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
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https://www.slideshare.net/CIFOR/enabling-conditions-to-implement-the-2018-forest-proclamation-to-facilitate-flr-in-ethiopia
Presentation by Habtemariam Kassa on April 5, 2019 at the “Forests and climate change: research results and implications for REDD+ and forest governance in Ethiopia”Workshop in Ethiopia.
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https://www.slideshare.net/CIFOR/redd-policy-network-analysis-in-ethiopia
Presentation by Lemlem Tejebe on April 5, 2019 at the “Forests and climate change: research results and implications for REDD+ and forest governance in Ethiopia”Workshop in Ethiopia.
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Benishangul-Gumuz Regional State (BGRS) is the region of Ethiopia with the greatest bamboo forest cover. The resource has, however, encountered heavy degradation in recent years due to fires for farming and for hunting, mass flowering, unsustainable harvest, and land conversion. Bamboo, if harvested correctly, can become a valuable resource and a source of income for the rural population of BGRS. In order to do so, a management plan is needed at the regional level to provide guidance for future planning at the district level. This document, based on a desk study, field survey, direct observation, and a participatory mapping workshop, intends to provide this guidance for a sustainable bamboo forest management plan. It also gives recommendations on how to sustainably harvest bamboo, how to develop nurseries for future bamboo plantations, how to link bamboo forests with the private sector and the market, and the role bamboo could play in degraded land restoration.
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The Guidelines on Sustainable Forest Management in Drylands of Ethiopia contributes to the sustainable management of dry forests by providing information on the national context on dry forests and practical dry forest management guidelines adapted to the Ethiopian context.
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About 80% of forests in Ethiopia are dry forest. For the last 20 years they have been subject to land use changes, and replaced by agricultural land and settlements. This situation may be due to the little recognition, at the national level, of the actual and potential contribution of dry forests to the national economy, especially as a source of income for the poor and for exportation.
Despite this situation, the Government of Ethiopia has made sustainable forest management a priority, and it includes the management of dry forests. This Guidelines on Sustainable Forest Management in Drylands of Ethiopia provides information on the national context on dry forests, and practical guidelines adapted to the Ethiopian context. It fills important gaps that should help decision-makers to understand better the role and value of dry forests in the country. It shows that dry forests should be sustainably managed and protected for all the economic, social, and environmental services that they provide, and pleads for a better recognition of such an important ecosystem.
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The Ethiopian government has a big dream: restoring 22 million hectares of degraded lands and forests by 2030.
By doing so, the country aims not only to increase tree cover and restore degraded forests, but also to significantly enhance the forestry sector’s contribution to agricultural production systems, water and energy; to improve food and nutritional security; and to create more opportunities for employment and household income.
It is a bold and laudable pledge, made as part of the 2011 Bonn Challenge and the 2014 New York Climate Summit’s goal of restoring 350 million hectares worldwide by 2030. But what’s the best way to make it a reality?
With some 80% of Ethiopians living in rural areas, one approach is to pour resources into forest protection, rehabilitation and conservation by enlisting smallholder farmer labor for the cause mainly through food or cash for work programs. Until now, that has been the predominant method of action of projects supported by development partners. Meanwhile, the government’s approach has been to increase awareness of smallholders on the need to responsibly manage land and other natural resources and systematically mobilize these rural communities to provide free labor for landscape restoration tasks through annual soil and water conservation work and tree planting campaigns.
But either way, restoration must also create socioeconomic incentives for this massive population that depends on these landscapes for their livelihoods. There is a growing recognition that communities should be able to reap more economic benefits and have better control over the land they are restoring – both within restoration processes, and in general after the land has been restored.
To this end, a new forest law was enacted in January this year that is a significant step in the right direction, says Habtemariam Kassa, Team Leader of Forests and Human Well-being Research at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) who supported efforts of the ministry in the process of revising the national forest law. The 2018 National Forest Law – a revised version of the 2007 forest law – now clearly recognizes the rights of communities and acknowledges their role in managing natural forests and establishing plantations, without unduly compromising ecological services or biodiversity.
