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FTA celebrates 10 years of achievements and sets ambitions for the future

FTA celebrates 10 years of achievements and sets ambitions for the future

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The “final” FTA event on Dec. 9 culminated 10 impactful years of research for development; it brought together 338 attendees from over 50 countries to hear about the partnership’s top accomplishments and lessons learned. These successes light the collective path forward into a new decade of continued research and impact.

“This is a springboard,” said Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) Director General, and Director of the first phase of FTA, Robert Nasi. “…We don’t want to stop here, as there is much more work to do in light of the recent COP26, the CBD and the news you see every day. We have a good team; we have a good set of partners. I see no reason why we should stop here.”

To begin the event, lead scientists from FTA’s Flagship programs and managing-partner organizations presented chapters from the FTA Highlights series, which showcases a decade of results, findings and achievements. More than 200 scientists were involved as authors in the highlights series’ 18 volumes. The event was organized around four sections which represent a partition of the highlights volumes.

The full event can be replayed in EN (ES and FR to follow). Download the agenda of the event.

Session #1: Forests, Trees and Agroforestry for Biodiversity and Food Systems

The first session was moderated by Linda Collette, member of the Independent Steering Committee of FTA, and showcased volumes two through six of the highlights series. Each of these chapters emphasize research and impactful projects related to tree genetic resources, biodiversity, landscape restoration, food systems and wildlife.

Leading the way, Ramni Jamnadass, FTA’s Flagship 1 Leader and senior scientist at ICRAF, presented on seeds and seedlings (Vol.2). She highlighted the need for diverse, high-quality seeds to sprout successful landscape restoration initiatives that are good for business and for ecosystems. “We have seen soaring tree-planting pledges over the past few years,” she said, “so this is an opportune time to bring up the seeds and to ask where they are coming from. …remember: garbage in, garbage out. Quality in, quality out.”

Read volume 2

Senior researcher at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, Barbara Vinceti, similarly reflected the need for diversity in her presentation on conservation of tree biodiversity and forest management (Vol. 3). In light of the ongoing environmental challenges facing the planet, “genetic diversity is a dimension still overlooked, so we need to include it explicitly in forest conservation and management,” she said.

Read volume 3

However, restoring ecosystem services is a difficult topic from a development perspective because it is multi-dimensional and multi-scalar, according to senior CIFOR scientist, Manuel Guariguata. Presenting on forest and landscape restoration (Vol. 4), he summarized FTA’s contributions to research and policy governance. He also celebrated the partnership’s on-the-ground implementation of FLR initiatives, “The restoration agenda is the bread and butter of FTA partners, and we have contributed a lot in this regard” he said. “We also learned a lot. For instance, we learned it is critical to implement FLR through landscape approaches.”

Read volume 4

Next, senior CIFOR scientist Amy Ickowitz showcased tree and agroforestry contributions to food security and nutrition. Ten years of research across Africa, Asia and South America has increasingly proved the links between trees and micro-nutrient-rich diets. “A lot more still needs to be done to have these contributions [from food trees] both better understood and, more importantly, better integrated in national discourses and policy,” said Ickowitz.

Read volume 5

Wild meat is another important, albeit controversial, source of nutrition that comes from forests. World expert and CIFOR senior associate, Julia Fa, has worked with the Bushmeat Research Initiative (BRI) to study how wild meat consumption impacts the environment, contributes to food security and impacts human health through its association with zoonotic diseases. She and her team have worked in more than 40 countries including the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Indonesia. “We’re very proud of what we’ve done in the last 10 years, and based on this, there is now an agenda to translate research to action, to link implementation and further learning and to ensure that wild meat is sustainably sourced and harvested,” said Fa.

Read volume 6

Session #2 – Forests, Trees and Agroforestry for Livelihoods

The second session was moderated by René Boot, member of the FTA ISC and Director of Tropenbos International; it centred on the highlights’ volumes seven through nine plus 15. These chapters reveal how FTA and its partners have worked to improve well-being and generate income through trees for people in developing areas.

For example, FTA Management Team member and CATIE senior scientist, Eduardo Somarriba, discussed how Trees on Farms (ToF), can generate income for farmers while also providing valuable ecosystem services. He especially focused on a case from Honduras where trees have been planted as “live fences” to facilitate rotational livestock grazing. “It is possible to increase innovation with trees on farms, but we need solid science to convince farmers, land-use planners and policymakers,” he said. “You need a lot of communication, facilitation and to show good financial performance.”

Read volume 7 (COMING SOON)

Sustainable timber harvesting for bioenergy is another way that trees can act as engines for sustainable development. INBAR representative, Li Yanxia, discussed how a wood-based circular bioeconomy could benefit local communities and global economies while reducing the ecological footprint of deforestation. “Efforts should not only invest in building natural capital,” she said. “Attention should also be directed towards building human capacity and understanding the social dimensions of the wood value chains through forest tenure systems, etc.”

Read volume 8 (COMING SOON)

Transitioning to a circular bioeconomy will require context-specific approaches that work at scale. In his presentation, CIFOR-ICRAF chief scientist and FTA Flagship 2 Leader Fergus Sinclair specifically promoted FTA’s work on Options by Context (OxC), a set of performance metrics that allow farmers and researchers to identify the best options for agricultural development and land restoration in their local areas. He also spotlighted the recent launch of the Agroecology Transformative Partnership Platform (TPP) that FTA incubated, and which brings together people from around the world to discuss sustainable food systems transitions. “There are multiple transition pathways depending on local contexts and partnerships; this is what allows us to scale up sustainably.”

Read volume 9 (COMING SOON)

None of this work is possible without financial support and increased investment in sustainable forest and tree-based commodities. Presenting the FTA Highlight Volume 10 on sustainable value chains, finance and investment in forestry & tree commodities, Michael Brady, FTA’s Flagship 3 Leader, outlined three core research areas for sustainable value chains: institutional arrangements, business models for smallholders and SMEs and responsible finance among financial service providers. He noted that research this decade has especially focused on sustainable certification systems for agro-commodities such as timber, rubber, shea, oil palm and cocoa. “This particular topic very much requires a systems approach looking at institutional, environmental and socioeconomic elements,” he said. “None of these can be really ignored when you consider value chains, finance and investment.”

Read volume 10

Cross-cutting all of FTA’s work on livelihoods is the need to advance gender equality and social inclusion. FTA’s Gender coordinator and senior researcher at The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, Marlène Elias outlined FTA’s Theory of Change, which places inclusion at the heart of the organization’s structure and encourages research done specifically with a gender and social inclusion lens. The goal is for women and other marginalized groups to share equal rights, access and tenure to forest and tree-based landscapes. “What we’ve shown in this work is not only that gender inequality can hinder efforts to achieve positive environmental outcomes but also how policies and interventions that focus on the environment can advance gender equality,” she said.

Read volume 15

Session #3 – Forests, Trees and Agroforestry for Climate change and the SDGs

The third session of the event focused on how FTA’s research aligns with the SDGs and contributes to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Moderated by Florencia Montagnini, member of FTA’s ISC, the presenters spoke on volumes 11-14 of the highlights series.

Starting off, Christopher Martius, CIFOR senior scientist and Flagship 5 Leader, offered several examples from FTA’s Global Comparative Study on REDD+. This work has helped governments set target emissions levels and to implement monitoring systems to track progress. While celebrating the work that was achieved over the past 10 years, Martius reminded the audience that long-term changes take time: “Oftentimes projects have a lot of high expectations,” he said. “In a 10-year program such as this, you will start seeing results, but it takes a lot of time to effectuate these changes in really complex policy environments.”

