Climate Archives - Resilient Landscapes (RL)

Shifting Knowledge and Attitudes on Gender related to Forest and Landscape Restoration – A couple’s perspective. Insights from married couples in Makueni County, Kenya

This brief presents the results of a small study that sought to reveal some of the change dynamics resulting from the participation of couples from the Mbooni Community Forest Association (CFA) in a two-day training, Breaking Ground: Community Dialogues on Gender and Restoration.
This training was delivered under the UK Partnering for Accelerated Climate Transitions (UK PACT) funded project, “Delivering nature-based solution outcomes by addressing policy, institutional and monitoring gaps in forest and landscape restoration”, led by CIFOR-ICRAF in partnership with African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), FAO-Kenya, and the County Government of Makueni, Kenya. The project is a unique capacity-building programme jointly governed and funded by the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) through the UK’s International Climate Finance. It works in partnership with countries with high emissions reduction potential to support them in implementing and increasing their ambitions for tackling climate change.

Toward a global monitoring framework of soil and rangeland health: Building on 20 years of the LDSF

Rangelands are among the most extensive land use systems globally, supporting the livelihoods of billions of people, sustaining pastoral economies, conserving biodiversity and providing critical ecosystem services. Despite their importance, they remain among the least consistently monitored ecosystems. This lack of standardized, high-quality data constrains the ability to assess degradation, evaluate restoration efforts and report progress toward national and global targets. We conducted a review of existing rangeland monitoring frameworks, standards, and remote sensing platforms to understand the methodologies used and indicators measured. Results highlight significant fragmentation and inconsistency in current approaches, underscoring the urgent need for standardized monitoring systems that can capture the complexity and variability of rangeland ecosystems. The Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF) was developed in response to the need for systematic assessments of soil health, land degradation and vegetation diversity within and across landscapes, including in rangelands. In this article, we present the LDSF as a well-established, scalable approach for monitoring soil and land health, underpinning a globally harmonized rangeland monitoring system. Over the last two decades, the LDSF has been implemented in over 40 countries in the tropics and subtropics and has become an important database of georeferenced indicators of ecosystem health. In this article, we: (i) report findings from a systematic review of existing rangeland monitoring frameworks, standards, and remote sensing platforms; (ii) synthesize the LDSF’s geospatially stratified, hierarchical sampling design and core indicator framework; and (iii) demonstrate how LDSF field data and Earth Observation are combined to generate spatially explicit, statistically robust maps of soil and land health, including in African rangelands.

Field and laboratory manual for unsupported 210Pb analyses

This manual provides a general conceptual framework for collecting and analyzing radionuclides related to the ²¹⁰Pb dating method in mangrove ecosystems. The ²¹⁰Pb radionuclide dating method applies alpha and/or gamma spectrometry. This guide outlines procedures for field sample collection, laboratory analyses and data analyses relating to these approaches.

Field and laboratory manual for unsupported 210Pb analyses

Building climate-resilient value chains in arid and semi-arid regions: a VC-ARID approach for rangeland adaptation in Kenya

Climate change has adversely impacted nature-based value chains in the arid and semi-arid regions. The study investigates the impact of climate change on nature-based value chains in arid and semi-arid environments. With an emphasis on rangeland adaptation in Kenya, the study used the VC-ARID (Value Chains for Arid and Semi-Arid Regions) approach, designed to build climate-resilient value chains in arid and semi-arid regions. The findings reveal that climate change poses significant risks to nature-based value chains, including reduced water availability, increased temperature variability, and changes in precipitation patterns. The study identifies several challenges to value chain development, such as limited access to climate information, financial resources, and supportive policies. It underscores the urgent need to integrate climate resilience into value chain interventions to achieve poverty reduction and food security goals in arid and semi-arid regions. This calls for active collaboration and investment in climate information services, research, and extension services to enhance the adaptive capacity of value chain actors and promote sustainable development in vulnerable regions. Given that climate hazards and changes are context-specific, strategies for improving value chains’ sustainability must be customized to the unique ecological and socioeconomic setting in which the nature-based value chain operates. Consequently, to build value chains that are climate resilient, each actor along the chain must assess climate risks and manage the activities that make up the value chain adaptively.

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