Tag: restoration


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  • ‘Grain for green’: How China is swapping farmland for forest

‘Grain for green’: How China is swapping farmland for forest

13 December, 2017

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A patchwork mountain landscape of agriculture, forestry and deforested terrain in Tianlin County, China. Photo by Nick Hogarth/CIFOR
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A legally protected ancient tree in Yunnan Province, China. The country’s successes in Forest Landscape Restoration are drawing attention globally. Photo by L. Putzel/CIFOR

Research draws lessons for global restoration goals.

Since 1999, China has restored forest landscapes across more than 28 million hectares of farmland and land classified as barren or degraded.

As global efforts turn to restoration as a way to mitigate climate change – led by the Bonn Challenge, with the goal of restoring 150 million hectares of deforested and degraded land by 2020, and 350 million hectares by 2030 – researchers are looking to China for lessons on how to achieve this.

A major driver of China’s success has been the ‘Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program’ (CCFP), also known as ‘Grain for Green’. The program pays farmers to plant trees on their land and provides degraded land to rural families to restore.

CCFP has so far cost more than $US40 billion, including direct payments to more than 32 million rural households. Overall, this massive program has affected the lives of 124 million people. The program is particularly important for China as 65 percent of the country’s total land area is mountainous and hilly, and a large proportion of China’s farmers live on sloping lands.

Some instructive findings have emerged from a four-year study by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in partnership with scientists from China’s Forest Economics and Development Research Center (FEDRC). Under the research program known as SLANT – Sloping Lands in Transition – CIFOR became the first foreign organization to access data from China’s national restoration program.

“We wanted to get a better understanding of the socioeconomic and environmental benefits and impact of CCFP through its monitoring program. There is still a lot more to learn, especially about the effect of the program on a variety of ecosystem services,” says Yustina Artati, a CIFOR research officer.

Read more: China’s conversion of cropland to forest program: a systematic review of the environmental and socioeconomic effects

A patchwork mountain landscape of agriculture, forestry and deforested terrain in Tianlin County, China. Photo by Nick Hogarth/CIFOR

RESTORING CHINA’S FORESTS

Louis Putzel, a former CIFOR scientist who led the SLANT program, says China has suffered serious consequences from deforestation in the past, and has had to implement a huge range of strategies to get trees back into the landscape.

This has included taking the approach of FLR, Forest Landscape Restoration, which aims to improve ecological functions and human well-being.

“FLR as a field has a lot to learn from China,” says Putzel.

Research collaboration through SLANT has focused on rigorous data collection and analysis, as well as support for environmental assessments. This work is helping scientists identify any research gaps, learn what works and what needs improvement.

Putzel says the development community, as well as national governments implementing reforestation projects, need to know how the approach has worked in China.

Each year, the FEDRC researchers and data investigators visit farmers annually in 21 provinces to find out firsthand the successes and also the challenges these communities face. The results can eventually help communities make more informed decisions that affect their land and livelihoods.

“We have been working with our Chinese counterparts to ensure that the data collection is the best it can be. Surveys have been done of thousands of farm families and the results can help not only China, but the global community,” says CIFOR researcher Himlal Baral.

He adds that plans are being made for further research collaboration with several other Chinese research institutions, including work with Renmin University and Beijing Forestry University on the socioeconomic and biophysical aspects of forestry, landscape restoration and climate change.

Key findings from SLANT have been shared through workshops, presentations, and key events, and of course research papers – to date, more than 70 have been published.

SHARING THE KNOW-HOW

Ethiopia is just one example of how other countries can learn from China’s success. Scientists and government forestry officials from China and Ethiopia have been brought together under the SLANT program to share experiences and find solutions to problems that can have a negative impact on reforestation programs.

Last year, Chinese researchers were able to see for themselves the challenges Ethiopia faces during a field visit and provide some FLR solutions for Ethiopia to reach its goal of restoring 15 million hectares of degraded forests.

CIFOR researchers have been working with a number of China’s national agricultural and forestry research institutes for more than 15 years, and this partnership has resulted in a rich source of information and data that can be used to improve agricultural and forestry strategies as well as rural livelihoods.

“During our long-standing collaboration with China, we have benefited from the knowledge and conceptual inputs of our Chinese colleagues on forestry-related matters as they apply in China — from bamboo enterprise value chains, to the role of forestry Chinese enterprises abroad, to more recent forest restoration,” says Robert Nasi, CIFOR’s Director General.