Read volume 11

It is well-known that forests and trees act as carbon sinks and ecosystem service providers. The mitigation agenda has often hidden a crucial adaptation agenda for forests and trees. FTA has worked to shift paradigms towards the key role of forests and trees for adaptation of various sectors. FTA’s approach also looks at how social and ecological systems can work together and adapt to climate change, according to senior CIFOR scientist Alexandre Meybeck. “You need to have research embedded in implementation,” he said. “We need normal interactions between actors on the ground and scientists to support them in creating the new systems for the future.”

Read volume 12 (COMING SOON)

In order to facilitate mutually-beneficial relationships between humans and ecosystems, FTA promotes a multifunctional landscapes approach that uses careful resource planning and implementation to generate more sustainable futures. Scientist at ICRAF, Lalisa Duguma, presented on how the organization has begun implementing these approaches in the humid tropics, managing trade-offs and synergies across multiple project sites. “We can’t solve all the problems at once, but they all need to be confronted in a way” he said. “There is a need for multiple projects to complement one another to achieve multi-functional landscapes. …for this, we need an articulated portfolio of research and action on the ground.”

Read volume 13 (COMING SOON)

Beyond on-the-ground approaches, FTA works with governments to build policies that harmonize human development with nature. Senior ICRAF scientist Beria Leimona spoke about how this work has involved advocating for multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs), supporting community forestry initiatives and lobbying for fair government policies. “The rich portfolios of local, national and international work, and the theories of change that FTA has developed, can support good governance principles being synergised across scales,” she said.

Session #4 – Results and impact

During the fourth session of presentations, led by Management Team member and CIRAD senior scientist Plinio Sist, scientists gave more details about how FTA measures its results and impact across scales.

Andrew Wardell began with a presentation on how FTA facilitates long-term capacity development. For example, his team collated data from the decade to track impacts and found there have been almost 80,000 downloads of the climate change tools that have been developed by FTA Flagship 5. Another example of capacity development includes the work done with the University of Kisangani, DRC, to train graduate students in forestry science and development. Already, the program has over 200 local students and graduates who will hopefully continue to work in the tropical rainforests of DRC. In the future, Wardell believes “there is a need to strengthen education systems and capacities in the global south, rather than relying on masters and PhD students from the global north. …This needs to be accompanied by monitoring and evaluation systems that look at the capacity development functions, including through ex post impact studies.”

Read volume 16 (COMING SOON)

In addition to capacity development, research for impact requires monitoring, evaluation, learning and impact assessment (MELIA). “Evolving research for development approaches require evolution in how we conceptualize and assess research,” said Brian Belcher, senior researcher at Royal Roads University. “How do we know that we’re doing the right thing? How do we know that we’re being effective?” To answer these questions, FTA has developed and applied an innovative approach based on integrative, challenge-driven Theories of Change and an organizing framework. These tools allow FTA to conduct qualitative assessments of some of the impacts of the program at scale and on key development objectives. Impact of FTA research overall has been substantial, it is estimated that FTA’s work has:

Brought between 1.8–34.4 million ha of land under
Provided between 5.1–19 million people with better means to exit poverty.
Brought 25.7–133.4 million ha of forests under enhanced protection. This represents up to 125.4 Gt of sequestered carbon dioxide.
Brought 59.5–204 million ha of land under better management via improved policy, monitoring and management practices.
Provided 1.12–3.43 million people with additional means to improve food and nutritional security.

Read volume 17

Following each set of presentations, the audience was asked through a poll whether they thought more implementation or more research was needed going forward. Although there was some debate, it is interesting that most poll respondents chose “more implementation.” The scientists agreed that implementation is now urgent, however, the relationship between research and implementation cannot be easily divided. “Do we need more research or implementation?,” said Meybeck. “We need a greater understanding of the relations between the two. We need more implementation of research and more research on implementation.”

Final discussion on the future of FTA

The closing panel brought together five distinguished speakers to discuss partnerships and new directions going forward. When moderator and FTA Director, Vincent Gitz, asked how organizations like FTA should work with actors in the global south going forward, Chairperson of the Independent Steering Committee of FTA, Anne-Marie Izac said, “Great focus on the role of partnerships is the very raison-d’être of FTA. …We have a relatively clear path ahead of us in terms of scaling up to build on local partneships… and I’m extremely hopeful.”

Sist (CIRAD) agreed that after 10 years and looking forward to a new FTA, we should put emphasis on strengthening our connection with society and with other actors in the field: “Our resources must breach the broader society if we want to catalyse large-scale changes that address climate change and other global challenges” he said.

Bas Louman from Tropenbos International, an organization that joined the set of FTA managing partners in 2017, also spoke on the value of an integrated, research-for-development approach for the new FTA, from upstream research to downstream, and back. “In spite of so much money being dedicated to climate, very little of that money is dedicated to research,” he said. “People just spend money and start implementing without really taking the time to think about what they’re doing. We need to help the word correct for that, to continue learning at the same time action is being made on the ground.”

To combat this trend, Li Xuejiao Deputy Director of the Division of International Cooperation at the Chinese Academy of Forestry (CAF) upheld the importance of ongoing South-South collaboration in the coming decade. “Research plays a very important role in terms of putting items on the agenda in the first place,” she said. Li pointed to ongoing networking opportunities for Chinese organizations through the FTA network.

Similarly, Erich Schaitza, Director General of Brazil’s Embrapa Florestas, praised the networking potential of FTA: “We have to have innovation to promote wealth sustainably,” he said. “Initiatives like FTA are incredibly important to us.”

In closing, Vincent Gitz, Director of FTA, called on the audience to remain hopeful about future progress and to work together to achieve goals. He said, “Often it is difficult to see the magnitude, increment and annual changes in the work we live in. But when we look back 10 years, we see the huge magnitude on how some things have changed and evolved, on the progress made for our planetary environment and people. Not all is solved of course, but it gives us hope that we can be effective for the future… And as the famous proverb says, ‘if we want to go far, we have to go together.’”

Stay tuned for the next decade of FTA, and a special thanks to all the scientists and partners who have made these past 10 years possible.

All the speakers’ PowerPoint presentations are now available below

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.

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Adapting to a changing climate with forests and agroforestry

Adapting to a changing climate with forests and agroforestry

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Article originally posted on Forest News.

The impact of a forest reaches far beyond its perimeter

CIFOR · Adapting to a changing climate with forests and agroforestry

Over the years, the climate crisis has demonstrated an inevitable impact on humanity. The rising temperature brings consequences such as rising sea levels, more frequent extreme weather and severe heatwaves, with for instance 1.6 billion people at risk of flood in 2050 around the globe, according to the United Nations.

It is widely known that forests and trees, while greatly impacted by climate change, also provide solutions to this ever-challenging problem. In a recent publication titled Addressing forestry and agroforestry in national adaptation plans, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA), provide a guideline for countries to involve forests, trees and agroforestry in their National Adaptation Plan (NAP) to deal with climate change.

National adaptation plans are the main vehicle for a country to identify vulnerabilities and construct policies and measures to address these vulnerabilities to climate change in the middle and long term, according to Alexandre Meybeck from FTA, a co-author of the publication.

The potential for forests and trees to mitigate climate change has long been acknowledged.