Ato Kebede Yimam, State Minister of the Forestry Sector, says the new law contains the following three key changes:
Yimam says his ministry has been working to socialize the new law since it was enacted in January 2018. The revisions were based on inputs from policy- and decision-makers at a range of levels, as well as CIFOR scientists – which, Yimam says, make the law an impressive example of science and politics coming together for the betterment of a landscape.
“The law, recognizing the need to strengthen the role of the state in protecting biodiversity rich forests with global and national significance, has identified reserved forests where access is strictly limited,” says Yimam. “On the other hand, the law intends to promote the socioeconomic contribution of forests to the surrounding communities and to local and national economies.
“It is designed to significantly enhance the involvement and ownership of communities and associations in the establishment of plantation forests, in the restoration of degraded forests, and in responsible management and sustainable use of natural forests.”
CHANGE OF SCENERY
According to Kassa, a key shift in the new law is its recognition of the need to maximize socioeconomic benefits of all forest types to the surrounding communities. In the past, when communities managed natural forests under participatory forest management paradigms, “the only thing that they could use were non-timber forest products [NTFP], because most experts considered that cutting [down] indigenous trees was a forbidden act,” Kassa describes. So, the economic returns for managing forests were not really worth communities’ efforts. As such, “we recommended that the law allow a certain level of timber harvesting in natural forests based on forest management plan to be developed,” he says.
To some senior foresters invited to discuss the law in draft phases, this sounded undesirable and even dangerous: “There was a certain group who were really against some of these changes, because they thought that it would open up all natural forests for individuals and communities,” says Kassa. So a new article was created, whereby forests of significant biodiversity are demarcated, and treated as ‘no-go zones.’ “This also places responsibility on the state for protecting biodiversity-rich forests, which wasn’t so obvious before,” he says.
The 2007 law only made mention of state and private forests. This meant that all restored forest land was treated as state property, so even after decades of restoration effort by a given community, the state could reallocate the land to other users. This tenure uncertainty demotivated communities to invest in forest landscape restoration. Since they didn’t clearly stand to benefit from landscape restoration and tree-planting, there was little incentive for them to take care of state-owned lands.
The new law, in contrast, grants rights of communities to manage and benefit from forests “very explicitly,” says Yimam. It does so by recognizing four categories of forest – state, private, community and association – thereby opening up new avenues for involvement and ownership. “So where you have degraded forest, the community can organize themselves, and with the approval of the relevant authority, can have all the responsibility of managing that forest as a community forest,” he explains.
“When you have groups of women or unemployed people, you can organize them to establish plantations on degraded hillsides, or even reforest and manage degraded forest, and this can be recognized as an association forest. Communities can then also stand to benefit financially from the carbon credits available for reforestation and forest preservation.”
REVISION TO REALITY
These new developments were hard-won. Kassa and his colleagues at CIFOR attempted to contribute similar content to the law’s predecessor in 2007, but then, forestry issues fell under the Ministry of Agriculture’s jurisdiction, and the sector was not getting the political attention it deserved. “We felt we were not really being listened to,” recounts Kassa.
When the Ministry of Environment and Forests (now the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change) was established in 2013, CIFOR staff and other national researchers pushed hard for it to confront and address the limitations of the 2007 law, advocating that forest sector development could bring a host of economic benefits as well as help the country attain its national and international restoration commitments. The ministry listened, set up a committee to work with the scientists, and revised the law according to their technical feedback.
However, putting a law to work is always a challenge. Kassa says the ministry and relevant regional authorities will need significant support to translate the law into concrete actions on the ground. One issue is expertise. The focus of forestry training has thus far been on enhancing the protection function of forests rather than the livelihoods of forest dependent communities, says Kassa, and now leaders and experts in forestry will need new knowledge and skills.
What’s more, “Ethiopia is a federal state, and the various regional governments have been forming different institutional arrangements to manage the forestry sector”, says Yimam. “We need to develop the understanding that the regions can produce their own guidelines to clarify and specify certain articles, but all these cannot go beyond or against the national forest law.”
Both Yimam and Kassa are hopeful that rural communities and forests throughout the country will soon experience the benefits of the new law’s possibilities. “Ethiopia’s 2018 National Forest Law is a really progressive law, and if it is implemented properly it is going to make a big difference” says Yimam.
