Conflicts of interest between forest conservation and livelihoods of swidden communities in Vietnam have been widely recognized by policy makers and scholars. However, policies and solutions to date have been based on a limited understanding of land use decisions and factors influencing these changes and strategies. This study addresses this gap by analyzing factors affecting farmers’ land use decision-making in three swidden communities in Nghe An and Son La provinces, Vietnam. Our findings show that swidden communities’ land use strategies were built on the cultural, social and economic statuses of households in response to government policies on the restriction of swidden farming, promotion of industrial forest plantations, and changes in environmental and market conditions. Our findings suggest that future policy interventions are unlikely to overcome existing conflicts between conservation and development without considering macro policies, continuous environmental and social changes, and diverse household characteristics and interests.
Tag: conservation
A guide to wildlife friendly tourism by the members of Visit Rupununi
The Sustainable Wildlife Management (SWM) Programme in Guyana is encouraging coordinated community-driven initiatives that support food security and traditional livelihoods. These will contribute to maintaining healthy fish and terrestrial wildlife populations. It is being implemented by the Guyana Wildlife Conservation and Management Commission in coordination with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).
The SWM Programme is the first international initiative to tackle the wild meat challenge by addressing both wildlife conservation and food security. Between 2018 and 2024, the SWM Programme implements field projects across three continents. The aim is to improve how wildlife hunting is regulated; increase the supply of sustainably produced meat products and farmed fish; strengthen the management capacities of indigenous and rural communities; reduce demand for wild meat, particularly in towns and cities.
The SWM Programme is an Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States initiative, which is being funded by the European Union with co-funding from the French Global Environment Facility. The SWM Programme is being implemented by a dynamic consortium of partners which includes FAO, the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD), CIFOR and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
Rights-based approaches and Indigenous peoples and local communities: Findings from a literature review
This preliminary assessment of rights-based approaches (RBAs) seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussions of RBAs for Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs). RBAs purposefully position the recognition of, respect for, and access to individual and collective rights as central to an initiative’s planning, design, implementation, process monitoring, and outcomes. In mainstream climate change, conservation, and development programs and policies, this means refocusing the relationship between “beneficiaries” and “implementers” to one of rights-holders and duty-bearers. RBAs hold growing discursive importance in relation to the rights of IPs and LCs in conservation and climate change spheres, including the agendas of international agencies. The growing interest in RBAs, and their inclusion in frameworks that will guide development, conservation, and climate projects over the next decade, is laudable. However, there are few reviews that seek to understand how RBAs emerged and how they have been conceptualized. Such analysis is a necessary basis from which to advance discussions on the impact of RBAs and provide lessons to support them. In this review, our primary interest is the conception, conceptualization, and implementation of RBAs in forest-based initiatives, but we reviewed the wider scholarly and gray literature on RBAs in development, conservation, and climate action initiatives.
Integrating local and scientific knowledge: The need for decolonising knowledge for conservation and natural resource management
Integrating Indigenous and local knowledge in conservation and natural resource management (NRM) initiatives is necessary to achieve sustainability, equity, and responsiveness to local realities and needs. Knowledge integration is the starting point for converging different knowledge systems and enabling knowledge co-production. This process is also a key prerequisite towards decolonising the research process. However, power imbalances may perpetuate dominant forms of knowledge over others, obstruct knowledge integration, and eventually cause the loss of knowledge of the marginal and less powerful knowledge holders. Despite increasing interest in knowledge integration for conservation, NRM, and landscape governance, documentation of integration processes remains fragmented and somewhat scarce. This semisystematic literature review contributes to filling this gap by synthesising methods, procedures, opportunities, and challenges regarding integrating and decolonising knowledge for conservation and NRM in Southern Africa. The findings demonstrate that despite an increasing number of studies seeking to integrate Indigenous and local knowledge and scientific knowledge relevant to conservation and NRM, methods, procedures, and opportunities are poorly and vaguely documented, and challenges and colonial legacies are often overlooked. Documentation, valuing Indigenous and local knowledge, addressing power relations, and collaboration across knowledge systems are missing steps towards efficient knowledge integration. The paper concludes that there is a need for further research and relevant policies. These should address methods and implications for equitable knowledge integration processes and move beyond knowledge sharing and mutual learning towards decolonising knowledge for conservation and NRM.