Nasi says this collaboration has opened the door to invaluable knowledge and data on the Chinese land restoration programs, which are among the world’s largest.

“We would like to expand to new topics with additional resources focusing on forest product value chains and forest landscape restoration considering important cross-cutting issues like tenure and climate change,” he says.

Read more: CIFOR/ICRAF sloping lands in transition (SLANT) project

By Suzanna Dayne, originally published at CIFOR’s Forests News. 

For more information on this topic, please contact Himlal Baral at h.baral@cgiar.org or Yustina Artati at y.artati@cgiar.org.

This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.

This research was supported by UK aid from the UK government.

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  • Gender matters in forest landscape restoration

Gender matters in forest landscape restoration

08 December, 2017

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Delving into Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) and gender equality considerations, this infographic looks at restoration efforts, safeguards, opportunities and more. With a host of benefits available for those practicing restoration also comes risks, and this publications outlines the issues involved and ways to move forward.

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  • Recognizing gender bias, restoring forests

Recognizing gender bias, restoring forests

20 November, 2017

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Women work in a tree nursery in Yangambi, Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo by CIFOR/A. Fassio

COP23 special: As global commitments gather momentum, gender equality and rights become urgent considerations.

One woman described the centuries-old, female-centered production of argan oil in Morocco and the recent degradation of the country’s forests. Another spoke of the gender disparities in experiences at REDD+ sites. And yet another talked of women in eastern India who cultivate up to 60 different crops in one shifting cultivation cycle, working from a base of rich traditional wisdom.

At the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) session “Gender equality, rights and ancestral knowledge in the context of forest landscape restoration” on the sidelines of the recent COP23, a diverse set of panelists stood at a frontier – bringing gender equality and women’s rights to the forest landscape restoration (FLR) conversation.

With international commitments to restoring forests and landscapes now almost de rigueur, there is a need to ensure gender considerations are incorporated from the start, lest inequalities be perpetuated, women excluded or rights wrested away.

On a gray morning in Bonn, a majority-female set of speakers – refreshing amid the number of all-male panels at COP23 – proffered insights ranging from the importance of community forests for women’s rights to the need for active and informed female participation in decision-making and the necessity that all of us confront our unseen biases.

Forest rights advocate Madhu Sarin talked of her experiences with forests and communities in India, and the trial-and-error process of reconciling top-down processes with moves toward equality for women in some forested areas, all while interrogating assumptions about rights.

“It’s only movements that can lead to transformative change. Community people working on the ground. The problem is that grassroots movements are like a drop in the ocean. We don’t have so many movements and we don’t have widespread movements – they are in certain pockets, but not all over. And not all movements are gender sensitive,” she said.

Read also: The Earthscan Reader on Gender and Forests

Tea plantations are seen beside the Mau Forest in Kenya. Photo by P. Shepherd/CIFOR

SHIFTING PARADIGMS

But clearly lack of gender sensitivity is not only a developing world problem.

Panelist Nigel Crawhall of UNESCO talked of the need to harmonize forms of knowledge, bringing local, indigenous, Western and other kinds of understandings together when thinking about forests and restoration, and the need to bring real interactions to the table amid issues of race, power, gender and identity. And, that table may already be steeped in a bias we may not recognize.

“[You] have to ask questions about the cultural framework in which you’re working … If there’s already a gender bias in the Western science framework, that’s what you’re bringing indigenous people into … You must shape the platform so you create a safer, more inclusive space so different paradigms can be in that space together,” he said.

For panelist Lorena Aguilar of IUCN, participation in FLR needs to be inclusive and built on a strong knowledge base with everyone, including indigenous women, informed and aware. “It’s not about applying a standard, like saying indigenous people need to participate. REDD is not a color, and FLR is not a powder you put in the water.”

Many of the panelists addressed this concern – that international commitments just may neglect the perspectives of communities who will then live in the midst of land others demarcate for restoration.

The CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry’s (FTA) Markus Ihalainen of CIFOR, who moderated the session, said in a later interview, “A key aspect of FLR is bringing stakeholders together to voice issues or concerns and to negotiate compromises, but not all stakeholders are equally powerful and not all voices are equally heard.”