“When people talk about forests and climate change, we very spontaneously think about mitigation and the role that forests play to reduce climate change impacts, like by absorbing carbon from the atmosphere,” Meybeck said. However, not many discuss their adapting ability to the changing climate and increasing human pressure. This adaptation dimension not only determines trees’ mitigation potential, it also has positive spillover effects, enhancing other sectors’ adaptation to climate change, according to the publication, which is also available in Spanish, and

The ability of forest ecosystems and trees to mitigate and adapt to climate change also depends on numerous policies related to land planning, water management, energy, development and agriculture, often under the authority of different institutions. It is also important to acknowledge the role of forests and trees both in urban settings as well as rural, since the impact of forests expands far beyond its perimeter, for example, because of its water-regulation function. Therefore, the inclusion of the forest and agroforestry sector in NAP is crucial.

In 2019, FAO and FTA co-published a framework that assessed the vulnerability of forests and forest-dependent people to climate change, a natural companion to the recent NAP publication.

“In fact, National Adaptation Plans are the main vehicle for a country to identify vulnerabilities, and construct policies and measures to address the vulnerabilities to climate change in the middle and long term,” Meybeck said. “The publication is very much about how to support these processes of involvement of different sectors, different stakeholders, different value chains into the whole national process.”

It is, of course, no simple business, said Julia Wolf, natural resources officer at FAO, who is also a co-author of the publication.

Adapting forestry, agroforestry and trees in the NAP requires a long-term perspective from the actors involved, legal frameworks and enabling environment.

Making matters more complex, adding forests and agroforestry may conflict with numerous national interests and the allocation of resources in the countries.

“There’s a lot of technical guidance out there; we have a lot of climate data, but I think the principal matters we need to look at are really climate finance and governance, because ultimately, the ownership question and the possibility of a country to go beyond business-as-usual is linked very strongly to power relations and governance questions in countries,” Wolf said.

Listen to the in-depth discussion with Alexandre Maybeck and Julia Wolf in this episode of Let’s Talk Trees podcast.

Related publications:

By Anggrita Cahyaningtyas and Fabio Ricci. 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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Asia-Pacific Roadmap - Materials

Asia-Pacific Roadmap – Materials

04 February, 2021

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Presentations from the Final Validation Online Expert Workshop (23-24 November 2021)

Full report from the workshop can be accessed here

Day 1

Day 2

Presentations from the Online Expert Workshop (23-25 March 2021)

Full report from the workshop can be accessed here

Introduction:

Yves Laumonier, Principal scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR): Primary forests in the Asia-Pacific region: status, extent and diversity.

Keynote address:

Anne Branthomme, FAO, Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA): Towards improved global reporting on primary forests.

Expert presentations:

Session 2. Increasing pressures on primary forests

Expert presentations:

Introduction to breakout group discussions:

Yves Laumonier, Principal scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR): Typology of the main threats facing different forest types.

Session 3. Priority areas for primary forest conservation

Introduction:

Yves Laumonier, Principal scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR): Assessment of priority areas for primary forest conservation in the Asia-Pacific region.

Expert presentations:

Session 4. Primary forests: governance tools in the Asia-Pacific region

Introduction:

Alexandre Meybeck, special advisor at CIFOR/FTA: What governance for primary forests’ conservation in Asia-Pacific?

Keynote address:

Ryosuke Ujihashi, Forestry Agency of Japan: Initiatives in biological diversity conservation of national forest in Japan.

Expert presentations:

Conclusion of Day 2:

Keynote address:

Robert Nasi, Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR): Asia-Pacific roadmap on primary forest conservation: food for thoughts.

Presentations from the Online Expert Workshop (Nov 30^th, Dec 1^stand Dec 3^rd 2020)

Full report from the workshop can be accessed here

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Sentinels of Social Transformation in Borneo

Sentinels of Social Transformation in Borneo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Borneo: The Last Forest Frontier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost without water

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

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

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

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

“We need this research”

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

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

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

Research in remote, pristine forests

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

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

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

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

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

*FTA Socio-economic surveys in Kapuas Hulu*

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Kapuas Hulu vegetation maps 2000-2010-2019*

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

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

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

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

Mentebah: the road, the rubber and the gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The curse of capitalism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The women landowners of Batang Lupar

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservation or infrastructure: a false choice?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Annual Report 2019 highlights FTA’s contribution to resilient landscapes and livelihoods

Annual Report 2019 highlights FTA’s contribution to resilient landscapes and livelihoods

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In the past year, the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) has brough crucial evidence to global discussions on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on Climate. Also, it has empowered thousands of people to transform evidence into action. The newly launched Annual Report highlights these and other FTA achievements in 2019 in support of resilient and productive landscapes and livelihoods around the world.

The report examines FTA’s innovative work across the technical, financial and policy spheres of development, as well as its contribution to national and international policies and decision-making process that touch on, at least, nine of the SDGs. In terms of priority areas, it looks at FTA’s work on genetic tree resources; livelihood systems; sustainable value chains and investments; landscapes dynamics, productivity and resilience; and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Cross-cutting areas include gender, youth and capacity building.

In 2019, the program’s effort to help translate scientific evidence into better policies bore yet more fruit. With FTA’s support, for example, Nepal became the second country in the world to have a national agroforestry policy, while Uganda succeeded in adopting a 10-year national bamboo strategy and action plan, and Ethiopia established a National Tree Seed Network.

FTA’s innovations and projects resulted in the restoration of 550,000 hectares of forest, and made it possible for 220,000 farmers to embrace sustainable agricultural practices across Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Ethiopia and Kenya. More than 10,000 farmers in Africa also adopted vital land restoration techniques with FTA’s support.

FTA’s research continued informing global discussions shaping the future of food security, biodiversity and climate change. Notably, the UN Committee on World Food Security High-Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) report on agroecology and the Global Commission on Adaptation (GCA) paper on building resilient agriculture. On the biodiversity, gender and climate fronts, FTA collaborated with major global actors such as FAO, UNFCCC, IPBES and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Sustainable value chains and investments are another pillar of FTA’s efforts. Last year, for instance, FTA developed inclusive finance and business models with companies across Tanzania, Ghana and Peru, and strengthened its engagement with rubber stakeholders to make the supply of this commodity more sustainable.

FTA’s efforts in partnerships and capacity-building were compounded by the launch of products that enhance decision-making on issues at the crossroads of food, climate and biodiversity. For example, the Ecosystem-based adaptation monitoring tool in Gambia, the Priority food tree and crop food composition database for sub-Saharan Africa, the Agroforestry species switchboard as well as several publications to support the design of national policies on REDD+. FTA’s climate change mitigation and adaptation workstream participated at COP25 in Spain, where it had the chance to share its work on REDD+ as well as on bioenergy, peatlands and bamboo, among others.

Likewise, FTA sought to bring a gender perspective to global processes such as the Rio Conventions on biodiversity, climate change and desertification, and to advance ender equity along value chains for commodities such as charcoal, coffee and tea.

In the coming months, FTA’s will continue building on these successes to create healthier landscapes and enhanced livelihoods for women and men worldwide.

A toolkit to promote the FTA Annual Report is also available here.

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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Biodiversity Day 2020 - Solutions in Nature

Biodiversity Day 2020 – Solutions in Nature

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The United Nations proclaimed May 22 The International Day for Biological Diversity (IDB) to raise awareness and increase understanding of the issues around biological diversity and its fundamental role for the planet and humanity.

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.

Biodiversity is fundamental for many aspects of our lives, not only ecological health, but also to improve livelihoods, providing income source, diets, nutrition and overall well-being.

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.