State of ex situ conservation of landrace groups of 25 major crops
Crop landraces have unique local agroecological and societal functions and offer important genetic resources for plant breeding. Recognition of the value of landrace diversity and concern about its erosion on farms have led to sustained efforts to establish ex situ collections worldwide. The degree to which these efforts have succeeded in conserving landraces has not been comprehensively assessed. Here we modelled the potential distributions of eco-geographically distinguishable groups of landraces of 25 cereal, pulse and starchy root/tuber/fruit crops within their geographic regions of diversity. We then analysed the extent to which these landrace groups are represented in genebank collections, using geographic and ecological coverage metrics as a proxy for genetic diversity. We find that ex situ conservation of landrace groups is currently moderately comprehensive on average, with substantial variation among crops; a mean of 63% ± 12.6% of distributions is currently represented in genebanks. Breadfruit, bananas and plantains, lentils, common beans, chickpeas, barley and bread wheat landrace groups are among the most fully represented, whereas the largest conservation gaps persist for pearl millet, yams, finger millet, groundnut, potatoes and peas. Geographic regions prioritized for further collection of landrace groups for ex situ conservation include South Asia, the Mediterranean and West Asia, Mesoamerica, sub-Saharan Africa, the Andean mountains of South America and Central to East Asia. With further progress to fill these gaps, a high degree of representation of landrace group diversity in genebanks is feasible globally, thus fulfilling international targets for their ex situ conservation.
PATSPO Newsletter April 2022
FTA Highlight No.3 – Conservation of Tree Biodiversity and Sustainable Forest Management
Forests and trees are critical for the survival of life on earth. They conserve a tremendous biodiversity and fulfill essential ecosystem services such as climate regulation, cycling of nutrients and water. They contribute to food and nutrition security, are a major source of raw materials and offer countless livelihood opportunities. However, forests and trees are increasingly threatened by anthropogenic pressures such as overexploitation and land conversion, which are intensified by climate change. At the same time countless tree species and their forest genetic resources (FGR) with exceptional potential uses for supporting the global transition to low carbon food systems and the UN decade on Ecological Restoration are badly conserved and remain critically underutilized. For the last 10 years, the FTA program has set in place research activities that focused on understanding pressures on and threats to populations of socio-economically important tree species; formulating effective, efficient and equitable safeguards for tree genetic resources that are adapted to the local context and species characteristics; and promoting conservation and characterization of germplasm of high-value tree species from forests to farms. FTA has also conducted a range of ecosystem- and landscape-level research projects that explored how silvicultural and monitoring practices can support sustainable timber production while ensuring delivery of multiple ecosystem services, including biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, livelihood support and nutrition security from forest foods. Much of the program’s later work focused on multiple-use forest management. This review of the program’s most salient experiences — derived from a decade of collaborative research — presents a portfolio of the most promising solutions and the significant contributions that FTA has provided to global conservation and sustainable use of tree biodiversity. These achievements also contribute to the international policy arena, particularly to the strategic objectives of various conventions (the Convention on Biological Diversity, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification), and to the efforts led by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to develop a global conservation strategy for forest genetic resources.