Read also: FTA at COP23

ON THE CASE

A number of panelists drilled down to specific geographies and restoration experiences.

Jamila Idbourrous, Union des Cooperatives Féminines de l’Argan (UCFA) Director, spoke of Morocco’s forests and the practice of producing argan oil, traditionally dominated by women.

“The women of the Berber indigenous people of south Morocco have customarily supported themselves through the production of argan oil. Women’s cooperatives protect their rights and preserve their knowledge, but there is desertification now in the argan forests and that is a big challenge,” she said.

An elderly woman sits on the terrace of her home in Nalma Village, Lamjung, Nepal. Photo by M. Edliadi/CIFOR

“With argan oil, there is no frontier between protecting forests and protecting ancestral knowledge; it is important to recognize the connection is there,” she added.

Looking at gender and restoration from the policy-in-practice side, FTA’s Anne Larson of CIFOR presented the results of a series of studies of women and men’s experiences of REDD+. In the early phase of the global emissions reduction mechanism, interviews in intervention villages found that only 38 percent of women’s focus groups had heard of REDD+, in comparison to 60 percent of village focus groups, which were about 70 percent male.

More recent preliminary analysis of results three years later in phase two of the research was even starker, with 18 percent of women’s focus groups demonstrating a decline in women’s well-being relative to the first phase. In comparison, control sites showed no change over the same period. A regression analysis suggests that REDD+ is a significant factor in these differences.

Larson said, “The combination of these two sets of data suggests that the failure to address gender early on may have something to do with poor performance for women’s well-being under REDD+ initiatives, although more analysis is required. That said, it is not particularly surprising: research by IUCN and others has shown that gender is still far too rarely addressed in forest-related projects.

“One of my concerns with FLR is that its advocates are trying to move faster than REDD+, but we need to move better, not faster.”

In her presentation, Aguilar offered one example of positive gender incorporation in the Government of Malawi’s work on restoration, which was supported by IUCN, saying “Gender has been embroidered [into it], you cannot de-link it, it’s not an annex, it’s not an add-in component, it is an integral part.”

Read also: Gender and forestry gain increasing attention worldwide

INTERSECTIONS

For panelist Eva Müller of FAO, “FLR is not a simple process of putting trees into the ground … FLR is all about balance at different scales.”

Striking that balance amid the intersecting issues of gender, rights, conservation and livelihoods will help forge the path to success, if all are on board.

Anne Barre of Women Engage for a Common Future works to connect on-the-ground processes and the experiences of communities and indigenous groups to the larger discussions at COP.

In an interview after the panel, she said, “We are starting to understand how important these knowledges passed down from generation to generation are to protecting our environment, biodiversity and climate.

So for us working as observers in the UNFCC process we are trying to make the link between people who work at the local level and the different international processes, or even national processes … These knowledges not only need to be recognized and protected but also these knowledges can be used to make responsible and relevant climate adaptation or climate mitigation actions.”

Referring to the pathbreaking Forests Rights Act in India, which ensures women’s and community forestry rights, Sarin said, “You have the law now that provides the facilitative framework, but in practice how do you deal with age-old systems that are biased against women? No matter how good manuals and procedures and methodologies are, we need to ask, ‘Who is going to put this all into practice?’”

And that, as they say, is the question.

By Deanna Ramsay, originally published at CIFOR’s Forests News. 

This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.

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  • Forest restoration needs to become climate-smart

Forest restoration needs to become climate-smart

17 November, 2017

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A native tree nursery promotes restoration in Colombia. Photo by C. Alcazar Caisedo/Bioversity International
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A gaharu tree nursery in the Hutan Harapan forest, Indonesia. Photo by R. Jalonen/Bioversity International

As the world leaders gather in Bonn for the UN climate summit, a new study shows that forest restoration needs a mindset change to reach its potential in mitigating climate change.

All forest and landscape restoration projects require access to land and seed. International agreements and guidelines now broadly recognize the need to consider both the biophysical and political dimensions of land during restoration planning, from erosion control to tenure issues.

By contrast, the quality, availability of, and access to tree seed has received little attention in high-level policy and planning. And yet, restoring just a million hectares of degraded forest land – a fraction of recent unprecedented global restoration commitments – can easily require a billion seedlings.

What these seedlings are, where they come from, how they are selected, produced and delivered and by whom, are neither trivial nor merely technical issues for forest and landscape restoration to be effective and provide expected benefits, including for climate.