2020 will also witness the end of the 2011-2020 Strategic Plan on Biodiversity and its 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, as well as the UN Decade on Biodiversity, leading to the transitional phase for the start of other new pivotal biodiversity-related decades for the period 2021-2030: the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration; and the UN Biodiversity Summit, in order to highlight the urgency of action at the highest levels in support of a post-2020 global biodiversity framework. FTA hopes that we will be indeed able to see a positive change in the coming years.

Role of trees and FTA’s work

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.

Recent publications include:

The Influence of Forests on Freshwater Fish in the Tropics: A Systematic Review highlighting that the majority of studies provided evidence that fish diversity was higher where there was more forest cover; this was related to the greater heterogeneity of resources in forested environments that could support a wider range of species. Read a recent blog about this.

Maize production and environmental costs: Resource evaluation and strategic land use planning for food security in northern Ghana by means of coupled energy and data envelopment analysis.

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.

Some recent online blogs also put the spotlight on the work CIFOR has been carrying out on biodiversity. We highlight this interesting piece on the extreme diversity of ecological systems present in Borneo and the large scale vegetation ecological maps crucial to manage all this biodiversity at landscape level.

Biodiversity and the Trees theme at ICRAF

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.

This work has been featured in Nature Genomics

Vegetation Map4Africa

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.

Building a healthy future

We highlight here two recent publications from our partner the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, one on mapping tree species vulnerability to multiple threats as a guide to restoration and conservation of tropical dry forests which was also featured as cover story for Global Change Biology. The other article illustrates the characterization of the genetic diversity of 21 wild and cultivated populations of the common walnut (Juglans regia L.) across Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. A complete threat assessment was performed evaluating the short-term threats from overexploitation, overgrazing, landslides, and fragmentation as well as long-term threats from climate change.

The Alliance also produced a series of blogs discussing the importance of biodiversity, a first one specifically on #BiodiversityDay2020, then on the threat mapping work and also a recent D4R workshop.

Sentinel Landscapes, solutions for biodiversity improvements

Our partner CATIE just recently released a report on the Nicaragua-Honduras Sentinel Landscape.

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!

Feel free to join our newsletter for updates on our work

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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Sentinel Solutions for the Anthropocene

Sentinel Solutions for the Anthropocene

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The NHSL team of researchers in El Tuma

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

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

We are living in the Anthropocene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sentinel Landscapes: A health check for tropical land use

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

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

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

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

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

The Nicaragua-Honduras Sentinel Landscape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond case studies: the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tracking degradation and climate change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sentinel solutions: Soil organic carbon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Context is everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The one big challenge”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sentinel solutions: Making change happen

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

Discussion groups with farmers and local communities in Rio Blanco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A warning shot”: Sentinel Landscapes research and Coronavirus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More crucially, we need to listen.

Selected references

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Five (or six) solutions for saving the world’s forests and restoring landscapes

Five (or six) solutions for saving the world’s forests and restoring landscapes

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Tony Simons (Left) and Robert Nasi (Right) at the Global Landscapes Forum Bonn 2019 closing plenary. Photo by Pilar Valbuena/GLF

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Working together for maximum impact

From the CIFOR-ICRAF DG column, available here.

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.

First, financing the transition requires a firm commitment from the global community. We have no shortage of money. Estimates indicate that governments spend $1.8 trillion a year in military expenditures and more than $5 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies, but only about $50 billion on landscape restoration.

We need to realign our priorities.

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.

More must be done to catalyze funds.

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.

A third of the world’s soil carbon and 10 percent of global freshwater resources worldwide are stored in peatlands, according to the International Mire Conservation Group and the International Peat Society.

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.”

Landscape restoration will not be fully effective unless it contributes to social as well as ecological benefits.

Recent discussions at the Global Landscapes Forum in Accra, Ghana, which revolved around tenure policy and forest landscape restoration in Madagascar, shed light on some of the issues impeding progress toward achieving positive social and ecological restoration outcomes globally.

The Bonn Challenge and the U.N. Decades on Ecosystem Restoration and Family Farming are important global restoration initiatives. They are designed, organized and funded by U.N. agencies, major donor countries, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and participating national governments that have signed on to their ambitious goals for restoring degraded forests, farmland and ecosystems.

Within the framework of the Bonn Challenge, 28 African countries affiliated in the AFR100 (African Forest Restoration Initiative) network are committed to restoring 113 million hectares of degraded forests.

There is wide agreement among experts that communities must be consulted at every stage of the restoration planning and implementation processes.

But too often “consultation” takes the form of perfunctory discussions with communities, and meaningful decisions about land use practices, funding, program design, local governance, incentives, regulation, planned outcomes and distribution of benefits are made by external entities.

In reality, communities lack any real negotiating power, including the ability to reject proposals they consider unrealistic or not in their best interests. This lack of community authority has significant consequences.

Manony Andriampiolazana, on left, interviews a leader in Ankijabe, Boeny District, Madagascar, forest restoration priorities.

Community members actively shape landscapes through decisions about how and where land is used for forests, agriculture, housing and other uses. As such, the outcomes of restoration efforts, positive or negative, are largely in their hands. While government and NGO planners may recommend or even prescribe adoption of new land use practices and technologies believed conducive to restoration and sustainable use, ultimately communities decide whether or not the recommended practices are practical and realistic.

Because they live and work close to the resource management problems, land users are in the best position to make informed choices about how land can be best managed and sustainably used for environmental, economic and social benefit. Research has found that practices imposed by outside authorities often lack technical credibility and rarely possess political legitimacy (McLain et al. 2018a).

This link between success in achieving positive outcomes and democratic decision-making is often overlooked in forest restoration programs. Reference to “consulting” local stakeholders doesn’t come close to describing the decision-making authority local people should exercise.

Governments can create incentives for restoration, but whether or not incentives are appropriate or sufficient to motivate new land use practices is largely a matter for users of land and forests to decide.

Governments can attempt to discourage destructive land use practices through direct regulation and penalties. But over-reliance on rule making and enforcement can prove unduly burdensome and coercive and turn communities away from a restoration agenda.

Lingering legacy

Colonial powers undercut or eliminated the ability of communities to make collective, democratic decisions about local land use by concentrating ownership rights over land, forests and pasture in the state.

While regulation carefully applied may have a role, communities should have the right to adopt restoration practices as a matter of free, collective choice, derived from secure rights to their local resources, including the right to decide how they are best managed.

CIFOR research found that tenure security motivates community investments in restoration (McLain et al. 2018b).

In much of Africa but also among indigenous communities in Latin America and Asia, customary tenure arrangements ensure access to land as a social right.

In other words, locally recognized systems of resource governance and rights are in place, but these systems too often are not recognized in statute or national law.

Madagascar, which aims to restore 4 million hectares of degraded forest by 2030, and other African governments, seek to “modernize” the property rights system by linking delivery of land rights to statutory instruments, such as title and certification.

Local people who believe that their customary rights are legitimate and secure may sometimes be vulnerable to loss of those rights because customary tenure arrangements are often not recognized under law.

Madagascar case study

Despite guidelines that Madagascar’s restoration plans reflect active engagement with communities and a variety of local stakeholders, research and experience suggests that Malagasy community-based land management institutions and practices are invisible to official authorities.

What is the evidence of this invisibility?

