Restoration of degraded forests and landscapes is becoming increasingly important thanks to major commitments, such as the Bonn Challenge, the New York Declaration on Forests and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Restoration work is now underway around the world, including through the 15 agricultural research centres that make up the CGIAR, a global science partnership for a food-secure future.
To assess effectiveness and assist with speeding restoration, the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) made restoration one of its research priorities. FTA teamed up with two other research programs — Policies, Institutions and Markets; and Water, Land and Ecosystems — to undertake a joint stocktake of the work on forest and landscape restoration of several of the CGIAR’s member centres. The synthesis study was published on 3 August 2020.
The three research programs agreed on a broad scope of restoration, focused on the restoration of ‘ecological functions’ and efforts to halt ongoing and reverse past degradation by aiming for increased functionality but not necessarily recovering past system states.
Building upon this work, a team of FTA researchers worked on a typology of the different approaches to restoration, now published in the journal, Land.
‘We identified the need to uncover the diverse understanding and perspectives about “restoration” and to construct a typology that can help to clarify contrasts, similarities and possible synergies,’ said Meine van Noordwijk, distinguished research fellow with World Agroforestry (ICRAF) and lead author of the study. ‘The aims of the typology are to better describe the links between evolving knowledge, stakeholder-driven action, and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.’
This is important because with the goal of reversing centuries of damage to forests, wetlands and other ecosystems, getting it right is key to putting the planet back on a sustainable course. However, despite the high level of political engagement and the number and diversity of people and institutions involved from the public and private sectors, civil society and local communities, research and academia, restoration is not happening at a wide scale across the globe.
The key to this problem is whether restoration goals and means are aligned with the priorities of the people who live in, and gain their long-term livelihoods from, the landscapes to be restored.
The typology has three main components. First, it distinguishes four levels of restoration, ranging from the lowest level of intensity of intervention to the highest:
Ecological intensification;
Recovery and regeneration;
Reparation and recuperation; and
Remediation.
Second, the huge diversity of interventions possible in this range can be broadly classified into
Leave alone;
Assisted or managed natural regeneration; and
Tree and grass planting.
The third component is a typology of contexts, which is fundamental to understanding the suitability and effectiveness of an intervention. The typology of contexts is based on the forest transition concept: 1) forest fraction; 2) forest configuration (core, edge and mosaic); and 3) human population density, with the addition of six ‘special places’ because of their specific importance in interactions between ecosystem functions and human activities: 1) watertowers; 2) riparian zones and wetlands; 3) peat landscapes; 4) small islands and mangroves in coastal zones; 5) mining scars; and 6) transport infrastructure. Further descriptors of context that are relevant for restoration are the climatic zones and soil properties.
‘The typology will be useful in view of the lack of such structured interpretations,’ said van Noordwijk. ‘It can support further studies on the effectiveness of interventions in different contexts.’
The complete typology can be found in the open-access article, People-centric nature-based land restoration through agroforestry: a typology, in the journal Land.
Read about the joint stocktaking work on forest and landscape restoration
Gitz V, Place F, Koziell I, Pingault N, van Noordwijk M, Meybeck A, Minang P. 2020. A joint stocktaking of CGIAR work on forest and landscape restoration. Working Paper 4. Bogor, Indonesia: CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry.
About World Agroforestry (ICRAF)
World Agroforestry (ICRAF) is a centre of scientific and development excellence that harnesses the benefits of trees for people and the environment. Knowledge produced by ICRAF enables governments, development agencies and farmers to utilize the power of trees to make farming and livelihoods more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable at multiple scales. ICRAF is one of the 15 members of the CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food-secure future. We thank all donors who support research in development through their contributions to the CGIAR Fund.
About the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA)
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, INBAR, ICRAF and TBI. FTA’s work is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.
A joint stocktaking of CGIAR work on forest and landscape restoration by FTA, PIM and WLE
A joint stocktaking of CGIAR work on forest and landscape restoration by FTA, PIM and WLE
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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.
This UN Decade could offer unprecedented opportunities to address food security, job creation and climate change simultaneously. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) considers that restoring 350 million hectares (ha) of degraded land by 2030, as committed in the New York Declaration on Forests, could generate USD 9 trillion in various ecosystem services and remove about 13–26 gigatons of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
However, despite the high level of political engagement and the wide range of institutions (public, private or civil society; local to global) involved in restoration projects, and beyond some success stories, restoration is not happening at scale.
“There are huge opportunities in bringing the three CRPs together to work on land restoration. Each of these CRPs works on different aspects of land restoration. Pooling this evidence in a user-friendly and accessible manner holds great potential for scaling, and for delivering enhanced impact from our CGIAR research” said Vincent Gitz, Izabella Koziell and Frank Place, the three CRP directors.
The three CRPs agreed on a broad scope of restoration, focused on the restoration of “ecological functions”, with the following definitions:
Degradation: Loss of functionality of e.g. land or forests, usually from a specific human perspective, based on change in land cover with consequences for ecosystem services
Restoration: Efforts to halt ongoing and reverse past degradation, by aiming for increased functionality (not necessarily recovering past system states).
They also discussed theories of [induced] changes underlying landscape dynamics of degradation and restoration. The following questions helped structure the discussions:
Why? What are the final goals of restoration efforts, which sustainable development goals can they contribute to?
What? What are the drivers of degradation that need to be addressed? What are the ecological functions to be restored?
Who?Who cares? Who are the stakeholders responsible for or impacted by land degradation? How stakeholders are encouraged, empowered and organized to act for forest and landscape restoration?
How? How to design effective restoration interventions? What are the land use and land management options for change in different contexts, across countries and biomes?
Where and when? How to operationalize action recognizing the connectivity across different spatial and temporal scales in the restoration process, considering the landscape’s spatial configuration and temporal dynamics?
As a first step of their collaboration, the 3 CRPs (FTA, PIM, WLE) conducted a broad survey of the CGIAR’s work on restoration, inviting contributions from other CRPs. The document published today is a synthesis of the survey results. The full database with full details on each initiative is available as an annex.
The survey reflects the implication of different CGIAR Centers (ICRAF, Bioversity, CIFOR, CIAT, IWMI, ILRI, ICRISAT, CIMMYT and IFPRI) in restoration projects across the tropics and sub-tropics, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Some countries, such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Peru, or Indonesia concentrate many projects and provide strong opportunities for further collaboration among the three CRPs.
The survey shows the wide range of restoration activities undertaken by CGIAR CRPs and Centers, with their partners, from knowledge generation, methods, planning, modelling, assessment and evaluation, monitoring and mapping, to action on the ground. CGIAR restoration work can be divided into three broad categories: (1) case studies and projects; (2) tools for development; (3) approaches and conceptual frameworks.
The first category gathers case studies and projects comprising an element of field research. It comprises experimental plots, trials, local capacity building and implementation, on-the-ground assessments and surveys at different scales. It distinguishes: (i) “restoration-focused projects” where forest and land degradation is the main entry point and restoration is the main objective; from, (ii) “restoration-related projects” that can contribute to forest and landscape restoration while following other objectives (such as sustainable intensification or climate-smart agriculture). Half of the “restoration-focused” projects aim at assessing restoration practices with the view to upscale successful restoration experiences, such as the Ngitili fodder management system which contributed to the restoration of up to 270,000 ha over about 25 years in Shinyanga region, Tanzania. The others focus on climate change and climate-smart restoration, or on desertification and sand fixation. Six projects in this category focus on genetic diversity and on the performance and organization of the seed supply system, identified in this survey as a critical factor of success for restoration interventions. “Restoration-related projects” focus on various topics closely linked to restoration, including: sustainable land and water management; climate-smart agriculture; land tenure security and land governance reform; participatory governance and planning and collective farming.