A new study that surveyed restoration projects from more than 50 countries shows that most projects struggle in selecting and accessing suitable tree seed for meeting their objectives. For example, half of the projects did not have any seed selection criteria to ensure that seed is viable and adequately diverse – and yet, four of five projects often could not find what they were looking for in seed markets.

Lack of genetic diversity or unsuitable origin of seed has profound impacts on restoration success, reducing seedling growth and survival, productivity, resistance to pests and diseases, and capacity to adapt to environmental change. Survey respondents described the practical implications for their projects: 47% of them had often experienced higher costs, 41% delays and 35% ended up restoring the same site again because of problems with planting material. Carbon credits quickly pick up cost.

Read more: FTA at COP23 

A native tree nursery promotes restoration in Colombia. Photo by C. Alcazar Caisedo/Bioversity International

Alarmingly, the projects that specifically aim at mitigating climate change are often the ones giving least attention to what they plant, and, therefore, at highest risk of failure.

Additional bad news for mitigation targets is that restoration practitioners often strongly prefer ‘local’ seed, typically sourced from within a few kilometers from the restoration site. They commonly assume that such seed sources are best adapted to the site conditions – a view that has little support from research, especially in light of changing climate.

Moreover, in target landscapes for restoration, remaining forests are often degraded and likely producing inbred seed with poor growth and survival. It would be prudent to expand the area within which seed is sourced, emphasizing the genetic viability of seed sources rather than arbitrary cut-off distances from the restoration site.

What can countries do to reduce the rates of failure and help make forest and landscape restoration climate-smart?

“Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes: trees typically take several years, in some cases up to decades, to start to produce seed”, says Riina Jalonen, the study’s lead author and Associate Scientist at Bioversity International. “Therefore, seed supply for tomorrow’s restoration needs really has to be planned today”.

“Countries should initiate national assessments of seed supply and demand for meeting restoration targets as a priority. If seed needs are assessed only at project level, the gaps in supply continue to go unnoticed and can’t be dealt with effectively,” Jalonen says.

Currently, growing restoration pledges worldwide are not accompanied by growing commitments to developing and protecting seed sources. That spells increasing trouble for restoration practitioners in the years ahead. Can we change the tide?

Read more: Gender Research Fellowship’s second round kicks off in Kenya

Originally published on the website of Bioversity International. 

This research is part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry and is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.

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  • Restoring forest landscapes: A question of community rights

Restoring forest landscapes: A question of community rights

09 November, 2017

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Trees dot the scenery in the Kongoussi area, Burkina Faso. Photo by O. Girard/CIFOR
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Trees dot the scenery in the Kongoussi area, Burkina Faso. Photo by O. Girard/CIFOR

What does forest landscape restoration mean for tenure, governance and communities?

About 30 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by forests, and around 1.6 billion people depend on them for significant contributions to their environments and livelihoods. Yet, 12 million hectares of intact forests are lost in the tropics every year, either through permanent destruction or degradation.

Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) is one of the newer initiatives to be put forward to help solve the problem. While its better-known cousin REDD+ aims to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation, the goal of FLR is to restore ecological integrity to deforested and degraded landscapes. Both see the link between healthy forests and human wellbeing.

Interest in FLR increased in 2011, with the launch of the Bonn Challenge, which aims to restore 150 million ha of degraded land by 2020, a figure that the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests increased to 350 million ha by 2030.

Scientists from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), including those working as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) and CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets, are looking into how FLR is working so far, and aiming to identify key challenges. Some of these are laid out in a new paper highlighting tenure, governance and equity considerations for getting FLR to work on the ground.

“The international community has committed tremendous resources to reforesting areas of extensive forest loss in the tropics. Very ambitious goals have been set, but implementation in many countries has been slow,” notes Steven Lawry, Director of CIFOR’s Equity, Gender and Tenure research program, and a coauthor of the paper.

Lawry believes this is in part due to the fact that insufficient attention has been given to questions of the strength of land and forest rights held by people living in areas intended to benefit from restoration initiatives.

“In fact, community rights are often very weak. Communities are not able to make decisions about the planning or implementation of FLR projects,” says Lawry.

IS THIS LAND MY LAND? 

The researchers found that tenure systems play a major role in shaping who benefits from forests and who benefits from restoration initiatives.

