Forest restoration is a key strategy in tropical regions for mitigating global warming and improving local livelihoods, yet despite significant international donor investments, its effectiveness in Central Africa remains poorly documented. This study systematically reviewed forest restoration initiatives involving local communities, analyzing 64 publications covering 26 projects, most of which applied agroforestry techniques and relied on exotic species. These efforts were predominantly implemented in the Democratic Republic of Congo (12 initiatives), Cameroon (11), Cameroon & Gabon (1), Rwanda (1), and the Central African Republic (1). Findings reveal that most restoration projects followed pre-established technical approaches without sufficient engagement with local communities, lacked monitoring and data-sharing mechanisms, and rarely incorporated prior consent, land arrangements, or benefit-sharing components. To enhance sustainability, this study recommends fostering genuine partnerships with local people, even if it requires adjusting project objectives, and establishing robust monitoring systems to improve future restoration initiatives. These insights are crucial for guiding donors and policymakers toward more effective, community-centered approaches that ensure long-term success in forest restoration efforts across Central Africa.
Tag: governance
Value chain analysis of furniture: action research to improve power balance and enhance livelihoods of small-scale producers
Value chain analysis (VCA) has emerged since the 1990s as a novel approach for understanding how power, benefits and costs are embodied and distributed to various actors. The Indonesian furniture industry demonstrates a long chain of production to consumption, from raw material producers (tree growers), semi-finished producers, finished product producers, and retailers to exporters. Each actor is connected by intermediaries. Indonesian furniture, dominated by teak, contributed 2% of the global wood furniture trade (valued US$ 85 billion in 2007). Indonesian forest includes more than 35% of the world’s teak forests. The furniture industry provides employment and livelihoods to millions of people. This paper describes the value added distribution to all furniture actors, actions to strengthen small-scale producers, and global comparisons with other forest product value chains. The furniture value chain connects producers from Jepara District, the center of Indonesian furniture with annual exports of US$ 150 million, with furniture retailers in Europe, the USA, Australia and Japan. The problem is power imbalance throughout the value chain and unhealthy competition among producers, which result in poverty of small-scale producers, product quality degradation and an unsustainable furniture industry. The adaptation of small-scale producers to market demand is low. They are price takers rather than the price setters, as indicated by their decreasing bargaining power. We used VCA to hypothesize governance and institutional arrangement scenarios for more equitable power and income to sustain both the forest and the furniture industry. Following the VCA analysis, action research is being conducted. Researchers and furniture stakeholders have jointly developed plans and actions to strengthen the industry structure, improve value addition and improve livelihoods. To ensure local and national impacts, we have collaborated with the Jepara Furniture Multi-stakeholder Forum, the Jepara local government, the Forestry Research and Development Agency (FORDA) of the Indonesia Ministry of Forestry, and Bogor Agricultural University. At international level, we are comparing this study with lesson learned from value chains of bamboo in China, honey bee in Zambia, potential for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) credit in Indonesia, and palm heart/ palmito in Brazil.
Transparent monitoring in practice: A guide to effective monitoring in the land sector. Book II – Case studies of transparent monitoring approaches
Land management plays a crucial role in addressing climate change, which makes transparent monitoring essential. Countries have considerable flexibility in setting targets, defining the scope of the land sector, and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and removals from it. They are, however, required to do this in a manner that promotes transparency and provides sufficient accuracy, completeness, comparability, and consistency.
The Transparent Monitoring project identified a set of criteria designed to overcome such challenges that are introduced by Book I. This Book II presents a collection of case studies demonstrating successful implementation of transparent monitoring approaches, based on experiences in Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, and Peru. These cases address specific needs identified by the countries, ranging from technical work on emission factors for forest conversion to palm oil plantations, via mapping of deforestation drivers based on remote sensing, improving communication of cacao mapping for different stakeholders, to making use of community-based monitoring information for forest restoration and deforestation alerts.
The case studies show that transparent monitoring approaches are not merely a technical requirement but a powerful enabler of meaningful climate action. By addressing existing challenges and building on the successes outlined in this report, countries can establish monitoring systems that drive transformative change. The path forward requires commitment, collaboration, and innovation, but the outcome will be more effective land sector policies, with benefits including enhanced resilience and contributing to containing climate change.
