optional…] – could you tell us more about it?

Violet Chanza Black – my story starts from one Saturday afternoon, I was at home tasked with making tea for a guest, my dad’s friend and as I served him his tea he asked me if I was still in school to which I happily responded yes and he turned to my father and said:

“If I had a daughter, I would never spend money on her school fees, because she is just going to get pregnant and then you waste all the money you spent on her school.”

I am a second born in a family of 8, four boys and four girls. I am the first daughter and that meant I was a “co-parent” when it comes to chores. Helping taking care of kids and cleaning, collecting water, firewood and cleaning. All of which had to be within my school day while my brother, even though he was older than me did not have to.

Primary school was fine, it was free, and the school provided us with free notebooks and pencils. All I needed was a school uniform.

I was selected to a public secondary school and I remember then I had to pay about 2$ per term and 6$ per year for my tuition fees. My brother went to a boarding school, which costed about 25 more times than my school and I remember he was never sent back home because he did not pay school fees, while I struggled to get my 2$. As a result, I would miss classes until well my father would give me the money to pay for school fees.

In school I remember one time my teacher wrote on my school report that “Violet likes hanging out with boys” which confirmed that theory that “she will just get pregnant and all the money would have been wasted and that made getting school fees even harder. I remember one of my teacher said to my friend “its good that you have pimples that way you will finish school.”

My message on the 11th of February was to shed some light on the power that teachers have to support students, also with their parents. Children who are in a similar situation as I was often face internal challenges within the household. Comments and general attitudes towards girls can really make them loose esteem or be encouraged.

FTA – When was the tipping point, when did your parents realize that you deserved the same education as your brother, despite what your teachers were saying?

VCB – My father always said go to school. It was until school wasn’t free that he was reluctant or unsure if he really wanted to spend that money on me. But when I didn’t go to school, he had me at home and I was nudging him… it was very annoying for him! Finally his reluctance was less strong than my determination!

FTA – What fueled your determination? It might be extremely hard to stand up to adult and community pressure, especially when you are so young?

My parents had separated by the time I went to secondary school and my mom was working for this woman who was working for Action Against Hunger. I looked up at her as a role model! That was a great source of inspiration for me. It made me realize that if I aspired at becoming like her, the only way I could achieve that was through education.

FTA – Well congratulations! Now you are the role model! How do you live up to this role?

VCB – Fom where I come the other issue is about poverty – so it’s not just about girls, it’s both girls and boys. How do you motivate a full community if no one is getting schooling, if they don’t have the basic needs? What I can do is to put myself in a place where they can talk to me, I reach out and I’m always there if they have questions. Another thing that is lacking is: information. You need to go to kids and tell them that education is possible, if they don’t see it as a possibility, they won’t desire it.

FTA- Did your personal experience bring you to focus on gender in your research?

VCB – I would say my personal experience is what keeps me going. I didn’t see any of my experience as it was happening that it was a gender issue. For me it was just happening. But my story allows me to relate to this topic and to the many people who are in a similar situation.

FTA – This year’s IWD theme is “I am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights” (or #GenerationEquality) and I think your story is strongly linked to this theme. Equality can be difficult however to define, because people are different, needs are different, contexts change, etc. There might be a thin line between equality and justice. What is your idea of equality?

When I hear the word equality, the first thing that should come to our mind is “equality of what?” Opportunities? Privileges? Different people are in different contexts, different situations. You cannot generalize. People are not homogeneous. I lend it from Amartya Sen’s Capabilities Approach: are people able to provide themselves food, shelter, clothing in a decent manner? I guess this is where we should all start from: Equality of access, equality of opportunities. It might be hard to achieve it, but there’s a lot we can do to help out someone else.

FTA- Any message you’d like to send out to all the women on this important day?

My wish for for all the women on International Women’s Day 2020: Individual Collectivism – we are all parts of one, if one of us is broken, we cannot make it to be whole. We are not free until we are all free. I think we all need to share, uplift and support in ways that we can other women and girls. Leaving no one behind.

As Martin Luther King said: “No one is free until we are all free.”

By the FTA Communication Team.

This article was produced by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA). FTA is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with Bioversity International, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR, ICRAF and TBI. FTA’s work is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.

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Women’s place in Africa’s growing charcoal sector

Women’s place in Africa’s growing charcoal sector

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The growing charcoal business in sub-Saharan Africa has often been seen as a male-dominated occupation, with few studies exploring gender dynamics. In reality, women are present throughout the value chain –from production to transport, sale and retail— and their involvement plays a vital role in sustaining rural livelihoods, especially in times of duress.