Insufficient recognition of community organizations and community resource rights in law. Malagasy civil law recognizes in principle the right of communities to manage forests. However, the law does not describe or grant the powers necessary for communities to carry out their management responsibilities. In practice, community representatives are sometimes consulted by government officials on land use decisions, but community organizations lack sufficient autonomy to manage and enforce local land use initiatives.
Failure of projects to systematically engage with legitimate local representatives. Local NGOs sometimes assert that they legally represent local communities, or hold and exercise rights on behalf of local communities, when communities would dispute that this is the case.
A focus on individual property rights instruments, such as titling or certification, which are recognized in law, while most forests and landscapes targeted for restoration are used and managed collectively. Assignment of individual title to portions of areas historically used collectively further erodes collective rights.
The administrative infrastructure and technical resources needed to assign title and other forms of statutory rights in rural areas are very limited. Poor people face additional barriers to securing title due to high survey and registration costs and limited knowledge of their rights and official procedures. Moreover, there is evidence that subsequent to the initial titling, right holders do not register transfer of rights due to sale or inheritance, largely because the level of tenure security provided under the customary system is perceived to be adequate or the costs of doing so are considered to be too high. (Ayalew et al. 2019; Lawry et al. 2017).
Some individuals (often migrants) who have weak customary rights in places of new arrival may claim statutory title to land as a way of securing rights in ways not possible through the local customary system. This can undercut the ability of the community to make enforceable collective land use decisions.
Lack of motivation for local people who have customary rights to seek land certificates or titles through the statutory system, because of the belief that their customary rights are secure.

Reshaping the terrain

In sum, the future of restoration may be limited if insufficient democracy and tenure insecurity are not addressed. Restoration practices that contribute to positive environmental and social outcomes are more likely to be taken up by local people when they have the degree of control over forests and trees necessary to reap the benefits of their investments.

It is imperative that the Bonn Challenge’s call for engagement with local communities in forest landscape restoration planning and implementation go beyond consultation and address the importance of community governance and secure community rights to land, forests and trees.

Restoring forests, restoring communities: How secure resource rights help communities in Africa restore forests and build local economies session panelists. From left: Chris Buss, IUCN forest programme; Patrick Ranjatson, ESSA-Foret, University of Antananarivo, Madagascar; Steven Lawry, representing the Center for International Forestry Research; Tangu Tumeo, Malawi Forest Department; and Priscilia Wainaina, World Agroforestry Center, Nairobi.

Community self-governance and legal recognition of resource rights are essential preconditions for community–led restoration. Self-governance is a precondition to negotiating consensus about use practices within communities and rights enable and catalyze action.

In the absence of rights there is no assurance that local communities will have the certainty that the benefits of their labors and investments will accrue to them.

Customary rights can be recognized statutorily, and several African countries have implemented legal reforms that recognize customary tenure (including Botswana, Kenya, Liberia and South Sudan). But Madagascar has not.

Until Madagascar and other countries take steps to design and implement laws that extend local self-governance and tenure security through, for instance, recognition of customary tenure, it is unlikely that landscape restoration at scale will occur.

By Steven Lawry and Patrick Ranjatson
This article draws on ideas discussed at the interactive session entitled “Restoring Forests, Restoring Communities,” held in Accra, Ghana, 29-30 October 2019, at the Global Landscapes Forum on Restoration in Africa. Steven Lawry, senior associate at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), organized and moderated the session. Patrick Ranjatson, professor at Mention Foresterie et Environnement de l’Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Agronomiques, Université d’Antananarivo (ESSA-Forêts) led a discussion on tenure policy and forest landscape restoration in Madagascar.

Funding from Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ) and the CGIAR Research Programs on Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM), led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) supported research in Madagascar in 2018-2019 on which this article was based. PIM and the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA), led by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) supported the Global Landscapes Forum interactive session where the research was presented. Opinions expressed are the authors’ alone.

References

Ayalew Ali D, Deininger K, Mahofa G, and Nyakulama R. 2019. Sustaining land registration benefits by addressing the challenges of reversion to informality in Rwanda. Land Use Policy. (In Press)

Baynes J, Herbohn J, Smith C, Fisher R and Bray D. 2015. Key factors which influence the success of community forestry in developing countries. Global Environmental Change Part A 35:226–38.

Lawry S, Samii C, Hall R, Leopold A, Hornby and Mtero F. 2017. The impact of land property rights interventions on investment and agricultural productivity in developing countries: a systematic review, Journal of Development Effectiveness, 9:1, 61-81,DOI: 10.1080/19439342.2016.1160947

McLain R, Lawry S, Ojanen, M. 2018a. Fisheries’ Property Regimes and Environmental Outcomes: A Realist Synthesis Review. World Development. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X17303091?via%3Dihub

McLain R, Lawry S, Guariguata M, Reed J. 2018b. Toward a tenure-responsive approach to forest landscape restoration: A proposed tenure diagnostic for assessing restoration opportunities. Land Use Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. landusepol.2018.11.053

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FTA Digital Summit on Inclusive Finance hosted by the GLF

FTA Digital Summit on Inclusive Finance hosted by the GLF

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Men process palm oil fruit in Cameroon. Photo by M.Edliadi/CIFOR

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A woman in Fatumnasi, Indonesia holding a harvest of cassava. Photo by A. Sanjaya/CIFOR

Within the framework of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA), Tropenbos International and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) have initiated a project on inclusive finance. This project includes eight interviews with key stakeholders involved in forest and tree product finance in developing countries and a summary of existing documentation on the topic.

This process, or learning journey, now enters into a consultative, interactive phase. During this phase, we invite you to share your thoughts on finance for inclusive and sustainable landscapes with experts on the topic.

Join us on 9 July 2019, 14:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST), for a Digital Summit on Inclusive Finance organized by FTA and hosted by the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF).

Pauline Nantongo of Ecotrust in Uganda, Juan Carlos Gonzalez Aybar of Althelia Funds and an impact investment manager from Mirova, and Marco Boscolo, forestry officer in the policy, governance and economics group of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) will discuss their experiences and thoughts on the way forward for the upscaling of innovative finance mechanisms that support sustainable landscapes and consider the smallholders within these landscapes.

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Moving towards a more integrated view on finance and impact

Moving towards a more integrated view on finance and impact

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A Lubuk Beringin villager taps a rubber tree on her farm in Jambi province, Indonesia. Photo by T. Saputro/CIFOR

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In the penultimate interview of this initial series, we hear from Marthe Tollenaar and MaryKate Bullen of New Forests, an Australia-based fund management company with more than A$5 billion invested in sustainable leading-edge forestry, land management, and conservation projects in the Asia-Pacific region and the United States.

Marthe is responsible for the environmental and social management of investments in Southeast Asia and for supporting compliance with International Finance Corporation (IFC) Performance Standards and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification.

MaryKate leads corporate communications and media relations, as well as strategic planning and implementation of corporate sustainability and responsible investment initiatives. They share many decades of experience on how to make investments more inclusive.

This interview complements our previous interviews held with non-governmental organizations (the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Finance Alliance for Sustainable Trade), intergovernmental bodies (the United Nations Forum on Forests), a community organization (the Association of Forest Communities of the Peten), a development bank (the Netherlands Development Finance Company) and another investment company (FORM International), thereby enriching the discussion on inclusive finance.

How do you define ‘inclusiveness’ and why should it be addressed by financial institutions?

At New Forests, we consider inclusiveness to mean the generation of value for all stakeholders in our business, including investors and communities, and the environment. We believe that an inclusive approach ensures steadier and more long-term profitability, and creates opportunities through shared value business strategies.