The second category regroups: (i) tools, methods and guidelines, directed at decision makers or restoration practitioners at different levels, to support decision making; as well as, (ii) maps and models, measuring at different scales the intensity of degradation (i.e. efforts needed for restoration) or modeling the impacts of different land-use changes or land management practices. Models and maps often serve as the first layer for decision-making supporting tools. This category includes for instance two entries on the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF), developed by ICRAF and applied, since 2005, in over 250 landscapes (100 km2 sites) across more than 30 countries. Using indicators such as vegetation cover, structure and floristic compositions, tree and shrub biodiversity, historic land use, visible signs of land degradation, and physical and chemical characteristics of soil (including soil organic carbon content and infiltration capacity), the LDSF, applicable to any landscape, provides a field protocol for assessing soil and ecosystem health to help decision makers to prioritize, monitor and track restoration interventions.
The third category, covering more theoretical work, includes: (i) evaluations, conceptual or theoretical frameworks around restoration and related issues; and (ii) systematic literature and/or project reviews, as well as meta-analyses on different topics linked to restoration. For instance a global survey on seed sourcing practices for restoration, was realized between 2015 and 2017 by Bioversity International, reviewing 136 restoration projects across 57 countries, and suggesting a typology of tree seed sourcing practices and their impact on restoration outcomes (Jalonen et al., 2018).
The survey describes projects operating at the landscape level or across multiple scales. This shows the importance of the landscape level to effectively combine integrated perspectives that allow synergies among different ecosystem components and functions with a deep knowledge of, and a fine adaptation to, local conditions. While many projects focus on the technical performance of restoration projects, relatively few investigate the economics, cost and benefits, of restoration and few examine their underlying power structures and power dynamics/games. This relative paucity of costs and benefit data has been noted by other organizations, an aspect that led to the launch of the FAO-led TEER initiative, to which FTA and several CGIAR centers contribute.
All the answers taken together provide useful insights for future restoration activities. In particular, they identify five critical factors of success for restoration interventions:
secure tenure and use rights;
access to markets (for inputs and outputs) and services;
access to information, knowledge and know-how associated with sustainable and locally adapted land use and land management practices;
awareness of the status of local ecosystem services, often used as a baseline to assess the level of degradation; and
(v) high potential for restoration to contribute to global ecosystem services and attract international donors.
This synthesis will inform future work of FTA, PIM and WLE. It can also be used to support the design of restoration activities, programs and projects. Finally, it also illustrates with concrete examples the powerful contribution of forest and landscape restoration to the achievement of many, if not all of the 17 sustainable development goals. In particular, forest and landscape restoration, through the recovery of a range of ecological functions, can contribute to:
enhance food security through the improvement of the ecosystem services sustaining agriculture at landscape scale
improve natural resource use efficiency, thus reducing the pressure on the remaining natural habitats and addressing water scarcity;
favour social justice by securing a more equitable access to natural resources (e.g. land, water and genetic resources), and a wider participation in decision-making processes, in particular for women and marginalized people; and,
strengthen ecosystem, landscape and livelihoods resilience to economic shocks and natural disasters in a context of climate change.
The COVID 19 crisis has shown the importance of healthy ecosystems for healthy and resilient economies and societies. We hope that this document will contribute to integrate restoration as part of the efforts to “build back better” after the crisis.
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.
In attendance virtually were 40 research coordinators, field officers, laboratory technicians and scientists from Rythu Sadhikara Samstha (Farmer’s Empowerment Organisation) and Foundation for Ecological Security, the two organizations with which ICRAF is collaborating.
The ICRAF team prepares for virtual training. Photo: World Agroforestry/Anne Wavinya
‘The health of our planet’s soil is of huge importance,’ said Leigh Winoweicki, soil scientist and leader of the Soils Theme at ICRAF. ‘Many soils are degraded and becoming increasingly infertile. We urgently need to reverse this trend and the LDSF is an important part of the global effort. Training people around the world in how to assess ecosystem health, including soil health, using the LDSF is a key step. Not wanting to let the pandemic stop the work, we set up the virtual meeting to demonstrate the standard operating procedure for processing and air-drying soil samples collected using the LDSF method. We also wanted to answer any logistical questions on the processing of soil samples collected in the field. And, of course, keep the teams motivated!’
Training in India on laboratory soil analysis had already begun in Tirupati, 16–20 September 2019, with scientists from ICRAF engaging with 25 soil scientists, laboratory technicians and doctoral candidates. The training covered the fundamentals of mid-infrared spectroscopy (MIRS), built operational knowledge of the Alpha II Spectrometer, and expanded the trainees’ capacity in analysis of the mid-infrared spectra.
All soil samples were collected using the LDSF methodology, which was developed by ICRAF in response to the need for consistent field methods and indicator frameworks to assess ecosystem health.
This framework, which uses a hierarchical field sampling design, has been applied in projects across the global tropics and is currently one of the largest ecosystem-health databases in the world, with more than 40,000 observations. The LDSF includes measurements of key indicators of soil health, such as soil organic carbon and nutrients, as well as aboveground biodiversity measurements (for example, tree and shrub diversity) and land-degradation assessments of the prevalence of soil erosion.
‘When we assess land health, a nested hierarchical sampling design is useful as it allows us to conduct analyses that incorporate scale,’ explained Tor-Gunnar Vågen, who is a geoinformatics senior scientist at ICRAF and a pioneer of the LDSF method. ‘This is particularly important in predictive modeling where we need to understand uncertainty (or accuracy) of our models at different spatial scales.’
Narenda Reddy and Khushwant Rahul of the RySS team in Andhra Pradesh using a single ring infiltrometer to measure how quickly water infiltrates through the soil. Photo: World Agroforestry/Leigh Winowiecki
So far, Rythu Sadhikara Samstha has sampled six LDSF sites while the Foundation for Ecological Security has sampled over 2000 LDSF plots, totaling over 8000 soil samples ready to be processed.
In the standard operating procedure we separate and weigh the soil fines (<2mm diameter) from the coarse fragments (>2mm diameter) for soil carbon calculations. Photo: World Agroforestry/ Ann Wavinya
‘It was a great experience for all of the Rythu Sadhikara Samstha science team to be part of the LDSF study,’ said Zakir Hussain, thematic lead of Climate Change and Livelihoods with Rythu Sadhikara Samstha. ‘The methodology and capacity-building process by Dr Leigh Winowiecki has been highly useful for our research coordinators, associates and natural farming fellows involved in the sampling. The training on MIRS has helped us to understand emerging technologies to monitor soil health across landscapes, at a scale relevant to farmers.’
The Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) team during the LDSF training in Gujurat State in India, October 2020. Photo: World Agroforestry/Tor- Gunnar Vågen
All samples will be scanned using MIRS, a reliable, cost-efficient method for analyzing soil properties. The use of MIRS enables landscape-scale assessments of soil health, which was not possible when soil scientists relied only on traditional wet chemistry methods, which are time consuming and costly.
‘Even though there are several key elements to the successful application of MIRS,’ said Elvis Weullow, manager of ICRAF’s soils laboratory, ‘a critical one is the use of consistent sampling, processing and preparation protocols. This includes how the sample is dried, sieved, ground, sub-sampled and presented to the instrument.’