Gendered barriers not only hinder equal participation and benefits in the sector, but they can also undermine the efficiency and environmental sustainability of the value chain as a whole. As the charcoal business expands to cater to the continent’s growing population, it is ever more important that policies identify and address these barriers in each of the countries.

Scientists at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) have recently come up with a framework for incorporating gender analysis in future research and policy-making in the charcoal sector.

Following an extensive review of existing studies, researchers also produced a snapshot of available information on gender and charcoal value chains, and identified knowledge gaps for future research.

Participation is not enough

The review process made clear that sex-disaggregated data on the charcoal value chain is patchy and often limited to field observations. Even when sex-disaggregated data on participation or benefits is available, few studies conduct gender analysis to make sense of the observed differences.

However, by examining selected papers, the review found that women participate throughout the value chain, although they concentrate in retail, and that female producers tend to get involved as a last resort. Hence, obstacles to women’s participation and benefits may have a disproportionate welfare impact, especially given the high numbers of female heads-of household among producers.

Yet, having more women participate in the charcoal sector does not necessarily indicate greater gender equality.

The engagement of women and men in the charcoal sector, and what they get out of it, are heavily influenced by gender differences and inequalities, which in turn often intersect with other aspects such as wealth and social class, marital status and age. Notable differences are found, particularly in access to and control over productive resources and income; social and political capital and gender roles and responsibilities.

For instance, studies suggest that women tend to produce less charcoal than their male counterparts, often due to a lack of access to tools, information and labor. Where producers’ groups channel licenses and capacity building, underrepresentation of small female producers can aggravate the disparity.

Similarly, female transporters usually ferry fewer bags per trip due to difficulties in accessing transport vehicles, while unequal access to finances can limit the ability of female retailers to store and bulk.

These observations illustrate how gender inequalities can constrain women’s abilities to earn more money through increasing production, selling higher volumes and accessing better markets.

Differences in financial and political power also put women at a disadvantage in both the informal and the formal charcoal sector. Inequalities limiting women’s access to information and tools, household finances, political connections and mobility, for example, can make it particularly difficult for female producers and retailers to comply with national charcoal regulations.

Although not always the case, poverty and inequalities have often been seen to push women into the charcoal sector, reinforcing the notion that greater female engagement is not a positive sign in itself.

The environmental impact of charcoal production offers a paradigmatic example.

Some studies note its effects are disproportionately borne by women because deforestation and forest degradation reduce their ability to generate income from firewood and other non-timber products.

As charcoal production erodes women’s alternative income sources, more of them may be forced to join the charcoal sector. In time, trees become scarce and production sites are moved further away from villages. This might further complicate things for women where it is not socially acceptable for them to work away from their homes and families.

In addition, gender inequalities may impact the sustainability of the value chain. A study in Cameroon, for example, found that women’s harvesting practices had a higher environmental impact compared to their male counterparts. This was attributed to women’s use of more rudimentary tools, which led them to cut smaller, younger tree stems close to their homes.

Addressing unanswered questions

Gender issues affect who participates in, and benefits from, each of the steps of charcoal value chain, and they also influence the efficiency and sustainability of a sector impacting the livelihoods of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.

To advance the understanding of gender dynamics in the charcoal sector, there is a need for systematic and robust sex-disaggregated data on participation; more studies on gender dynamics along downstream nodes, which tend to have higher proportions of women; and a deliberate focus on the ways in which gender norms and relations influence and are influenced by factors such as institutional and governance arrangements or the social and environmental impact.

The study conducted by CIFOR and ICRAF proposes a conceptual framework to guide future research on these various issues, informing better policies and combating women’s marginalization. It encourages analysis from various perspectives, ranging from the decision-making power in the household to community-level institutions and norms as well as legal systems.

The conceptual framework explores how gender roles and relations, in combination with factors such as age, class and ethnicity, influence women and men’s motivations to participate in the charcoal sector, as well as the costs and benefits associated with their involvement.

It also intends to show how gender differences and inequalities in the value chain influence its structure, efficiency and sustainability, and the impact of broader gendered norms and relations in the nature and extend of women and men’s participation.

Importantly, the available evidence shows the need to place gender analysis at the core of charcoal value chain studies and interventions, rather than approaching it as an add-on component that is haphazardly conducted in the periphery of project activities.

The charcoal sector is expanding as an affordable energy source for the growing population of the continent, and it provides people in rural and peri-urban settings with much-needed income.

This study distills the current understanding on gender and charcoal value chains, and provides guidance to address the numerous, and important, questions that remain unanswered. Questions that shall inform better charcoal-sector policies and interventions for the benefit of people and the environment across the continent.

By Markus Ihalainen, FTA Gender Specialist.

This article was originally published on Forest News. FTA is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with Bioversity International, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR, ICRAF and TBI. FTA’s work is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.

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