Batch-produced, GIS-informed range maps for birds based on provenanced, crowdsourced data inform conservation assessments
Accurate maps of species ranges are essential to inform conservation, but time-consuming to produce and update. Given the pace of change of knowledge about species distributions and shifts in ranges under climate change and land use, a need exists for timely mapping approaches that enable batch processing employing widely available data. We develop a systematic approach of batch-processing range maps and derived Area of Habitat maps for terrestrial bird species with published ranges below 125,000 km2 in Central and South America. (Area of Habitat is the habitat available to a species within its range.) We combine existing range maps with the rapidly expanding crowd-sourced eBird data of presences and absences from frequently surveyed locations, plus readily accessible, high resolution satellite data on forest cover and elevation to map the Area of Habitat available to each species. Users can interrogate the maps produced to see details of the observations that contributed to the ranges. Previous estimates of Areas of Habitat were constrained within the published ranges and thus were, by definition, smaller-typically about 30%. This reflects how little habitat within suitable elevation ranges exists within the published ranges. Our results show that on average, Areas of Habitat are 12% larger than published ranges, reflecting the oftenconsiderable extent that eBird records expand the known distributions of species. Interestingly, there are substantial differences between threatened and non-threatened species. Some 40% of Critically Endangered, 43% of Endangered, and 55% of Vulnerable species have Areas of Habitat larger than their published ranges, compared with 31% for Near Threatened and Least Concern species. The important finding for conservation is that threatened species are generally more widespread than previously estimated. © 2021 Huang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Sensing, feeling, thinking: Relating to nature with the body, heart and mind
The cultural ecosystem services (CES) construct has evolved to accommodate multiple worldviews, knowledge systems and conceptualizations of nature and values, including relational and mental health values. Cultural ecosystem services research and practice has mostly focused on cognitive ways of constructing and expressing intangible values of, and relationships with, nature. But our non-material relationships with nature are not exclusively cognitive: sensory and affective processes are fundamental to how we build, enact and experience these relationships. Building on the core ideas of relational values, embodied experiences and connectedness with nature, we present a simple framework to explore the sensory, affective and cognitive dimensions of human–nature interactions, as well as the settings and activities that frame them. We demonstrate its use in a case study in the Peruvian Andes, where we applied an inductive, exploratory approach to elicit personal imageries and imaginings related to nature, place and recreation. The narratives shared were rich with symbolism and personal sensory experiences, emotions and memories, which the interviewees linked with general assertions about people, place and nature. We discuss the usefulness of such a perspective for CES research, and for human well-being, environmental justice and landscape management.
Community forestry in Cameroon: opportunity or constraint for REDD+?
This study aims to identify opportunities and constraints of community forestry in the context of forest decentralization in Cameroon and what can be capitalized on for sound REDD+ design and implementation. A qualitative approach to data collection was used through content analysis of 1994 forestry law, reports and publications related to decentralized forest management, community forestry and REDD+ in Cameroon. Principles that govern community forest and REDD+ were highlighted and opportunities and constraints of community forestry for REDD+ projects were discussed. Community forestry was developed principally to protect forests in order to support the subsistence and income-generating extractive activities of forest-dependent communities. Community forestry governance arrangements were not designed with the objective of achieving verifiable emissions reductions or carbon stock values. Hence, existing community forestry institutions may not address all the specific demands of REDD+ programs. However, existing community institutions and practices can be strengthened or modified to align better with climate change mitigation goals and to achieve REDD+ objectives in community forestry sites. On the other hand, REDD+ was developed principally to mitigate climate change by reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation principally within developing countries where the livelihoods of forest-dependent people are a central component of all forest management policies. However, despite fundamental differences between community forestry and REDD+, there is substantial synergy between their objectives, and the dual forest conservation and livelihood development focus of both programs means that policies that strengthen and support existing community forestry institutions and sites will advance REDD+ objectives. As such, REDD+ will likely to be more successful if it builds on lessons learned from community forestry. This paper demonstrates how REDD+ is more likely to succeed if it builds on the lessons learned from community forestry over the past 20-plus years in Cameroon. It also discusses how REDD+ can benefit from community forestry and how some of the many challenges related to community forestry can be directly addressed by the REDD+ mechanism. Further, this paper also argues how the congruence between community forestry and REDD+ can effectively facilitate the direct use of community forestry as a tool to achieve REDD+ goals.