Rubber trees grow in rows in South Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo by I. Cooke Vieira/CIFOR

We also feel that demonstrating successful business models that incorporate environmental and social benefits are essential for transitioning the forest and land use sectors to long-term sustainable models that promote equity and inclusion.

New Forests ensure that our investments use appropriate best practice in stakeholder engagement, guaranteeing inclusiveness with respect to gender, indigenous peoples, and other potentially vulnerable groups.

As global demand for resources grows, there is a need to increase productivity while ensuring the conservation of the world’s remaining natural forests and sustaining the needs of local communities. The Sustainable Landscape Investment (SLI) framework has six core themes that we apply throughout our investment portfolio, which is designed to balance these interests and deliver enhanced investment performance in support of our corporate purpose.

New Forests’ Sustainability Working Group developed a series of quantifiable measures to track our performance against each of the six themes defined in the SLI framework, and both the Shared Prosperity and Land Use themes measure the inclusiveness of our investments.

We are continuing to build on this and look to deepen the benefits that inclusiveness can bring, continuing to focus on key areas including gender, shared values, and the social license to operate (for example ensuring that Free, Prior, Informed Consent (FPIC) or similar procedures have been implemented by investees).

What are the structural barriers to financing smallholders and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)?

There are several options for New Forests to invest in smallholder forestry: The first is direct investment in smallholder-managed forestry assets through a cooperative or other organizational structure. The second is through outgrower schemes that enhance scale and production by integrating contract farmers in the business model, enhancing scale and production of our investments. A third is with forestry and agroforestry programmes, though the signing of agreements with communities for mixed cropping models either inside or outside the forest area under our management.

Structural barriers differ in each of these different investment options. Smallholder-managed forestry assets, even when they are united through a cooperative or other form of association, often lack the scale required to make an attractive business case for direct investments.

A Hevea plantation in Ngazi, DRC. Photo by A. Fassio/CIFOR

Good governance is key to meeting our strict performance and compliance requirements, but is often challenging in smallholder forestry. Organizational structures are also often lacking or poorly managed, with a high risk of internal disputes, and low smallholder commitment reduces the quality of production.

New Forests requires certification of our investments as part of our Social and Environmental Management System. The challenges described above and complex supply chains mean that there are considerable barriers to group certification, increasing reputational risk for the investor. Another challenge in the forestry sector is the long investment horizon. Smallholders are often looking for quick returns and lack the resources to make long-term investments.

Expected returns in forestry may also not be high enough for the farmers to compete with alternative crops like oil palm or annual food crops. Land tenure and land governance issues can also be barriers to investing in smallholders, because investment criteria require certainty over forestry use rights through the duration of the investment.

What are the underlying reasons for these structural barriers?

There is a clear knowledge gap at the local level of production techniques in forestry. Smallholder timber production is typically geared toward the local market, with low-tech processing facilities, and the low quality of timber products often not suited for more commercial and industrial end uses. Smallholders also traditionally lack access to the technical knowledge and expertise in improved silvicultural practices.

There is often a lack of funding for research and development and technical capacity to develop and implement appropriate Standard Operating Procedures. These aspects mean that smallholder forestry is often less productive, less efficient and less profitable than larger-scale models where such resources are available.

Smallholders also face challenges marketing their products. A lack of knowledge on pricing and markets often causes them to sell their products (far) below market-price to middlemen or processing facilities. Long, non-transparent supply chains in smallholder operations increase the marketing complexity, and corruption can contribute to unfair pricing of smallholder products.

Governance of smallholder cooperatives may lack structure and effective oversight and controls, but this may also be complicated by existing disputes or political interference, enhanced by corruption and lack of law enforcement. Communities often lack the knowledge and experience to establish formal bodies, especially with respect to finance, administration and legality.

These barriers can, however, be mitigated to some extent through capacity development, technology transfer, and development of more effective intermediaries and support organizations.

How is your organization addressing the needs of smallholders and SMEs for finance, and what have you learnt from that?

New Forests is not focused on investing in SMEs and smallholders directly, but we seek to help our investees – which in Asia are typically medium-sized businesses or subsidiaries of larger conglomerates – identify and understand their impacts on SMEs and smallholders in order to seek where shared value opportunities may exist.

Evening in the forest of Mount Halimun, Salak National Park, West Java, Indonesia. Photo by A. Erlangga/CIFOR

We have developed and implemented various smallholder models in our existing portfolio in Southeast Asia. In our experience, these models play an important role in creating a shared interest in our investments, facilitating shared revenue streams, and providing a social license to operate on the land. New Forests is therefore optimistic that our future investments in the region will continue to include smallholder and SME opportunities.

In addition to these integrated smallholder models, the Tropical Asia Forest Fund (TAFF), managed by New Forests, has in its portfolio companies that invest in local business development, including contract managers, handicrafts, food processing, tailors and farming businesses. Where possible, we link these development opportunities to company needs. In our Indonesian investment for example, we trained local tailors to manufacture uniforms for company staff.

We further incentivize involvement at the local level through community-based monitoring programmes. Communities in and around the forest management units are hired to monitor and patrol the forest close to their village, and receive a bonus for good management, e.g. no fires, no illegal activities, no littering.

Through smallholder models, local business development, employment and other community-based activities, New Forests’ investments promote economic development in the region, and further enhance a shared interest in the company.

What examples do you have of successful or promising financial innovations that contribute to sustainable landscapes?

New Forests has developed an innovative blended finance structure for its latest investment fund for Southeast Asia, with the goal of enhancing investment in sustainable plantation forestry and generating significant positive climate, community, and biodiversity impacts. The fund aims to bring together complementary mainstream and high-impact, development-oriented capital to invest in a diversified portfolio of plantation assets with associated impact activities.

One interesting financial innovation that we came across recently is Fast Track Trade, a platform that connects buyers and sellers through block chain technology, currently being piloted with smallholders in Indonesia.

What types of support and conditions are needed to ramp up development and scaling of such innovative finance?

New Forests considers that new commercial models for sustainable forestry are required to meet rising Asian timber demand while also ensuring the sustainable development of emerging markets in ways that are socially and environmentally beneficial. The impact tranche of the second phase of the Tropical Asia Forest Fund (TAFF) is an innovative step to shift capital at scale into high-impact investment models and will seek to demonstrate the case for sustainable forestry businesses in Southeast Asia. Using blended finance, the fund will focus on priority impact activities that are anticipated to support a shift in the overall risk-return profile of investments, while also targeting broader climate, community, and biodiversity benefits.

Through this, we aim to show that more sustainable investment approaches produce an overall benefit for investors, society, and the environment. By demonstrating a scalable, institutional impact investment approach, a second phase of the Tropical Asia Forest Fund (TAFF2) is positioned to be a leader that will shape the market for sustainable forestry in emerging economies. The blended finance structure may also be transferable to other regions and sectors, promoting replicability and scale for impact investment aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement.

We believe a shift is required towards a more integrated view on finance and impact – moving from grant funding into high-impact business models. A key factor in achieving this shift is educating investors in commercial landscape investment opportunities, aligning the interests of commercial and mission-oriented finance.

By Nick Pasiecznik, Tropenbos International.

This interview has also been published on Tropenbos International’s website.

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

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Using forests to support wellness

Using forests to support wellness

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A woman harvests Gnetum spp (Okok) leaves in Minwoho, Lekié, Cameroon. Photo by O. Girard/CIFOR

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At the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) in Bonn, Germany, in December 2018, the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) spoke with social entrepreneur Doreen Mashu, the founder of The Good Heritage in Zimbabwe – a wellness brand using non-timber forest resources to create products.