“The next step is to support the efforts of the Ethiopian government as it attempts to put in place appropriate structures at different levels, redefine the roles of experts and build their capacity to actualize the rights of communities and other forest managers provided by the law,” concludes Kassa.
By Monica Evans, originally published at CIFOR’s Forests News.
For more information on this topic, please contact Habtemariam Kassa at h.kassa@cgiar.org.
This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.
This research was supported by the Strategic Climate Institutions Program (SCIP). SCIP is financed by the Governments of UK, Norway and Denmark.
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Forests provide fundamental ecosystem services. Environmental changes are predicted to affect forest growth directly through increased environmental stressors, and indirectly by amplifying disturbance. To increase our understanding of effects of environmental changes and disturbance on Afromontane forest growth, we used tree-ring data collected from Juniperus procera trees from church forests in the northwest highlands of Ethiopia. We used structural change models to detect structural shift in growth trends. We applied Linear Mixed Effect Models (LMM) to compare growth rate differences between successive tree generations. The running mean method and radial growth pattern analysis were used to detect disturbance events. Three groups of generations were identified based on Basal Area Increment (BAI) rates. There are significant differences (?=2204.64, P<.001) anong generations in pace of BAI, indicating that old generation trees grew at a slower pace than younger ones. Radial growth patterns were homogeneous for the old generation, but diverse in young trees. The observed high growth rates in the younger generation may have a negative effect on the longevity of the individuals and positively affect carbon accumulation in the biomass. Disturbance was detected in all generations, but worsened in the 20th century. anout 35% of disturbances matched with climate extreme events, providing evidence that the disturbance is both human-induced (i.e., site-specific) and climate-induced. Thus, forest management plans should emerge from a sound understanding of climate-forest-human interaction.
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https://www.slideshare.net/CIFOR/comparing-governance-reforms-to-restore-the-forest-commons-in-nepal-china-and-ethiopia
Presented by Peter Cronkleton of the Center for International Forestry Research at the 16th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons July 14, 2017 in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
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Authors: Mulugeta Mokria, Motuma Tolera, Frank J. Sterck, Aster Gebrekirstos, Frans Bongers, Mathieu Decuyper, Ute Sass-Klaassen
Boswellia neglecta S. Moore is a frankincense-producing tree species dominantly found in the dry woodlands of southeastern Ethiopia. Currently, the population of this socio-economically and ecologically important species is threatened by complex anthropogenic and climate change related factors. Evaluation of tree age and its radial growth dynamics in relation to climate variables helps to understand the response of the species to climate change. It is also crucial for sustainable forest resource management and utilization. Dendrochronological and remote-sensing techniques were used to study periodicity of wood formation and leaf phenology and to assess the growth dynamics of B. neglecta. The results show that B. neglecta forms two growth rings per year in the study area. The growth ring structure is characterized by larger vessels at the beginning of each growing season and smaller vessels formed later in the growing season, suggesting adaptation to decreasing soil moisture deficits at the end of the growing season. Seasonality in cambial activity matches with a bimodal leaf phenological pattern. The mean annual radial growth rate of B. neglecta trees is 2.5 mm. Tree age varied between 16 and 28 years, with an average age of 22 years. The young age of these trees indicates recent colonization of B. neglecta in the study region. The growth rate and seasonal canopy greenness (expressed by Normalized Difference Vegetation Index – NDVI) were positively correlated with rainfall, suggesting that rainfall is the main climatic factor controlling growth of B. neglecta. The observed temporal changes in leaf phenology and vessel size across the growth rings indicate that the species is drought tolerant. Therefore, it can be regarded as a key tree species for restoration of moisture-related limited areas across the Horn of Africa.
Published at Forest Ecology and Management 385 (2017) 16–24
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Presentation by Habte Mariam Kassa, Senior Scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), at the IUFRO Regional Congress for Asia and Oceania, October 2016, in Bejing, China
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Presentation by Peter Cronkleton, Senior Scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), at IUFRO Regional Congress for Asia and Oceania, October 2016, in Bejing, China.
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To stem the effects of climate change on the country and its people, Ethiopia is looking towards forestry as a key solution.