Elvis Weullow and Bella Kauma of the ICRAF Soil and Plant Spectroscopy Lab demonstrating how to break up clods of soil before gently crushing with the rolling pin. Photo: World Agroforestry/Anne Wavinya
At the end of the training, there was a vibrant discussion between trainees and trainers on diverse issues, such as seeking clarification on some of the soil processing steps through packaging of processed samples to the storage of samples remaining after analysis.
‘We are thankful to the ICRAF team for organizing a very informative training for everyone involved in the collection of soil samples, their processing and subsampling,’ said Himani Sharma, program manager of the Foundation for Ecological Security. ‘It enabled all of us to follow the standard operating procedure to ensure the integrity of samples. We were inspired by the high precision lab where the samples will be analysed. We wish to have more sessions on the soil analysis process.’
In conclusion, while field surveys have slowed down due to COVID-19, following this virtual training, partners can start processing the soil samples locally.
Forests, trees and agroforestry provide nutrient-dense foods such as fruits and nuts, that contribute to livelihoods and to the diversification of diets. They also provide ecosystem services — water regulation, soil fertility and conservation, pollination services, temperature regulation — all of which support sustainable and resilient food systems. The 2017 publication of the High Level Panel of Experts report “Sustainable Forestry for Food Security and Nutrition” detailed these contributions, but more needs to be done to increase the visibility of the roles of trees in food security and nutrition. The COVID-19 global pandemic highlights the need for sustainable and resilient food systems more than ever.
The CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) with its partners organized a session titled “Contribution of forests, trees and agroforestry to sustainable food security and nutrition in a time of crisis,” during the Global Landscape Forum (GLF) Bonn 2020 Digital Conference held from 3 to 5 June. The conference was attended by 5,000 people from 185 countries, and kick-started a global conversation on how to ‘build back better’ and transform food systems to protect human well-being and planetary health in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Vincent Gitz, FTA Director, opened the session explaining that FTA hosted the session to share what forests, trees and agroforestry can bring to food security, nutrition, and the resilience of food systems.
Contribution of Forests, Trees and Agroforestry for Sustainable Food Security and Nutrition
Inge Brouwer, Assistant Professor in Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University & Research, who leads A4NH’s Food Systems for Healthier Diets research flagship, set the scene for the session by providing an overview of the state of nutrition and diets in today’s world. COVID-19 threatens the ability of people to prioritize healthy diets as it disrupts food systems in low- and middle-income countries due to changes to the food environment, economic impacts on consumers, and access issues related to supply chain disruptions. This will even be harder when they do not know what a healthy diet means. She pointed out that food based dietary guidelines help to define healthy diets in local contexts, and the global nutrition communities should support the translation of global recommendations into local contexts. This should include the promotion of a broader range of local foods which could contribute to healthier diets.
The presentations that followed provided examples of approaches to strengthen the use of local foods to improve the ability of the population to consume nutritious foods throughout the year, as well as in times of shocks such as COVID-19, where trade is restricted and access to market is limited. Stepha McMullin with World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) presented an approach used to make location-suitable recommendations for promoting greater diversity of food trees,[1] and crop species on farms. These portfolios (adapted from the Fruit Tree Portfolio Approach) are combinations of indigenous and exotic food tree, and crop species – that could provide for year-round harvest and address key micronutrient gaps in local food systems. Celine Termote of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT presented a participatory community approach for devising more diverse farming systems to address food and nutrition insecurity. An example from Vihiga County in Kenya revealed initial impact evaluations showing increased dietary diversity amongst women and children engaged in the approach.
Prasad Hendre of the African Orphan Crop Consortium (AOCC) explained the use of genomics for trait enhancement of ‘underutilized’ or ‘orphan’ species. The AOCC uses advanced breeding methods including genomic selection and marker–trait associations on 101 crops to expedite the breeding cycles for nutritious crops. A short video intervention was shown by Daniel Ofori, the Director of the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana (FORIG), who described the work FORIG is doing on Tetrapleura tetraptera, a tree providing fruits which are used as food supplements. FORIG set up a plant for processing of the fruit and established an agroforestry domestication program.
Terry Sunderland of the University of British Columbia outlined some ‘hidden contributions’ of forests with respect to the many ecosystem services they provide that support food production. He gave an example from research in Ethiopia which showed that planting wheat close to forests can improve nitrogen availability, water use efficiency, and therefore increase yields. Another example showed raising livestock close to forests had beneficial effects on food security for local communities as livestock grazed on leaves from forests, which then enriched the soil with their manure, resulting in higher yields.
Researchers also shared examples of how indigenous foods could support the food and nutrition security of people who are often marginalised and often most vulnerable to the response to shocks like COVID-19. Leandro Castello of Virginia Tech University presented evidence from the Amazon, where people in floodplain areas with more forest cover capture more fish from rivers, with positive dietary implications. Caleb Tata Yengo of Forest Resources for People, an NGO in Cameroon, shared results from a project in that country showing very high consumption of several forests foods including green leafy vegetables, mushrooms, oily seeds and bushmeat. He showed that the consumption of a forest liana, Gnetum africanum, known locally as eru, explained the higher hemoglobin levels and lower anemia rates in women who lived closer to the forest compared to those further away. Bronwen Powell of Pennsylvania State University pointed out that Indigenous communities around the world are vulnerable to policies that are not attentive to the unique aspects of their food systems; she presented an example from the Gumuz, a marginalized ethnic group in Ethiopia, whose preferred traditional lablab bean variety is dependent on shifting cultivation, which the government is now discouraging.
Mulia Nurhasan of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) shared an example from West Papua Province of Indonesia, where the local government quickly responded to the situation with a campaign to improve local food production and consumption, many of which are forest foods. CIFOR is working with the local government of West Papua to study how online platforms can help establish a supply chain of forest foods to reach urban consumers.
The current pandemic as a ‘wake up’ call drawing attention to the roles of forest, trees and agroforestry for enhancing resilience
The coronavirus crisis has unveiled vulnerabilities of food systems that rely heavily on imported foods. Although forests, trees and agroforestry make diverse and important contributions to food security and nutrition, these roles have not been very visible to the wider public or even to policy makers. Amy Ickowitz of CIFOR wrapped up the session with a call to spread the message of the diverse roles that forests, trees and agroforestry play in food security and nutrition. The greater the appreciation of these roles, the more support there will be for conserving forests, planting trees, and preserving local foods contributing to the resilience of food systems and recovery from shocks such as COVID-19.
By Mulia Nurhasan, Stepha McMullin, and Amy Ickowitz
Mulia Nurhasan is an associate at CIFOR. Stepha McMullin is a scientist at ICRAF. Amy Ickowitz is Team Leader for Sustainable Landscapes and Food at CIFOR. The views expressed in this piece are solely those of the authors.
[1] Food Trees – those that provide a variety of nutrient dense foods including fruits, leafy vegetables, nuts, seeds, & edible oils are important in local food systems.
But what exactly is biological diversity? Biological diversity, or in short biodiversity, is often understood in terms of an abundance of diverse plants and animals present in a specific region. However, biodiversity also includes genetic differences within species — e.g., varieties of crops — and the variety of interlinked ecosystems (lakes, forests, rivers, agricultural landscapes, etc.) giving shelter and allowing interaction between those who inhabit them (humans, plants, animals, insects, microorganisms, etc.). Biodiversity is a prerequisite for life, any loss of it, is a loss for everyone and a threat for the future.
