This brief presents the gender transformative approach taken by the UK PACT funded project, ‘Promoting nature-based solutions for land restoration while strengthening the national monitoring in Kenya’ in Laikipia County, providing an overview of the training and lessons learned. It is aimed at restoration practitioners and initiatives invested in gender transformation, to assist in enhancing knowledge and sharing lessons on gender transformative approaches to land restoration.
Tag: knowledge sharing
Tailoring Andhra Pradesh Community Natural Farming (APCNF) for Wider Adoption: Addressing Challenges with Evidence Based Policy
The Andhra Pradesh Community Natural Farming (APCNF) program shows promise in promoting sustainable agriculture, but uneven adoption across districts requires tailored interventions. While some districts like Ananthapuramu demonstrate progress with some methods, they struggle with input access. Others, like West Godavari, remain reliant on chemical-based practices. Socioeconomic factors like limited land resources, knowledge gaps, and insecure land tenure further hinder progress, particularly for marginalized groups. To address these challenges, district-specific strategies are crucial. Ananthapuramu requires local input resource centers and wider training on input preparation and application. Alluri Sitharama Raju (ASR) needs workshops promoting core APCNF practices and farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing. West Godavari will benefit from research trials and technical support for complete system adoption. Additionally, inclusive capacity building, targeted policies for female farmers, cost-benefit analysis with financial support, and dedicated market channels are crucial for wider adoption. Equipping farmers with drought mitigation strategies can further enhance climate resilience. By implementing evidence-based policies, APCNF can be strengthened, empowering farmers and ensuring a more sustainable agricultural future for Andhra Pradesh.
ID-RECCO – the international database on REDD+ projects and programmes: Unlocking REDD+ project knowledge for informed environmental action
Key messages
- Access to standardized, unbiased information on REDD+ projects is essential to assess project impacts, analyse trends, develop and scale up initiatives, and evaluate investment opportunities. This fosters informed decisions, transparency and collaboration in sustainable forest management and climate action.
- Scientists working in CIFOR-ICRAF’s Global Comparative Study on REDD+ have created a publicly accessible database of REDD+ initiatives (ID-RECCO) that offers comprehensive, in-depth information on these projects, while also putting in place checks to ensure data reliability and transparency.
- Stakeholders in the forest carbon sector have identified ID-RECCO as an essential tool for their work, indicating that its many core strengths – comprehensiveness, independence, neutrality and focus on data quality – offer unique value compared to other publicly available resources.
- Beyond aggregating information, ID-RECCO has been instrumental in advancing knowledge-sharing, with a team of CIFOR-ICRAF scientists disseminating insights on REDD+ projects through workshops and seminars, supporting users in deploying data for their research, and offering training.
- Institutionalizing ID-RECCO is crucial to maintain and enhance the impact of REDD+. This tool has successfully supported evidence-based decision-making, as indicated by stakeholder feedback. Ensuring its continuity is therefore essential to strengthen environmental accountability measures, optimize future REDD+ strategies, and enhance their long-term sustainability. This is vital for achieving international climate objectives, promoting sustainable forest management practices, and ensuring equitable livelihood improvements for local communities and Indigenous Peoples.
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.
Shifting Knowledge and Attitudes on Gender related to Forest and Landscape Restoration: Insights from Makueni County, Kenya
This brief presents the results of a small study that sought to reveal some of the change dynamics resulting from Mbooni Community Forest Association (CFA) members’ participation 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.