“Tenure security is vital,” says Lawry. “Communities or individuals with land and forest rights can make decisions about taking up FLR investments on terms acceptable to themselves.”

“With forest rights, they can negotiate questions about choice of tree species, forest land use in relation to other land uses, and operating principles about forest management and governance,” he adds.

The scientists found that one major obstacle to achieving this goal is that people may have rights to the land, but not to all trees on that land.

Read more: For secure land rights, indigenous forest communities need more than just titles

The native lands of the Tres Islas community are seen in Peru. Photo by CIFOR/Juan Carlos Huay llapuma

“FLR is about trying to restore ecological functionality and, generally speaking, native species tend to be better for that,” notes Rebecca McLain, CIFOR consultant and author of the paper.

“But if people don’t have rights to sustainably grow native species, the ones that are protected, then they aren’t going to grow those species in the areas they have ownership over because they aren’t their trees. So that’s a really big disincentive,” she says.

She points to Ghana, which has had some success in overcoming this challenge through a government-run revenue-sharing initiative known as Community Resource Management Area (CREMA). Under CREMA, communities are given the authority to manage resources for economic benefit, while being supported in efforts to conserve native biodiversity.

CREMA directly deals with trade-offs between conservation and development aims, and uses local knowledge to protect land and forests sustainably.

FILLING IN POLICY GAPS

Much of the forest domain in developing countries is owned by the state and managed by national and local forest agencies. Forest governance is largely based on a combination of formal and informal regulation of forest use by governments, companies, communities and other forest users.

“Rules and regulations often support important values and public policy goals, including conservation and biodiversity protection,” says Lawry.

“But when policies fail to take account of the economic and land-use goals of local users, regulations can have punitive effects, by denying or limiting opportunities for communities to derive livelihood benefits from forests, even for sustainable forest uses,” he adds.

McLain says another key issue that often came up was a “mismatch” between forest policies and agricultural policies.

“So you have a forest policy trying to support FLR and an agriculture policy which is encouraging people to clear land and plant crops. And those two end up being in conflict with each other,” says McLain.

Most people living in these forest communities are poor, so they will plant and harvest whatever provides them with the greatest income for their families. McLain says there are ways for people to make a living from the forest, but if they can make more from agriculture then they will likely clear the land for crops.

“At that point, you need to see a payments-for-ecosystem-services policy come in, where you literally pay people not to clear the forest for crops like oil palm or cassava,” she says.

DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

The researchers found that NGOs often play a major role in supporting communities that want to manage their forests.

“In Madagascar, the government claims ownership of forests, but they had a law that made it possible to create a community-managed forest,” McLain says. “An international NGO helped the community broker the contract with the forest service, and essentially they were then able to claim rights on a piece of land.”

Another solution the researchers say can work is giving long-term concessions to local communities rather than to big logging companies. Some countries are trying to do this by transferring rights to local communities, but often there is a qualifier.

“The deal is, if you want to harvest timber you need a management plan. Well, that’s not as easy as it sounds and it takes technical skills and time, so in essence, they were tying peoples’ hands,” says McLain.

Read more: Finding a way in for better landscape governance

A water porter makes his way to a gold panning area in Sindri village, Burkina Faso. Photo by O. Girard/CIFOR

Lawry agrees, adding that sophisticated management plans are needed in many contexts where communities have been given a measure of rights, not just concessions.

“The Kenyan provision for establishment of Community Forest Associations is a case in point. Communities can only use the forest once a management plan has been approved,” he says.

“On the other hand, the management plan requirement has worked well in Guatemala, in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, where plans are FSC certified. There, communities had three years to get their plans certified, and a lot of support from NGOs on the technical side,” he adds.

McLain says it is not just communities that tend to lack the capacity to develop a management plan, but governments often do not have the resources, either.

“It’s important for FLR to figure out that piece to make it work. It’s not actually tenure, but it may be part of what you need to make that tenure piece work,” she adds.

PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST

The researchers say FLR initiatives will have a greater chance of success over the long-run if they invest in helping communities secure stronger, clearer rights to forests where rights are weak.

“In some settings, rights are strong on paper, but forest agencies have not changed their regulatory practices in ways that recognize the new-found authority of communities to exercise greater control over the use and management of forests,” says Lawry.