This year’s theme is Our solutions are in nature, underlining how any activity we perform is always interconnected with mother earth. Today humanity faces an unprecedented number of ecological challenges (as the current coronavirus pandemic has made evident), but any solution we can imagine and formulate is inevitably found within the same domain: nature. And nature’s barometer is biodiversity. For example, a pathway to reduce climate shocks and increase resilience to climate change is landscape restoration, which in turn is highly correlated with biodiversity levels. Moreover, maintaining high levels of biological diversity offers protection from spillovers of diseases from animals to humans (i.e. zoonoses) such as the current one we are living through, as it has been proven that biodiversity loss is a sufficient (but not necessary) condition for the increase of zoonoes.
The UN has devoted the full week 18-22 May 2020 to celebrate biodiversity through 3 themes: importance of knowledge and science, importance of biodiversity itself and a call to action for the future.
2020, dubbed the biodiversity super year, is a pivotal moment to re-think our relationship with nature. This lock-down time should push us to reformulate a new normal that should focus on resilience and a common approach towards the restoration and conservation of biodiversity, inverting the disastrous trend of biodiversity loss that we have been accumulating over many deacades.
Trees, forests and agroforestry have an enormous role to play in preserving and enhancing biodiversity and improving human and animal life. To underline this, FTA has set the safeguarding and conservation of biodiversity as one of its main priorities. In the occasion of this day we are happy to illustrate some of the activities that our partners are carrying out in this domain.
Biodiversity in tropical forests
Our lead partner CIFOR has a specific landing page for biodiversity which gathers all the most recent publications dealing with this important topic, highlighting the extreme potential for the unknown and the strong link between forests and food security and nutrition.
Systematic review on impact of oil palm on biodiversity – a study focusing on the impacts on species richness, abundance (total number of individuals or occurrences), community composition, and ecosystem functions related to species richness and community composition.
Our partner ICRAF develops a number of interesting studies that are strongly linked with the analysis of biodiverse elements, as they supporting biodiversity-based livelihood strategies, requiring them to characterize patterns of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes and how these are changing as farming systems and climate alter. For example: they conduct tree species diversity inventories in farmland, considering whether the trees found are of local origin or are exotic (are introduced from elsewhere), and how common individual species are in farm landscapes.
African Orphan Crops Consortium
ICRAF has just launched the new website of the African Orphan Crop Consortium which includes a fully searchable database of 101 different crops identified as important for nutrition and livelihoods in a participatory manner by Africa’s scientists, development practitioners, consumers, and producers. Together they provide a wide range of nutritious foods, including edible roots, leaves, seeds and fruit, and encompass plants that are part of Africa’s historically neglected bounty of biodiversity. The idea is to use advanced genomic methods to support genetic improvement. These plants form a unique biological resource for crop development, but the window of opportunity to realise their value is limited as they are threatened by the relentless simplification of farming landscapes and forest loss.
In order to promote tree species’ biodiversity effectively, information on what trees to plant where and for what purpose is required. ICRAF develops maps, databases and smartphone apps to better allow this. The high-resolution vegetationmap4africa (www.vegetationmap4africa.org/), for example, supports the selection of suitable indigenous tree species to plant in particular ecological zones in eastern Africa through the Useful Tree Species for Eastern Africa selection tool, which uses Google Earth to explore geographic locations and present species’ options.
Bamboo and rattan for biodiversity
Lack of bamboo planting material of particular species in required quantity and quality has always been a challenge due to the flowering nature of bamboo and lack of standardized vegetative propagation methods and selection protocols. INBAR’s previous and current development projects in Africa have set up several nurseries to scale up bamboo planting material production in Africa and Latin America. Moreover, INBAR is also undertaking ex-situ genetic conservation activities including setting up of bamboo setums and research plots. These activities are aimed at enabling large-scale bamboo based landscape restoration activities.
Currently our partner INBAR is developing a study to obtain a deeper understanding of conservation of bamboo genetic resources in theory and practice. The study will examine the growth and performance of indigenous and introduced bamboo species, the modification of local biodiversity. The aim is to select the most appropriate species for expansion as well as developing seed sourcing and selection.
A comprehensive report on bamboo seed sourcing/selection and mechanisms for identification of superior bamboo clumps for expanding vegetative propagation will be the outcome of this research.
The report shows how agroforestry is a sustainable alternative for rural development, and it is a conspicuous beneficial element in the agricultural landscape. Trees on farms can contribute to subsistence farmers’ strategies to face climatic or socioeconomic eventualities and can supply important goods to meet farmers’ demands.
Sentinel Landscape stocktaking pilot study: Report Nicaragua-Honduras [pdf]Study sites were similar in terms of tree diversity and density, but differences were found in the economic benefits provided by trees. A total of 261 tree species were recorded in both sites (160 species were shared), 202 species in La Dalia and 220 species in Waslala. In terms of land uses, coffee was the land use with the highest tree diversity (197 spp), followed by pasture (189 spp), cacao (169 spp), home gardens (152 spp) and staple crops (138 spp). The most important species in terms of their abundance, frequency and relative dominance were: Cordia alliodora, Mangifera indica, Persea americana, Citrus sinensis, Platymiscium dimorphadrum, Inga oestediana, Psidium guajava, Cedrela odorata, Guazuma ulmifolia, and Tabebuia rosea.
We hope that you will find this information is useful and interesting!
Finally, we are happy to share with you A Hymn to Biodiversity an a cappella musical composition inspired and dedicated to biodiversity by composer David Rain, who contacted us through our facebook page. Well done David, it’s beautiful!
May it inspire everyone to love and protect our biodiverse nature.
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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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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Malnutrition in many African nations is widespread but can be addressed by diversifying food systems with a wider range of nutritious crops. To support this, the African Orphan Crops Consortium is applying genome-enabled methods to improve the production of under-researched (‘orphan’) crops on the continent.
“Orphan crops”, explains Ramni Jamnadass, lead author of a Comment piece about the Consortium just published in Nature Genetics, “are crops that have received only minor investments in the past, but often are well adapted to local environments and cultures and are nutritious, being rich in vitamins, essential minerals and other micronutrients important for healthy diets. The reasons for their past neglect include a focus over the last century on increasing the yields of major crops as the primary providers of calories but with less attention being given to providing crucial micronutrients.”
In some cases, too, orphan crops have been difficult to research and improve because of their particular biologies. With the advent of new crop improvement methods that include genomic approaches, however, such barriers are easier to overcome.
The Consortium works on 101 orphan crops chosen as priorities for consumers and farmers in Africa. These encompass plants that are part of Africa’s historically neglected bounty of biodiversity. Many of the species are at threat, meaning that if they are not improved and brought into wider cultivation now, the opportunity to do so will be lost forever. The plant species included feature a wide range of nutritious foods, such as edible roots, leaves, seeds, and fruit.
The Consortium develops genomic resources of these crops and makes these available freely to all. At the same time, the UC Davis-led African Plant Breeding Academy empowers the continent’s plant breeders to use these resources through an intensive training and mentoring program. The Academy is a model for the importance of continuing education and professional development of Africa’s scientists. By the end of 2019, 114 alumni from 27 African nations, collectively working on more than 100 crops, had graduated. In the Academy’s teaching, participants share their experiences to support translational learning so that new breeding approaches can be fully exploited. This involves considering ‘orthologous’ genes that contribute to the same function across crops and for which knowledge of their role in one crop may be applied to another.
As Africa’s national economies transform there will be new opportunities for orphan crops to support forward-looking healthful food systems. These are needed to counter the current trend toward more homogenised diets, something which applies worldwide, with its negative consequences for human health and the environment.
Jamnadass concludes: “Though the challenges involved are complex, the rewards for society in diversifying food production are large. We encourage more colleagues to engage in orphan crop research and to support such work in Africa and globally.”
