10 years Archives - Forests, Trees and Agroforestry

Eight stunning digital exhibits to reduce humans’ “plant blindness” surrounding forests, trees and agroforestry

Forests and trees are allies in the fight to achieve the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, but it is not always easy to see their contributions to livelihoods, ecosystems, food security and nutrition. On Dec. 9, FTA launches its partnership with Google Arts & Culture to bring audiences eight visually-engaging exhibits for forests, trees and agroforestry. The prestigious collaboration makes 10 years of forest-based research and impact more accessible to global audiences.

“As scientists, we were pleased to create exhibits with Google Arts & Culture, a new way to bring our important message to global audiences: trees are drivers of sustainable development,” said FTA Director, Vincent Gitz, “they are the cornerstone of our future.”

This work forms part of a larger Google collaboration with over 60 international organizations. Together, the partners aim to reduce “plant blindness” — the tendency for people to have difficulty empathizing with plants and the environment at risk.

Explore these eight exhibits from FTA and its strategic partners, featuring compelling images, Google Streetview, videos, key messages and infographics and find out more about our research!

A Global Partnership for Forests, Trees and Agroforestry

Learn more about FTA and the scope of its international work!

Access the story of FTA here!

The Forest Transition Curve

Explore the relationship between trees, humans and ecosystem services over time.

Learn about the Forest Transition Curve!

Trees on Farms

Find out how planting trees on farms (agroforestry) makes good business sense while also contributing to healthy ecosystems and food security and nutrition.

Read about the benefits of adding trees to farms!

Forest Landscape Restoration

Learn more about the 6 principles of FLR and the top 7 tree-planting misconceptions!

Did you know there are many ways to achieve FLR?

FTA Highlights of a Decade: From research to impact

This exhibit showcases FTA’s achievements over the past 10 years.

Access 10 years of research in a nutshell!

From Tree to Fork

Did you know that trees and forests are the key to the world’s future food security and nutrition? Learn more about how trees provide healthy foods, cultural traditions and jobs to people everywhere.

How many of these fruits have you tasted?

Ingenious Innovations

The tree sector is often perceived to be a low-tech world… time to change your opinions! Read up on these top 11 innovations that FTA and its partners have developed.

Innovations are at the core of forestry!

Roleplaying Agroecology

Play along as a smallholder farmer, policy maker and palm-oil plantation manager to learn more about the difficult decisions that we all need to make to protect our planet. What choices will you make?

Play along with us!

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The full Google campaign with 60+ partner pages and curated exhibits will be released early next year, sensitizing more people to the vital role of trees for climate adaptation, biodiversity, food security and nutrition. Stay tuned for more!

This article was written by Daniella Silva.

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

Are you looking for some of the key latest research findings, keynotes, videos regarding trees, forests and agroforestry contributions to sustainable development? Go to the newly launched web-portal of the groundbreaking FTA Science Conference 2020 by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA).

The fully digital conference, titled Forest, trees and agroforestry science for transformational change, ran from 14 to 25 September 2020 and drew more than 520 participants from 69 countries around the world. It featured close to 200 interventions from scientists involved in the FTA program spread over 10 days and 26 different sessions. It included keynote speeches, controversial panel debates on “hot topics”, and technical presentations and posters.

FTA 2020 Science Conference Book of Abstracts now **available in PDF**

The conference put an emphasis on collaborative research between FTA and the broader community, as 60% of the presentations were between FTA’s seven managing partners (CIFOR, ICRAF, The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR and TBI) as well as the many national partners. The 179 abstracts accepted for the event are now made available in a book on the new web-portal, with more coming next, such as selected videos.

The conference was organized around six key technical themes that are pathways for transformational change:

Inclusive value chains, finance and investments
Towards resilient and diverse landscapes and food systems
Transforming livelihoods through agroecological approaches with trees
Nature-based solutions to address the climate crisis
Inclusive governance for sustainable landscapes
Designing, implementing and evaluating research for development impact

Three plenary sessions allowed for overall framing, linking-up across themes, stock-taking of discussions. The conference featured two sessions addressing “Hot & Controversial” issues, be it in science, in development, or in the media:

Competing understandings of the restoration problem and solutions
Systemic approaches in a ‘silver bullets’ world.

Restoration has emerged in the last decade as a key global political objective and debates on the topic are intense. The “Hot & Controversial” session used a variety of techniques, including role-playing, quick polls and devil’s advocacy, to highlight and debate some of the most disputed points, allowing to discuss strengths and shortcomings of the argumentations behind, and to debunk myths.

An innovative “Green” Dragons’ Den event was organized for the second “Hot & Controversial” session, to trial five innovations coming from the program. These were defended by their authors in quick elevator pitches, trying to convince the Green philanthropist dragons to invest a “virtual” sum of three million USD. The audience was also called to a virtual crowdfunding exercise. The session was a “live learning” event, for scientists to get better at telling convincing stories on often very complex issues and tools, to best sell their results, as well as understand needs, objectives, and ways of thinking of investors.

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It was the second time FTA organized a global virtual conference, after the first one held in March 2017 on “cool insights for a hot world”, that gathered 200 participants over two days.

For the 2020 conference, technical developments, including live (“synchronous”) online collaborative tools such as Mural, virtual poster rooms, live polling, role-playing sessions, and the experience of FTA’s events team, allowed for a lively and smoothness event, marking probably a new era for large scale scientific conferencing.

Participation from within the program was double the size of what it would have been if held in-person, and several high-level stakeholders could join for engagement sessions, for which otherwise they may not have been able to travel for a full week. Also, with 3 hours of “air time” per day, it left participants still with time for their other activities, while allowing participation from scientists in time zones situated 15 hours apart, from Vancouver to Hobart.

As a follow-up, the FTA is now organizing a series of “Science to Action” webinars, which are open to all, and which will focus on the way forward for actors on the ground. The first webinar was held on 26 November 2020 on the topic: Innovations to overcome barriers to access to finance for smallholders, SMEs, and women, and was developed in coordination with FTA partner Tropenbos International. You can replay the whole event here.

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Looking forward to engaging even more in 2021, as we wrap up a full decade of research since 2011.

By Sandra Cordon.

Forests, Trees and Agroforestry

Livelihoods, Landscapes and Governance

Tag: 10 years

New partnership with Google Arts & Culture brings more visibility to trees

Eight stunning digital exhibits to reduce humans’ “plant blindness” surrounding forests, trees and agroforestry