Building partnerships to support people-centred land governance: A toolkit to foster collaboration between Government and Civil Society Organisations
This toolkit was designed as an evidence-based guide to support actors in forming partnerships that are context-specific, genuinely inclusive, and capable of expanding their impact over time. It is based on a review of the literature and research with multi-stakeholder partnerships involving government agencies and CSOs in the global south, as well as practices and tools of both CIFOR/ICRAF and ILC. The purpose is to provide a comprehensive framework for designing, implementing, and evaluating effective partnerships in land governance.
Transparent monitoring in practice: A guide to effective monitoring in the land sector. Book I – Background for understanding transparent monitoring approaches
Land management plays a crucial role in addressing climate change, which makes transparent monitoring essential. Countries have considerable flexibility in setting targets, defining the scope of the land sector, and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and removals from it. They are, however, required to do this in a manner that promotes transparency and provides sufficient accuracy, completeness, comparability, and consistency.
An unprecedent amount of data is currently generated globally. It is available for assessing how land use and land management change over time and what the implications for greenhouse gas emissions and removals are. This data richness can serve as a solid foundation for generating high-quality products and services for tracking carbon stock changes. However, this large amount of information is also leading to confusion, with competing definitions and misinterpretation.
The Transparent Monitoring project identified a set of criteria designed to overcome such challenges and strengthen the effectiveness of monitoring greenhouse gas emissions from the land sector. These criteria are introduced in this Book I. Transparent monitoring approaches refer to datasets, tools, and portals that support countries’ needs in the land sector, by providing complementary data to what is mandated by their own monitoring systems.
By taking advantage of transparent monitoring approaches, countries can increase their capacities for monitoring and reporting GHG emissions and removals from the land sector and advance in the implementation of the Paris Agreement’s Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF). Book II includes a collection of case studies demonstrating successful implementation of transparent monitoring approaches.
Are countries delivering on transparency? Key takeaways from the first Biennial Transparency Reports to the UNFCCC
Key messages
- The Paris Agreement requires Parties to submit Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs) on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals. The first set of these reports was due by December 2024, however, as of February 2025, only 105 Parties had made their submissions—78 when counting the 27 countries of the European Union as a single Party—, while 90 submissions remained pending. Early submission was strongly correlated with country income level.
- This review applies a tailored screening and scoring framework to assess transparency in these first BTRs, focusing on two main dimensions – data and governance. The accuracy of data reporting was generally high– yet information on the Governance dimension in the reports remained limited referring to transparency, consistency, and comparability.
- To improve transparency in future BTRs, recommendations for data reporting include enhancing the quality of input data; adopting more advanced estimation methods and uncertainty analysis; improving inventory completeness across time series, emission categories and gases; and reducing the developing countries’ reliance on flexibility allowances in the reporting.
- Similarly, future governance reporting can be strengthened through standardized structured questionnaires or detailed checklists; better integration of institutional and stakeholder information; and greater recognition of non-state actor contributions.
- These improvements will require increased international cooperation, financial and technical support, and sustained capacity-building, particularly for developing country Parties.
Toward Resilient Rivers: Insights from the Kafue, Magdalena and Atrato River Basins in Zambia and Colombia
Key messages
- Forests and fisheries are interconnected, and both are impacted by changes in land use within watersheds.
- Watershed functions are affected by climate, land-use change, overfishing, deforestation and forest degradation.
- Riparian communities value watersheds but lack political structures for effective integrated management.
- Community-based governance of natural resources within watersheds can protect ecosystem services and support livelihoods of riparian communities.
- Even where there is little data now, actions can be taken to enhance monitoring and management of watersheds.
Experimental insights on the investment behavior of small-scale coffee farmers in central Uganda under risk and uncertainty
In this study, we investigate the investment behavior of small-scale coffee farmers in central Uganda in an experimental setting. We consider a situation in which farmers are asked to make an investment under uncertainty and analyze whether and to what extent the Real Options Approach can predict the investment behavior of farmers and whether these predictions are better than those derived from the Net Present Value Approach. We also investigate whether the presence of a price floor has an effect on farmers’ investment behavior. Our results suggest that the Real Options Approach more accurately predicts the decision-making behavior of farmers than the Net Present Value Approach. However, the results also show that neither of the approaches entirely explains the observed investment behavior. Specifically, the presence of a price floor does not significantly affect the investment behavior. The latter is, however, significantly determined by the order in which treatments with and without price floor are introduced, alongside various demographic and socio-economic characteristics.