The team of authors above was drawn from ICRAF; University of Illinois, Urbana; University of New Hampshire, Durham; Scotland’s Rural College, Edinburgh; University of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg; and University of California, Davis. The African Orphan Crops Consortium is supported by the African Union’s Development Agency. A list of other core Consortium partners is given in the article and on the Consortium’s web site.
About World Agroforestry (ICRAF) World Agroforestry (ICRAF) is a centre of scientific and development excellence that harnesses the benefits of trees, including food trees, for people and the environment. Knowledge produced by ICRAF enables governments, development agencies and farmers to utilize the power of trees to make farming and livelihoods more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable at multiple scales. ICRAF is a partner of FTA and one of the 15 members of the CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food-secure future. We thank all donors who support research in development through their contributions to the CGIAR Fund.
We’ve heard a lot about ambitious tree planting initiatives in recent months. Laudable as these may be – and we offer congratulations and celebrate the community-minded impetus behind them – we need a lot more than tree planting to restore degraded landscapes and to save the world’s forests.
On International Day of Forests, we join with the United Nations to draw attention to the urgent need for general recognition of the key role these treed landscapes play in combating climate change and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), targets aimed at alleviating poverty.
We celebrate all forested biomes, whether they are enmeshed in effective agricultural systems, natural peatlands, dry forests and mangroves. “Forgotten” forests that deserve more attention include tropical montane cloud, karst and keranga forests.
We urge the international community to implement robust, systemic changes required to address the dramatic consequences of deforestation and forest degradation, to conserve intact forests, sustainably manage secondary, disturbed or overlogged forests, increase trees on farms, while restoring degraded lands for both global goods and local livelihoods.
The high-level frameworks and targets exist. Through the SDGs, the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), the U.N. Paris Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity we have all we need to deploy transformations and succeed. Hopes are now weighted heavily on the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030). Will it provide the structure within which governments, businesses and people will act in a united effort to offset global warming before it is too late?
But we must not forget those people who are closest to forests. We must deepen our dialogue with the communities who live, work and rely on forests.
Not only are forests the most biologically-diverse land-based ecosystems, but they are home to more than 80 percent of terrestrial species of animals, plants and insects and store vast quantities of carbon.
Consider this: these critical ecosystems containing half the planet’s species of plants and animals provide livelihoods for 1.6 billion people – including more than 2,000 Indigenous cultures – who rely on forests for medicine, fuel, food and shelter.
Although the financial values attributed to land degradation, forest restoration and other data are projections and estimates, we know that the orders of magnitude are valid.
Deforestation, land degradation and depletion of natural capital are common across the world, and estimated to cost $6.3 trillion in lost ecosystem services annually. That is a value roughly 10 percent of the global economy.
When packaged together as the “land-use sector,” agroforestry systems provide more than 95 percent of all human food, generate employment for over half of all adults and account for 30 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions.
And trees in forests or on farms are at the very heart of nature-based solutions for the climate emergency.
Research by CIFOR-ICRAF and others has shown that not only do trees in forests and fields sequester large amounts of carbon but they also provide food and material for farmers and foresters, renew the fertility of soils and their stability, protect watersheds for downstream consumers, and that they are the critical player in our planet’s water cycle.
And now, as we confront a climate emergency, the global community urgently needs to make better efforts to reconnect human prosperity and ecosystem resilience to forests and agriculture.
So how do we get there?
The world needs transformative scientific, development, business and financial partnerships to undertake the large-scale transformations needed and achieve the global targets so onerously worked out over the years.
There are five areas where investment can be made to rejuvenate the functions of degraded ecosystems. These will help protect, expand and value forests and their biodiversity, transform agriculture into perennial systems, and build sustainable value chains, with the combined support of governments and the private sector to make the transition to sustainable economies.
The investment needed to reverse land degradation around the world to meet the target of the NYDF is $830 billion, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Restoring 350 million hectares as part of the Bonn Challenge — a commitment made during U.N. Climate talks in 2014 as part of the NYDF – is estimated at $360 billion.
As highlighted by participants in November at the Global Landscapes Forum in Luxembourg, triggering investment requires broadening the definition of “wealth” to include natural and social assets, significant collaboration between the public and private sectors and a systematic change in global supply chains and financial systems.
Second, agriculture must be more strongly connected to climate solutions. The agriculture, forestry and other land use sectors are responsible for just under a quarter of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, mainly caused by deforestation and such agricultural sources as livestock, soil and nutrient management.
Yet, agroforestry, if defined by tree cover of greater than 10 percent on agricultural land, is widespread: found on more than 43 percent of all agricultural land globally, where 30 percent of rural populations live, representing over 1 billion hectares of land and up to 1.5 billion people.
It must be expanded in both area and diversity of species to help countries meet nationally determined contributions – targets under the U.N. Paris Agreement on climate change aimed at reducing global warming – improve livelihoods, enhance food security and perennialize agriculture, taking the pressure off natural forests.
Third, mangroves and peatlands are vital carbon sinks.
Mangrove ecosystems are recognized for their ability to store large amounts of carbon and protect shorelines from erosion caused by ocean activity. They also provide a buffer by capturing sediment high in organic carbon, which can accumulate in tandem with sea level rise, according to research findings by CIFOR scientists.
Like mangroves, peatlands have a massive role to play in mitigating the impact of climate change, but they are under major threat in many countries in both the Global North and the South.
For example, in the Congo Basin concessions are up for sale and the threat of drainage is real. Peatlands make up more than half of all wetlands worldwide and they are equivalent to 3 percent of total land and freshwater surfaces.
Built up over thousands of years from decayed, waterlogged vegetation debris, Wetlands International reports that 15 percent of peatlands have been drained for agriculture, commercial forestry and to extract fuel.
When they are drained, they oxidize and carbon is released into the atmosphere, causing global warming.
Any program to fix forests and landscapes must ensure peatlands are protected, rewetted and restored.
Fourth, restoring landscapes can bring impressive benefits, by some measures up to $30 for every dollar invested, but restoration investments have so far been slim.
Important steps toward this transformative investment include collaboration between private and public funders, reducing risk and uncertainty for investors, developing better measures of landscape health and building an inventory of technologies, methods and knowledge that can be expanded in scale.
Fifth, biological diversity is fundamental to the existence of life on Earth. To choose the most obvious example, food crops are plants that rely on pollinators to flower and fruit. The value of these crops is almost $600 billion annually.
The vast majority of pollinators are wild, including 20,000 species of bees, and reliant on intact, diverse and healthy ecosystems. Insects are likely to make up the majority of future biodiversity loss: up to 40 percent of all invertebrate species face extinction.
Integrating a greater amount and number of trees, shrubs and other species into farms will provide habitat, pollinators, natural predators and sources of food and incomes.
And so?
We know the solutions needed to save Earth’s forests implement land restoration and we increasingly understand the implications of failure. Tree planting has inspired many to take action to protect and rehabilitate our forests. What is needed now is the financial commitment to make it happen, and happen fast.
We recall the teachings of Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012), who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, which she shared with Oliver Williamson, “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.”
Through her research into how commonly held lands are managed, she overturned traditional colonial-dominant perspectives. She taught us that people can work together to sustainably and effectively shape natural resource use, as long as ground rules and parameters are clear, and those who work on the land are involved. She recognized that rules should not be imposed without consultation from above by governments or other formal entities to achieve the highest level of successful land management.
She delivered the formula for success. We must ensure we live up to it by melding high-level policies with tactics deployed by sustainable land managers — the people who live and work in forests. We must continually work across sectors to achieve comprehensive results.
