This month:
On Deforestation and the industry:
- How many million hectares are deforested every year? In his insightful “One number to rule them all” blog post, Peter Holmgren, the former head of CIFOR, dives into the numbers and the frequent confusion around them.
- As covered in Mongabay.com, a recent study found that tropical deforestation is getting bigger, mainly due to an increase in large clearings driven by industrial agriculture in Southeast Asia and South America.
- The Tropical Forest Alliance, a partnership of over 100 governments, companies, NGOs, experts and indigenous groups, provided a 10-Point Plan to improve supply chains that rely on tropical forests and stop deforestation.
- The cocoa industry is one of the many industry sectors trying to change their role in deforestation and in advancing better solutions. At the last UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn (COP23), world’s top cocoa-producing countries, Ivory Coast and Ghana, and leading cocoa and chocolate companies launched a Joint Framework for Action to halt conversion of forest land for cocoa production and to promote restoration.
- Achieving this ambitious goal is certainly not a straightforward endeavour. As discussed recently at The Conversation, protecting forests and improving farmers’ livelihoods will require a better understanding of the complex cocoa forest landscape, including tree tenure, poverty and the dynamics of local communities.
On Restoration:
- A growing number of initiatives are focused on the restoration of forest ecosystems and a better integration with other human activities. Forest landscape restoration (FLR) has proved to be a useful approach to transform degraded lands, as discussed in this recent blog post at the Global Landscapes Forum . But how do we scale it up? A recent post at the IUCN blog provides some thoughts on how to stimulate large-scale results and achieve the 2020 Bonn Challenge targets.
- Apropos of forest landscape restoration, since 1999 forest restoration in China has converted nearly 30 million hectares of farmland and degraded land. As reported in ForestNews, scientists have now assessed the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the so-called “Grain for Green Program” and drawn important lessons.
- Many projects implement appropriate technical solutions but are unsuccessful. Why do projects fail? At Weforest, they dedicated a blog post to this question. A common reason is the lack of ownership of the project by the local community to ensure long-term sustainability.
- CIFOR published an interesting piece on local communities and how their rights influence this process. And, a few years ago, a group of indigenous communities prepared a list of “do’s and dont’s” for forest conservation schemes. A recommended reading for field practitioners.
- As covered by the Global Landscapes Forum, a newly published study shows that we have been underestimating nature’s role in tackling climate change. Nature climate solutions (including restoration) are a cost-effective alternative to mitigate 23.8 billion tonnes of CO2 per year.
Suggested reading
- Forests: a very short introduction (Oxford University Press, 168p). This small book takes us on a fascinating tour through time and place, nicely blending cultural and social aspects of forests with their ecology and evolution – from tropical forests to boreal ones. The author, Jaboury Ghazoul, is Professor of Ecosystem Management at the ETH Zurich.