“FLR programs can help negotiate full actualization of rights, as a condition of long-term support and investment,” he says.

McLain adds that to make FLR work, you need strong community and stakeholder engagement.

“I think if you could have real, meaningful community engagement — where the government, private sector and NGOs get together with forest users and really listen to them — then I think it can work,” says McLain.

“How you get there is the challenge,” she adds.

By Suzanna Dayne, originally published at CIFOR’s Forests News. 

For more information on this topic, please contact Steven Lawry at s.lawry@cgiar.org.

This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.

This research was supported by Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets.

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  • Key governance issues and the fate of secondary forests as a tool for large-scale forest restoration

Key governance issues and the fate of secondary forests as a tool for large-scale forest restoration

31 July, 2017

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  • Agroforestry on peatlands: combining productive and protective functions as part of restoration

Agroforestry on peatlands: combining productive and protective functions as part of restoration

16 June, 2017

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Abstract

The ASEAN countries, in particular Indonesia and Malaysia, are home to the worlds largest tropical peat stocks and have suffered the brunt of the conversion from natural forest cover to “fastwood” (trees grown for pulp and paper), oil-palm plantations and other agricultural use. In order to control the use of fire and to avoid the deep drainage that is responsible for degradation, government commitments need to go beyond good intentions alone. Land-use solutions are needed that provide local livelihoods while keeping the peat profiles wet. Fortunately, certain forms of agroforest offer solutions and can be promoted more widely.

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  • China's fight to halt tree cover loss

China’s fight to halt tree cover loss

05 May, 2017

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Authors: Antje Ahrends, Peter M. Hollingsworth, Philip Beckschäfer, Huafang Chen, Robert J. Zomer, Lubiao Zhang, Mingcheng Wang, Jianchu Xu

Abstract

China is investing immense resources for planting trees, totalling more than US$ 100 billion in the past decade alone. Every year, China reports more afforestation than the rest of the world combined. Here, we show that China’s forest cover gains are highly definition-dependent. If the definition of ‘forest’ follows FAO criteria (including immature and temporarily unstocked areas), China has gained 434 000 km2 between 2000 and 2010. However, remotely detectable gains of vegetation that non-specialists would view as forest (tree cover higher than 5 m and minimum 50% crown cover) are an order of magnitude less (33 000 km2). Using high-resolution maps and environmental modelling, we estimate that approximately 50% of the world’s forest with minimum 50% crown cover has been lost in the past approximately 10 000 years. China historically lost 1.9–2.7 million km2 (59–67%), and substantial losses continue. At the same time, most of China’s afforestation investment targets environments that our model classes as unsuitable for trees. Here, gains detectable via satellite imagery are limited. Conversely, the regions where modest gains are detected are environmentally suitable but have received little afforestation investment due to conflicting land-use demands for agriculture and urbanization. This highlights the need for refined forest monitoring, and greater consideration of environmental suitability in afforestation programmes.

Published at Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Publication year: 2017

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  • Success from the Ground Up? Participatory Monitoring in Forest Restoration

Success from the Ground Up? Participatory Monitoring in Forest Restoration

25 January, 2017

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  • Strengths and limitations of participatory forest management and area enclosure: two major state-led forest landscape rehabilitation initiatives in Ethiopia

Strengths and limitations of participatory forest management and area enclosure: two major state-led forest landscape rehabilitation initiatives in Ethiopia

19 January, 2017

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Presentation by Habte Mariam Kassa, Senior Scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), at the IUFRO Regional Congress for Asia and Oceania, October 2016, in Bejing, China

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  • How do property rights regimes provide incentives for Forest Landscape Restoration? Evidence from Nepal, China and Ethiopia

How do property rights regimes provide incentives for Forest Landscape Restoration? Evidence from Nepal, China and Ethiopia


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Presentation by Peter Cronkleton, Senior Scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), at IUFRO Regional Congress for Asia and Oceania, October 2016, in Bejing, China.

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  • Avoiding failure in forest restoration: the importance of genetically diverse and site-matched germplasm

Avoiding failure in forest restoration: the importance of genetically diverse and site-matched germplasm

03 February, 2016

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  • Restoring forests: What constitutes success in the twenty-first century?

Restoring forests: What constitutes success in the twenty-first century?

27 November, 2015

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New Forests, 

Article co-authored by ICRAF scientist John C. Weber

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