Listen to Ostrom: “Until a theoretical explanation — based on human choice — for self-organized and self-governed enterprises is fully developed and accepted, major policy decisions will continue to be undertaken with a presumption that individuals cannot organize themselves and always need to be organized by external authorities.”
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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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.
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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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.
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.
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.
Tenure reform in forests has been on national and international forest policy agendas in recent years. These important reforms are intended to give customary communities, other local communities or local governments ownership or a greater level of user rights over forestland and resources. The Global Comparative Study on Forest Tenure Reform, undertaken by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), has been aiming to understand what happens on the ground when these reforms are implemented.
A collection of briefs just released by CIFOR presents findings on the progress of forest tenure reforms in Uganda and Kenya. The research team aimed to analyze some of the primary questions: 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?
In Uganda, research was conducted in four districts in Uganda (Kakumiro, Kibaale, Masindi, and Lamwo), which covered four types of tenure regimes that came into effect with the 2003 National Forestry and Tree Planting Act (NFTPA). The main findings of this work are summarized in this brief. Forest tenure security in Uganda was seen by respondents to be most positively influenced by forest land having clear boundaries, by local people having land titles, and by the absence of conflicts within the community. More results and recommendations are presented in the complementary briefs listed below:
The work in Kenya was undertaken in three regions (Mount Elgon, Nyeri county, and Kilifi county), also using Participatory Prospective Analysis approach:
The project website includes a number of videos from Uganda, as well as similar research from Peru, Indonesia, Colombia, and Nepal. This video summarizes some of the key findings of The Global Comparative Study on Forest Tenure Reform:
This work was conducted under the purview of Esther Mwangi, Principal Scientist at CIFOR, who passed away in October 2019. Esther was a great scholar focusing on gender and land-rights inequities in relation to natural resources, and a dear friend to many of us.
The Esther Mwangi Scholarship Fund established in her memory by the International Associations for the Study of the Commons (IASC) and CIFOR, aims to provide funds to support African commons scholars to participate in international (IASC) conferences.
Eradicating hunger through the African Orphan Crops Consortium
Eradicating hunger through the African Orphan Crops Consortium
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Baobab fruit, Kilifi, Kenya - Photo by World Agroforestry
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Training scientists in advanced plant genomics is set to transform nutrition in Africa. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations works with the African Orphan Crops Consortium to assist its member countries.
The African Orphan Crops Consortium is an African-led, international consortium founded in 2011 with the goal of sequencing, assembling and annotating 101 African orphan crops. The Consortium was approved by African heads of state at the African Union Assembly and is led by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).
ICRAF’s Working Paper n. 296 – Breeders’ views on the production of new and orphan crops in Africa: a survey of constraints and opportunities [PDF]The Consortium and its African Plant Breeding Academy, which is run by the University of California, Davis, comprise the most comprehensive and integrated crop-improvement venture on the continent. The Academy is funded by Mars Inc and the Alliance for the Green Revolution for Africa, among many other donors, and is hosted by World Agroforestry (ICRAF) in Nairobi, Kenya. The Academy trains African plant scientists and breeders to develop better crop varieties faster from genetic ‘maps’ of orphan crops. It has trained 85 of its target 150 African scientists to use DNA-sequence information to breed more nutritious, productive and resilient varieties that can withstand threats from environmental change.
‘The Consortium and the African Plant Breeding Academy have created synergy across the continent to promote African orphan crops and assist improvement of these crops through knowledge, skill, and technology transfer to African scientists,’ said Ermias Abate Desta, a graduate of the Academy. ‘This initiative is creating a network of “new breed” African plant breeders with a shared vision of a continent with no hunger, malnutrition and poverty. I am part of this great movement.”
‘Orphan crops’ refers to a diverse range of plant species that are economically and socio-culturally important but which are neglected by science and research because they are not widely traded commodities. The Consortium is raising the importance of these species and accelerating research activities for plant growth and development. By 2030, the use of nutritious, climate-resilient African crops stimulated by the Consortium’s work is expected to be a part of dietary improvements in 20% of rural populations and 10% of urban populations.
African orphan crop Adansonia digitata L. Photo: World agroforestry/Ake Mamo
The orphan crops include annual and biennial shrubs, bushes and trees that act as principal food sources for the 600 million people living in rural Africa. The Consortium has been sequencing the genomes of 101 species to allow scientists to efficiently improve the crops’ productivity, climate resilience, disease and pest resistance and nutritional quality and also training African scientists to best use the genetic information. All completed genetic ‘maps’ are published online with open access, with the intellectual property held by the African Union.
In 2017, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) signed a letter of intent with the Consortium to assist member countries of FAO develop policies, regulations and laws that facilitate the genetic improvement of orphan crops; strengthen institutional and human capacities of member countries for research and development of genomic tools, plant breeding and seed-delivery systems; and convene neutral platforms for stakeholder engagement to advocate for greater investments in breeding nutritious and climate-resilient crops.
ICRAF’s Working Paper n. 276 -Supporting human nutrition in Africa through the integration of new and orphan crops into food systems [PDF]In 2018, the Consortium’s work was formally recognized at the October meeting of FAO’s Committee on Agriculture (COAG). During the Consortium’s side event at COAG, eight graduates from the African Plant Breeding Academy shared information about their work to help fight malnutrition in their own nations through transferring research methods and results and through training.
FAO Director of Nutrition and Food Systems, Anna Lartey, told the meeting that the Consortium’s approach has the potential to spur a revolution for orphan crops in Africa. Moreover, Lartey highlighted how the program can contribute to the nutrition targets of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, with a focus on the Decade of Action for Nutrition, which is a UN commitment to eliminate malnutrition from 2016 to 2025.
‘Together we have created a movement to end hunger and malnutrition in Africa. Stunting will be eliminated in your lifetimes, if not earlier,’ said Howard-Yana Shapiro, Chief Agricultural Officer of Mars Inc and co-founder of the Consortium.
Sahu SK et al. (2020) Draft genomes of two Artocarpus plants, jackfruit (A. heterophyllus) and breadfruit (A. altilis). Genes, 11: 27, https://doi.org/10.3390/genes11010027.
Hendre PS et al. (2019) African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC): status of developing genomic resources for African orphan crops. Planta, 250: 989-1003, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00425-019-03156-9.
Dawson IK et al. (2019) The role of genetics in mainstreaming the production of new and orphan crops to diversify food systems and support human nutrition. New Phytologist, 224: 37-54, https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.15895.
Dawson IK et al. (2018) Delivering perennial new and orphan crops for resilient and nutritious farming systems. In: Rosenstock T., Nowak A., Girvetz E. (eds) The Climate-Smart Agriculture Papers, Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92798-5_10.
Hickey JM et al. (2017) Genomic prediction unifies animal and plant breeding programs to form platforms for biological discovery. Nature Genetics, 49: 1297-1303, doi: 10.1038/ng.3920.
Muchugi A et al. (2016) Genome sequencing to unlock the potential of African indigenous fruit tree species. Indian Journal of Plant Genetic Resources, 29: 371-372, doi: 10.5958/0976-1926.2016.00074.7.
Partners in the African Orphan Crops Consortium
Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Nairobi, Kenya) is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates and the Rockefeller foundations. The Alliance partners in many ways, including contributing USD 1.1 million to the African Plant Breeding Academy.
Agricultural Research Council (Pretoria, South Africa) supports by by sequencing genes (transcriptomes).
Benson Hill Biosystems is a plant biology, analytics and cloud computing company focusing on global food systems. It is providing all Consortium plant breeders with advanced computational technology to accelerate their breeding programs.
