Planted forests provide a range of ecosystem services, from the local to global scales. In this study, we evaluated the perceptions by local people of the ecosystem services from planted forest stands in Bhutan. We employed household questionnaires, interviews and focus group discussions in eight villages in two regions of Bhutan: Trashigang dzongkhag, in eastern Bhutan, and Punakha dzongkhag in western Bhutan. At all sites, the planted forests were created several decades ago to restore forest cover in deforested and degraded areas. The restored stands were perceived by residents to provide multiple goods and ecosystem services important to local security, health, and livelihoods, including wild edibles, freshwater, and soil protection, and aesthetic and cultural services. This study indicates that local community participation in forest resource management can ease user conflict and manage the planted forests sustainably. We see community-based forest restoration on degraded lands as a viable approach, among others, to achieve national commitments to the Bonn Challenge and other multilateral environmental agreements related to forests.
Tag: community forestry
Land use change in four landscapes in the Peruvian Amazon
This working paper uses remote sensing data and methods to characterize land cover change in four sites in the lowland Peruvian Amazon over a period of three decades (1987-2017). Multi-village landscapes were purposefully selected to include road accessible sites and others only accessible by river. Landscape analysis focused on buffers around the selected villages used to approximate the areas of influence of farmers in these communities. Deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon has been commonly attributed to agriculture expansion by smallholders. This belief falls short in acknowledging that the contribution of smallholder deforestation is mediated by others decisions around infrastructure development. In this analysis, road connected landscapes experienced greater loss of closed-canopy forest while closed canopy forest remained mostly stable in the river sites over the thirty year study period. Results indicated that closed canopy forest loss occurred in parallel with agricultural expansion at the road sites. The findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of local land use dynamics and the role of regional infrastructure development as a driver of forest loss.
Non-Wood Forest Products for Improved Nutrition, Livelihoods and Biodiversity
Illipe nut as the ‘glue’ for integrated watershed management: Experiences from the Labian-Leboyan watershed
Main points
- Though stakeholders are already aware of the importance of sustainable non-timber forest product (NTFP) management and integrated watershed management, they have yet to fully appreciate or implement them.
- Experiences from community facilitation show that management of one type of traditional NTFP – tengkawang (illipe nut) – from its upstream cultivation to downstream marketing could become an entry point for integrated landscape management in the Labian-Leboyan watershed.
- Lessons learned from activities in several Iban Dayak communities show that external facilitation from outside the villages is important as it can accelerate collaboration processes between village communities and external stakeholders; and help in establishing local strategies that integrate modern knowledge with customary rules.
Annual Report. September 2019 – August 2020. Regreening Africa Reversing Land Degradation in Africa by Scaling-up Evergreen Agriculture
This narrative report covers year four of the Reversing Land Degradation by Scalingup Evergreen Agriculture (Regreening Africa) project funded by the European Union (EU) from September 2017 to September 2022.
Regreening Africa: Consolidated Baseline Survey Report
The United Nations General Assembly declared 2021 to 2030 as the decade of ‘ecosystem restoration’, signalling a global consensus on the urgency to restore degraded lands. Restoring degraded lands is critical to regain lost ecological functionality that underpins life-sustaining ecosystem services, such as the provision of food, fresh water, and fibre, and the regulation of climate, natural disasters, and pests. Indeed, restoration is fundamental for meeting the triple goals of tackling the climate crisis, reversing biodiversity loss, and improving human wellbeing. Regreening Africa (2017 to 2022) is part of a larger global and regional effort to reverse and halt land degradation, which is being implemented in eight African countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, and Somalia.
Using local capacity to assess carbon stocks in two community forest in South-East Cameroon
Quantification of forest biomass is a challenge for developing countries due to insufficient data and lack of expertise. Involving villagers in this work, especially in the case of local forests could improve the speed and efficiency of this quantification process. This article describes the participatory approach implemented to assess carbon stocks in two community forests located in south-eastern Cameroon. This was put into practice for forest inventory work and the estimation of biomass and carbon stocks. The aim was to use classic scientific approaches of inventory and cartography, but involving local populations in the different stages of the process. The involvement of local populations, through the mobilization of their indigenous knowledge, significantly increases data quality and considerably reduces the costs and duration of the evaluation process. Ultimately, only 2% of the trees inventoried were “unknown” by local botanists, 92.3% of the species identified by them had accurate scientific correspondences. Help of local actors contributed to halving the time required to set up the plots and reduced the cost of operations by twenty times compared with using experts. REDD +, at least its local level monitoring dimension, could be successful if implemented in a dialectic involving expert scientists and local populations.
Learning to learn in tropical forests: Training Field Teams in Adaptive Collaborative Management, Monitoring and Gender
From 2011-2015, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) trained field teams in Nicaragua in Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM) methods. ACM is a social learning-based approach to help forest communities manage their natural resources in a more equitable and sustainable way and respond to change. This paper presents the lessons-learned from the training and field work. It argues that understanding and building social learning processes among the ACM team members and facilitators are crucial components of the ACM methodology and necessary in order to recognize and address the complex nature of socio-ecological relationships. In particular, promoting women’s participation in forest decision-making in their own rural communities requires not only a consideration of gender relations but also of the gender perspectives of each member of the field team.
Aiming for sustainability and scalability: Community engagement in forest payment schemes
Community-based forest monitoring is seen as a way both to improve community engagement and participation in national environmental payment schemes and climate mitigation priorities and to implement reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and foster conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries (REDD+). There is a strong assumption among community-based monitoring advocates that community monitoring is a desirable approach. However, it is unclear why community members would want to participate in their own surveillance or be involved in a program likely to limit livelihood uses of forest areas and possibly even sanction them based on the data provided. This paper explores these issues by examining three communities involved in Peru’s Conditional Direct Transfer Program, in which indigenous communities are compensated for protecting communal forests through various mechanisms, including forest monitoring. The case studies focus specifically on communities that received smartphones and were trained in their use for monitoring. The results affirm the importance that benefits outweigh the costs of local participation to sustain motivation. They also point to key factors supporting the legitimacy of the program, specifically to overcome historical tensions between the state and indigenous communities. These include the nature of engagement by program implementers and the importance of building trust over time.
Indigenous tenure security and local participation in climate mitigation programs: Exploring the institutional gaps of REDD+ implementation in the Peruvian Amazon
The Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism faces implementation challenges related to tenure security and governance institutions. In response, multiple regional climate mitigation initiatives have emerged. In Peru, indigenous networks have created their own Indigenous Amazonian REDD (RIA), an initiative aiming to strengthen property rights for native peoples. At roughly the same time, the Peruvian government launched the National Forest Conservation Program (PNCB), a conditional payment scheme aiming to encourage sustainable forest management. However, these initiatives must still overcome fragmented institutional governance of forests at the regional scale and continued challenges related to indigenous tenure security. This article examines how indigenous federations and the Peruvian government are attempting to implement these initiatives in the Amazonian region of Madre de Dios to examine how challenges play out in practice. These cases illustrate the institutional gaps between national policies, regional capacities, and local needs and expectations. However, it also demonstrates how an innovative institutional partnership at the subnational scale may be overcoming some of these challenges.