At the GLF, Mashu was part of the panel titled, “Delivery of quality and diverse planting material is a major constraint for restoration: What solutions, what emerging needs?”, hosted by FTA with Bioversity International, World Agroforestry (ICRAF), and supported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

During the session, Mashu emphasized the need for a clear connection between restoration efforts and economic activity. “Companies are thinking about doing good in addition to making financial returns,” she said. Thus, business can be a vehicle for restoration for both businesspeople and the scientists who support it, she explained.

Read our interview with Doreen Mashu here, edited for length and clarity.

How is your business connected to nature and forests?

The Good Heritage is a startup, and it’s a company I founded recently. What I am really trying to do is take a back-to-basics approach to ‘nutrifying’ the world. We look back at some of the traditions and we borrow from them – some of these great traditions about using just the most natural forms of medicine, for example, or cosmetic products, or food products. I’m trying to bring to the world more consumer goods that are wellness-based, and are based from forests, and that are very natural, wild harvested, and in their most natural form. And I am aiming to make these more available to the global community.

How do forest products relate to the growing interest in wellness?

I think wellness is just this idea of feeling your best, whether it is the way you look, the way you feel, the way you think, or the decisions you make throughout the day to support your whole being. It’s a holistic view to what makes a person whole, and what makes them live their best life.

When I was looking at working with forests and creating opportunities around forests for communities, I realized that I needed to find a demand, a need to be met, through forests. And wellness is a growing trend globally. It’s potentially not even a trend, because it is something that is really here to stay.

People are moving away from cosmetic products, for instance, with multiple ingredients, in favor of things with minimal ingredients. As an example, one of our products is a cosmetic oil that you can apply, and that’s it. You don’t need another cream, you don’t need an eye cream, you don’t need all these other cosmetic products that you would normally need. We are basically meeting that need to simplify the beauty process for women and men around the world. This is certainly an area for me that is exciting, and that can be met through developing and restoring forests.

Afrormosia trees stand in Yangambi, DRC. Photo by A. Fassio/CIFOR

What barriers exist in restoring degraded land and achieving sustainable development related to forests?

I think that the main issue is connecting with communities and cocreating with the communities. I don’t think we’ll fix this problem by simply bringing solutions. I think that we need to connect the goals of restoring forests to development goals, to people’s needs.

I like ideas where you cocreate with the community, so you’re not bringing a solution from elsewhere. Bringing all these together will be a step in the right direction to meeting these goals.

Watch: FTA at GLF: Involving youth in restoration and conservation

How can the private sector engage in seed systems and land restoration?

The private sector plays a very big role. It needs to be at the table when scientists, researchers and the government are talking about restoration. And thanks to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the private sector is now thinking about ways to do good and implementing a multipronged approach of doing good for business, good for society and good for the environment.

A man holds some indigenous seeds in Olenguruone, Rift Valley, Kenya. Photo by P. Shepherd/CIFOR

The private sector needs to be front and center. In terms of financing, some financing can come through the private sector as long as they are also getting what they need and getting the financial returns that they need.

How can we move from restoration pledges toward restoration action?

Pledges are very interesting because sometimes people sit in a room and they come up with numbers. However, I think that they need to be constantly be updated with new information from the field. Sometimes, we have these big numbers that we want to accomplish, but we don’t really tie them to what’s happening on the ground. We really need to look at why we are trying to achieve something such as the restoration of however many hectares of land. What is the reason for this, and can we explain it in a way that we get buy-in from everyone that is involved?

By the FTA communications team.

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

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More dialogue needed between farmers, forest enterprises and finance providers

More dialogue needed between farmers, forest enterprises and finance providers

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A market in the village of Minwoho, Lekié, Center Region, Cameroon. Photo by O. Girard/CIFOR

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As part of this new interview series on inclusive landscape finance, Tropenbos International’s Nick Pasiecznik spoke to Noemi Perez, an inclusive finance and investment specialist, with extensive experience with key issues gained from work in both the private and public sectors.

Noemi began her career sourcing timber for one of the largest door manufacturers in the world, Puertas Montealban, rising to general manager.

After seeing how the corporate sector could support and promote sustainable finance for small-scale forest enterprises, she applied her experience to roles in the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Costa Rica and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in Mexico.

She then cofounded the international, non-profit Finance Alliance for Sustainable Trade (FAST) in Montreal, Canada, in 2008, where she worked until April 2018. At FAST, she worked mainly with public funds seeking to match small- and medium-sized forest enterprises (SMEs) to private investors. Noemi is currently a freelance consultant.

What are the underlying reasons for underfinancing of small-scale agricultural and forest businesses?

The most basic problem is lack of literacy – not only financial literacy, but also basic literacy. How can we expect farmers or rural entrepreneurs to be able to access finance if many can’t even read or count? Even among those that can, there is a lack of understanding of business fundamentals, when what is needed is business acumen, as a prerequisite for good decision making, including finance.

Thus, there is a serious and urgent need for basic education and business education. For example, in 2010, at an investment conference I attended, rural SMEs were invited to present their cases, but it was clear that some were not even differentiating between sales and profit.

Another constraint is that farmers often sell perishable agricultural produce, and do not have facilities to store goods while waiting for a better price. This makes them even more vulnerable: they have to sell at any price, or they run the risk of losing everything. The lack of strong producer organizations makes it very hard for individual smallholders to be bankable.

On the other hand, financial service providers are not willing to take risks in sectors where they have not previously invested. They may not have sufficient knowledge or information on how to manage risk in rural small-scale agricultural and forest business settings.

Even institutions that claim to invest in forestry or agriculture, often say things like “we invest in agriculture, but we don’t invest in that country”, or “we don’t invest in that sector” without even looking at the specific business cases.

What are we not doing right, or not doing well enough, or not doing at all?

Where are the farmers? We need to inform financial service providers and bring them together with farmers. I have been to more than a hundred meetings and conferences on agriculture, forestry investment and similar initiatives, and there is hardly ever a farmer present, or not more than a single token representative. This is not right. We need to create situations where farmers can sit down and tell financial service providers face to face what it is that they need.

At the same time, the financial sector needs to explain their own needs and constraints clearly to farmers. Then they can sit down together and discuss how to manage the risks.

Financial institutions need to understand small-scale agricultural and forest business needs. Adapting and creating specific products and services based on their needs is key, particularly medium- and long-term access to finance.

They also need to know how value chains work, be in contact with different links in the chain, understand market requirements and make strategic alliances. They need to better understand smallholder production cycles, needs, products and markets, and that it is usual and acceptable to rely on local markets and not only on export markets.

On the other hand, farmers must understand the requirements of financial institutions, their restrictions, and that they need certainty that they will get their money back, to satisfy their own investors. Financial institutions must also make clear to farmers why they charge X or Y percent interest, and where this money goes, as often, rural, agricultural SMEs do not even understand why interest is charged!

In addition, one important thing we can do is to look more closely at successful small-scale agricultural and forest businesses in developed countries – how do they work and what makes them successful, what subsidies exist and what types of finance do they have access to?

In developed countries, many small-scale agricultural and forest businesses make a decent income. Even though they have their own struggles, they live well. It would be useful to compare similar types and sizes of smallholder enterprises in developed and developing countries, how they are organized and how they operate.

What examples do you have of successful or promising ‘model’ approaches or innovations?