Biosciences Eastern and Central Africa, International Livestock Research Institute Hub (Nairobi, Kenya) is a shared agricultural research and biosciences platform providing laboratory services to African and international scientists conducting research on African agricultural challenges. It provides the Consortium with laboratory and project support, training of breeders, and the curation of germplasm.
BGI (Shenzhen, China) is the world’s leading genomic sequencing organization. It is involved in sequencing, annotating, assembling and curating many of the 101 African orphan crop genomes as well as supporting development of the Consortium.
CyVerse (Tucson, USA) is a collaborative organization that has developed a cyber-infrastructure for data-intensive biology driven by high-throughput sequencing, phenotypic and environmental data sets. It has helped the Consortium with analysis and curation of sequence and genotype data.
Corteva Agriscience is a private agricultural company focusing on development of crops. Corteva is helping train plant breeders and development of genomic resources.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) (Rome, Italy) supports the development of the Consortium through a letter of intent with specific areas of support.
Google Genomics (Mountain View, USA) provides rapid transfer of data worldwide using cloud space.
Illumina Inc (San Diego, USA) develops technology and kits for use in genetic research and has provided the Consortium with reagents to sequence the gene complement of 50 species and has donated their HiSeq 4000 Sequencer to the laboratory to sequence 10,000 accessions of African crops.
Integrated Breeding Platform provides data management systems for plant breeders. The Platform provides training to breeders through the UC Davis Plant Breeding Academy.
The James Hutton Institute (Dundee, Scotland) is a non-profit research institute specializing in plant breeding. It provides gene sequencing tools and analyses to breeders.
Keygene Inc, (Rockville, USA) is an international company supplying genomic tools for plant breeding. It provides tools to breeders.
LGC (Hoddesdon, UK) is an international life-sciences measurement and testing company, providing reference materials, genomics solutions and analytical testing products and services. It has also provided genotyping services for plant breeders.
Mars, Incorporated (McLean, USA) is one of the world’s largest privately-owned food companies; it has provided over USD 2 million for the African Plant Breeding Academy, scholarships for breeding programs and support for laboratory personnel.
New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Midrand, South Africa) is a technical body of the African Union which provides administrative, logistical and political support.
Oxford Nanopore, (Oxford, UK) is a genomics company providing DNA and RNA sequencing technologies. It provides its platform and reagents to breeders.
Thermo Fisher Scientific (Waltham, USA) helps companies and organizations solve their research challenges; it has donated four Proton sequencers and four Chef Stations and reagents. It recently acquired Life Technologies, which had donated four Ion proton machines to the Consortium.
UNICEF (New York City, USA) supports the development of the Consortium.
University of California, Davis (Davis, USA) is one of the world’s leading agricultural universities. It manages the Academy and co-leads the laboratory and scientific program.
VIB-UGhent Center for Plant Systems Biology (Ghent, The Netherlands) is a non-profit research institute in the life-sciences sector that has 1200 scientists conducting basic research on molecular mechanisms. It has helped with bioinformatics and annotation of plant genomes.
Wageningen University (Wageningen, The Netherlands) is a world-leading agricultural university working closely with the Consortium to define the nutritional value of African crops and breeding lines.
World Agroforestry (ICRAF) (Nairobi, Kenya) hosts the laboratory and the Academy and helps manage its data.
World Food Programme is the food-assistance branch of the United Nations and the world’s largest humanitarian organization addressing hunger and promoting food security. It supports the Consortium in a variety of ways.
World Wildlife Fund for Nature (Washington DC, USA) has worked with the Consortium since its inception, helping with initiation and vision
This research was conducted by World Agroforestry (ICRAF) as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, 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. The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) leads the Research Program in partnership with the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE), Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD), International Bamboo and Rattan Organisation (INBAR), ICRAF and Tropenbos International (TBI). The work of the Research Program is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.
Restoring Forests, Restoring Communities: Lessons from Shinyanga
Restoring Forests, Restoring Communities: Lessons from Shinyanga
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A restored Ngitili system in the Shinyanga Region, Tanzania. Photo credit: Lalisa A. Duguma / ICRAF
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How secure resource rights help communities in Africa restore forests and build local economies
“Landscape restoration is not new,” said Steven Lawry, former director of CIFOR’s Forests and Governance Research portfolio. “But global and national commitments such as the Bonn Challenge and AFR100 and the urgency of addressing climate change mean that a qualitatively different approach is needed if we’re going to achieve the kind of success that we aspire to.”
Lawry used these words last October, during the interactive “Restoring Forests, Restoring Communities” session at the Global Landscapes Forum in Accra, Ghana. Supported by a panel of conservation experts with experience across the continent, Lawry put communities – and the question of secure land tenure rights – at the heart of that “qualitatively different approach”. [Full session can be replayed entirely here]
Shinyanga: Restoring communities in Tanzania
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.
The region suffered from severe landscape degradation as early as the 1930s when British colonial authorities encouraged the clearing of woodlands for various reasons, including the eradication of disease-carrying tsetse flies and increased demand for wood. But this was only the beginning. “In the 1960s and 70s, cash crops – mainly cotton and tobacco – intensified this degradation,” Wainaina said.
The degradation was so severe that, by the 1980s, Shinyanga had become known as the “desert of Tanzania”. “That’s when the government of Tanzania, together with ICRAF, came up with the HASHI restoration project,” Wainaina explained.
Building on the existing local practice of Ngitili fodder reserves, the HASHI restoration project encouraged cattle farmers to plant trees on their grazing land. As they matured, these trees supplied the farmers with fodder for livestock, as well as wood they could use or sell for fuel and construction.
When the HASHI project started in 1986, there were only around 600 hectares of land managed under the Ngitili system. By the time the project ended in 2004, over 250,000 hectares of Ngitili had been restored and were being managed by local communities.
In 2004, management of the restored landscapes were taken over by local communities under the leadership of the village councils, supported by a government body dedicated to community empowerment.
The project was hailed as a triumph by conservation scientists across the globe. But recently there have been troubling signs for the future of Shinyanga, and the problem centres around land tenure rights.
“This goes beyond just troubling”
“When it comes to land tenure rights in Tanzania,” Wainaina said, “land is owned by the state, but it’s managed by local households and communities. This gave communities an incentive to restore their landscapes so as to strengthen these property rights.”
And, for the last 30 years, this is exactly what happened: the customary rights of local communities to the communal restoration areas had, in the words of Priscilla Wainaina, “grown stronger”.
“But in 2018,” Wainaina continued, “a new ministerial directive to shift some of these communally-owned restoration areas to the state was issued, so they can be state managed.”
Wainaina was quick to add that the state had good intentions for this decision. Naturally, the Tanzanian government has access to much greater resources, both human and financial, to better manage the restoration in Shinyanga than the local communities do.
But Wainaina also reported that, “the local communities feel like [the decision] was not well communicated: it was top-down as opposed to participatory”.
“Now communities are not sure about the future ownership of the communal restoration areas,” Wainaina said. Because it is the local communities who are responsible for the majority of the landscape restoration, this new insecurity is, according to Wainaina, “really clouding the restoration efforts”.
Although her concerns were stated in the straight-forward language of an agricultural economist, Lawry was quick to pick up on the significance of Wainaina’s comment. “It’s a bit troubling to hear that there are now questions in the air about the ability of the communities to retain the tenure rights that have contributed to the success of the project,” he said.
Chris Buss, Director of the Forest Programme at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), went further: “We use Shinyanga as one of the great examples of restoration,” he said. “If the land and trees are being taken away under different ownership systems, then this goes beyond just troubling. It goes to the heart of what we’re trying to achieve.”
Secure land tenure: “The heart of what we’re trying to achieve”
Secure land tenure is the foundation of successful landscape restoration, as Steven Lawry explained: “Research – considerable research, in fact – identifies secure tenure as a necessary condition for successful community forestry, including for forest landscape restoration adoption.”
Landscape restoration goes far beyond simply planting trees. It takes a much broader view of degraded sites, restoring the whole mosaic of land uses that draw from and contribute to the landscape. Without the involvement of the local communities who live and work on the land, such a holistic approach is impossibly difficult. But without secure tenure, what motivation do local communities have to invest in the landscape?
Tangu Tumero, Principal Forestry Officer at the Department of Forestry in Malawi, tells a story that illustrates the same motivations, but on an individual scale.
“In Malawi, we have a tradition in some cultures where, when a man marries a woman, the man moves to live in the woman’s community. But, if the marriage ends, he must go back to his village,” Tumero said. “As long as he feels like he doesn’t belong with this community, he is not going to plant a tree from which he would benefit [in the future]. ”
This thinking plays out on a larger scale when the whole community does not feel like they have rights to the land they work. “Secure tenure motivates investments in land, including community investments in forest landscape restoration,” Lawry explained.
Unfortunately, as Wainaina showed with her research on Shinyanga, secure land tenure is far from the norm.
Interview with Priscilla Wainina during GLF
“Indigenous peoples and local communities occupy some 50 percent of the total land area in the tropics,” Lawry said, “but only have legal rights to a very small portion of those resources and governments still struggle with how to understand and secure customary rights.”
Restoration management is already a very complex task, but it is made even more complex when, as Wainaina discovered in Shinyanga, projects fail to take account of who exactly owns the land and to accord statutory protection to existing customary land tenure arrangements.
Chris Buss learned this lesson the hard way when he was working in Malawi. “There was a fuel wood project that planted millions of trees,” he said. “It was very successful for three years, until the trees got to a decent size and all the local chiefs said ‘These are our trees and we’re going to harvest them now.’”
“Over three or four years, the project looked very successful,” Chris said, “but we hadn’t addressed the critical tenure issues and the trees were cut down.”
Tumero agreed that understanding the local context is paramount. “When we’re developing our programs,” she said, “we make sure that they are locally driven as much as possible. Otherwise, we can overlook some of these things that look minor but are going to be very crucial in terms of how we make progress.”
Customary land rights are typically not written into law but are rather rights that are recognised by the local community. Importantly, customary tenure principles grant all bona fide members of the local community land as a social right. However, the introduction of individual, statutorily recognized rights, can have the effect of dissolving long-standing customary rights, making poorer community members particularly vulnerable; hence, the importance of extending statutory recognition to existing customary rights, at a legal status equal to private land and state land.
The absence of statutory recognition of customary tenure creates what Patrick Ranjatson, professor in Forestry and Environment at the University of Antananarivo, calls “invisible communities”. “Community is always there, but people have a tendency to overlook them,” Ranjatson said. “Government agencies, NGO projects and even sometimes the community’s own members are not aware of the importance of their community.”
“Simply put,” Steven Lawry concluded, “the future of forest landscape restoration is limited if we do not solve the tenure problem where the problem exists.”
Return to Shinyanga: Choosing Intrinsic over Extrinsic Incentives
For solutions to the problems of land tenure rights and invisible communities, we return to Shinyanga, and Priscilla Wainaina.
“Restoration in Shinyanga has been going on for 30-plus years,” Wainaina said. “When the HASHI project ended in 2004, the communities, with support from the government, were able to continue the restoration efforts. So, what made restoration so successful in this landscape?”
Wainaina’s research (awaiting publication) found the answer to be, not one incentive in particular, but a pattern of incentives and disincentives that complemented each other.
“The incentives that stood out particularly were conservation benefits,” Wainaina explained, “the ecological, economic or even cultural benefits communities derive from restoration.”
These conservation benefits were predominantly what Wainaina described as intrinsic motivators. “These are motivators that rely on self-desire more than external factors,” Wainaina explained, “and these intrinsic motivators were the key drivers of restoration in Shinyanga.”
“Restoration in this area focussed more on local people and local knowledge and that focus really got the communities involved, in addition to the other actors,” Wainaina said. “The communities, together with their village governments, owned the projects and that was a really key motivator.”
Patrick Ranjatson issued a final note of caution. “Strengthening communities doesn’t mean that we strengthen communities to the detriment of the state,” he said. “If there are people doing slash-and-burn agriculture, then the forest will be finished very rapidly. We need to find this balance, so if it’s not local community who bring this idea of sustainability, then it has to be either the government or partners such as NGOs.”
Wainaina’s research also found that extrinsic motivators – such as top-down cash incentives – were not as important for restoration in Shinyanga as policy-makers might imagine. “External motivators, although they supported the restoration, they were not as strong as the intrinsic ones,” she explained.
Wainaina gave the example of the United Nations REDD+ programme, which uses cash incentives to encourage the reduction of net emissions of greenhouse gases by improving forest management and restoration in developing countries.
“REDD+, although it’s usually a motivator in most of the restoration projects in most countries, didn’t actually achieve the benefits they intended in Tanzania because it was a pilot project,” Wainaina said. “It only ran for four years and then it was gone. The discontinuation was a disappointment for the farmers and the local community.”
Extrinsic incentives like REDD+ need careful deployment, otherwise they can back-fire and discourage communities from supporting landscape restoration.
A surer bet for successful restoration, according to Wainaina’s research, is to empower local communities with intrinsic motivators like education and land rights that will secure for them the ecological, economic and cultural benefits from conservation.
“We hope that, with participation through the village government and the national government, they will reach a consensus on the way forward in regards to land tenure rights,” Wainaina said.
As for Steven Lawry’s “qualitatively different approach”, these researchers believe that approach must include land rights for local communities.
“Most of these communities are advocating for registration of their land rights,” Wainaina said. They feel as if this is the only way they can secure the benefits that they get from this restoration. They started the restoration areas, they managed them successfully for the past years and they feel like they still have the capacity to do it.”
Participants: Chris Buss (IUCN); Patrick Ranjatson (ESSA-Foret, Madagascar); Priscilla Wainaina (ICRAF-Nairobi); Tangu Tumero (Forestry Dept—Malawi); and Steven Lawry, Moderator (CIFOR).
Funding from the CGIAR Collaborative Research Programs on Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM) and Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) supported the event. 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.
Restoration 
Plantations and tree crop commodities 
Enhanced nutrition and food security 
Biodiversity, safeguarding and conservation 
Nationally determined contributions 
Bioenergy and biomaterials 
Blue carbon and peatlands 
Climate change adaptation 
Landscape governance 
Gender 
Silvopastoral systems 
Market-based agroforestry-forestry 
Farm-forest policy interface 
Agroecology 
Livelihood trajectory modelling and assessment 
Inclusive finance and business models 
Innovating finance for sustainable landscapes 
Public and private commitments to zero deforestation 
Orphan tree crops 
Effectiveness of approaches to sustainable supply 
Quality of FTA research for development 
Sentinel landscapes 
Foresight 
Seeds and seedlings delivery systems 
Smallholder tree-crop commodities 
The complete typology can be found in the open-access article, People-centric nature-based land restoration through agroforestry: a typology, in the journal Land.
This work was conducted under the purview of Esther Mwangi, Principal Scientist at CIFOR, who 