Good examples of inclusive finance tend to occur where the true realities of farmers are well understood, such as the impacts of seasonality of production, for example. These success stories have almost always resulted from situations where farmers and financial institutions have sat together and talked and rural, agriculture smallholders have repaid. There are excellent examples from banks that have specialized in agriculture, such as the Netherland’s Rabobank, or France’s Credit Agricole. There are also socially oriented lenders such as Alterfin, the Commodities Fund of Kenya, Pear Capital, Root Capital, Oikocredit, ResponsAbility, Triodos Investment Management, Bankaool, and Shared Interest.

What is your vision on how to increase finance and investment in sustainable forestry and farming?

My vision is that every individual should have the right to access financial resources to improve their livelihood if they can demonstrate they have a viable business and produced positive social and environmental impacts. But how? First, we must promote greater dialogue between small-scale enterprises and financial service providers, as I have explained.

This also highlights and connects to those small-scale agricultural and forest businesses that already have a secure market and long-term relationships that could immediately back up a loan. Next, we need to better understand current markets and take these into account – and not any potential future (e.g. export) markets that might take 5–10 years to materialize.

Finally, we need to provide similar conditions for small-scale agricultural and forest businesses in developing countries as are offered to those in developed countries, including the needed levels of education from basic financial literacy to business acumen.

By Nick Pasiecznik, Tropenbos International.

This interview has also been published on Tropenbos International’s website.

Please note that the photos used here are for illustrative purposes and do not refer directly to FAST activities.

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New online platform promotes collaboration in the Congo Basin

New online platform promotes collaboration in the Congo Basin

17 April, 2019

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Aerial view of the Congo River. Photo by A. Gonzalez/CIFOR

To address the duplication of initiatives in the Congo Basin, the Central African Forest Observatory (OFAC) – whose mission is to provide data to decision makers so they can create evidence-based policies – recently launched an interactive project monitoring platform. The online tool enables access to data and projects in the region, to promote collaboration and put an end to wasted resources.

Conservation of the Congo Basin forests is a critical, but complex undertaking. This massive tropical forest block, the world’s second largest, covers over 200 million hectares and spreads across six countries in Central Africa.

It is home to some of the world’s most critically endangered animals, such as lowland gorillas, as well as over 10,000 endemic tropical plant species.

It also provides livelihoods to 60 million people, who depend on forest resources for food, energy, and jobs – a significant economic contribution in one of the world’s least developed regions. And as if this was not enough, it stores around 46 billion metric tons of carbon, benefitting the whole planet facing climate change.

The importance of this ecosystem means that a multitude of actors, including donors, implementing agencies, national governments, and local organizations, are simultaneously carrying out conservation and development efforts on the ground.

While international interest, availability of funds, and political will are certainly good news, duplications of initiatives do happen. Information gaps and a lack of overarching coordination stand in the way of achieving environmental and development objectives.

“In the last two decades, the region has seen an exponential increase in the number of actors in the forest-environment sector,” explained Quentin Jungers, OFAC’s technical advisor, who leads the IT team behind the platform.

“The new project monitoring platform answers calls for better coordination at the regional and national levels. It will allow organizations and governments to share information, promote collaborations, and ensure harmonization.”

A woman carries vegetables in Yangole, DRC. Photo by A. Fassio/CIFOR

A call for a regional approach

Better coordination has long been part of the Congo Basin conservation agenda. In 1999, the Central Africa Forest Commission (COMIFAC), became the birth-child of all ten Central African countries; its mandate to oversee the sustainable management and conservation of the Congo Basin’s forest ecosystems.

In 2005, the finalizing of a first Convergence Plan provided a common strategy for the COMIFAC Member States and international partners to reach sustainable goals.

OFAC officially became part of COMIFAC in 2011, leading to the development of an integrated monitoring and evaluation system just a few years later.

“There are so many initiatives to support the sustainable management of Central Africa’s forests, that sometimes it is difficult for COMIFAC to have a clear vision of all the efforts that contribute to the implementation of our Convergence Plan,” explained Vincent Medjibe, OFAC coordinator at COMIFAC. “We expect this platform to give us an accurate overview of what is happening on the ground”.

Digital solutions

The development of the project monitoring platform, the first of its kind in Central Africa, began in 2015 with a basic repository and took over 8 months of intense work to convert into an analytical platform, which was finally ready last year.

“We started by developing a basic database with experts, projects, and capacity building initiatives in the fields of environment and climate change, sustainable management of natural resources, and conservation,” said Donald Djossi, programmer at OFAC. Though he says the real technical challenge was to find the “interconnections” of the projects, so as to provide a comprehensive cross-view of all initiatives.

“Our goal was that all kinds of users, tech-savvy or not, could benefit from it,” added Jungers. Appetite for the platform is clear. Though it was only launched a couple of months ago, it already has an average of 60 users per week.

Users can benefit from a directory and an interactive map showing geolocation and explanation of each initiative, an analysis tab that examines the current state of projects, as well as a report generation tool.

People gather outside the parish of Notre Dame de l’Assomption in Yangambi, DRC. Photo by A. Fassio/CIFOR

Learn more: Go to the project monitoring platform website

Contributions needed

This platform is a collaborative initiative, and its success will depend on the organizations’ will to share their projects’ information. Until now, over 651 projects have already been submitted, out of which 508 have been validated and published, a significant amount considering that they account for 5 billion euros of funding.

To contribute, it is first necessary to create a user account. This gives organizations access to a private module. Then they can fill out a form for each project. “That’s all is needed,” said Djossi.

After a project is submitted, OFAC’s team reviews the form to ensure that all information is accurate and to avoid duplications. “We need to go through this validation process to ensure that our platform is a reliable source,” explained Jungers.

To encourage organizations to feed the platform, with their user account they also get access to a free monitoring tool that can help them track the progress of their projects. “They can have a report with one click”, said Djossi.

The next step for OFAC is to use the information on this platform to produce a regional publication called “The State of the Projects”, expected in 2020. As a complementary instrument, it will analyze the impact of projects in the Congo Basin in the last 15 years, looking to better integrate them into national and regional environment policies.

“The State of the Projects will help regional policymakers understand what has been done to conserve Central Africa’s forests, and what still needs to be done,” concluded Jungers.

By Ahtziri Gonzalez, originally published at CIFOR’s Forests News.

This research was supported by the RIOFAC, funded by the European Union.

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

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Forests in Flux: Exploring Park–People Conflicts in Colombia through a Social Lens

Forests in Flux: Exploring Park–People Conflicts in Colombia through a Social Lens

25 February, 2019

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FTA COMMUNICATIONS TEAM

Natural resource-related conflicts between local communities and nation states can be extremely destructive. Worldwide, interest is growing in gaining a better understanding of why and how these conflicts originate, particularly in protected areas inhabited by local communities. The literature on local attitudes towards and perceptions of park conservation and park–people conflicts is quite extensive. Studies have examined the socioeconomic and geographical determinants of attitudes to protected areas. However, the role of such determinants in the experience of park–people conflicts has received considerably less attention. Drawing on 601 interviews with people living in or near 15 Colombian national protected areas (NPAs), we examine the socioeconomic and geographical variables that are most influential in people’s experience of conflict related to restricted access to natural resources. We find that the experience of this type of conflict is largely explained by the NPA where a person resides, pursuit of productive activities within the NPA, previous employment in NPA administration, gender and ethnicity. We recommend implementing socially inclusive conservation strategies for conflict prevention and resolution in Colombia’s NPAs, whereby both women and men from different ethnic groups are engaged in design and implementation.

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