Just a week to go before the Investment Forum on trees and landscape restoration opens in Nairobi, Kenya! About 100 people from the private sector, public sector and civil society organizations have registered so far.
In addition to background papers now available on the event page here, we've posted related photos taken by our partners at TerrAfrica and the World Agrofestry Centre on Flickr.
We'll be posting more content as we visit agroforestry and sustainable land management sites near Embu, Eldoret and Kisumu in the coming week.
Impact Stories
October 21, 2024 - 06:50AM
On May 4th, Indonesia concluded Voluntary Partnership Agreement negotiations with the European Union. This marked the culmination of a long process toward establishing a timber legality verification system in the country and an important milestone for forest governance reform. Negotiations had started in 2004...On the plus side, the lengthy process allowed for extensive consultaions resulting in civil society support for this ambitious new system.
We asked Hugo Schally, Head of Unit on Multilateral Environmental Agreements, Processes and Trade Issues at the European Commission, to describe…
October 21, 2024 - 06:50AM
Many countries are interested in addressing climate change and promoting green growth. But lack of information on associated costs and benefits (including the potential welfare and development impacts of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures) make it difficult for countries to take effective action.
Development consultant Dominic Elson presented a report commissioned by the UK Climate Change Unit of the British Embassy, Jakarta, that seeks to address some this knowledge gap in the case of Indonesia. Elson found that Indonesia could stand to gain by changing its 'business as usual…
October 21, 2024 - 06:50AM
A new study published in the online journal PLoS ONE establishes a strong correlation between rising gold prices, mercury imports and deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. In parts of the forest, deforestation has increased six-fold in recent years.
Jennifer Swenson, assistant professor at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, was interviewed by Science Daily:
"At the two sites we studied, Guacamayo and Colorado-Puquiri, nearly 5,000 acres were cleared in just three years, between 2006 and 2009, largely outpacing nearby deforestation caused by human settlement."
With gold…
October 21, 2024 - 06:50AM
The World Bank Institute which shares knowledge related to poverty reduction has recently published online a training manual for estimating REDD+ opportunity costs. The theory behind REDD+ and terms of art like “carbon dioxide equivalents” or “net present value” are demystified in accessible terms and helpful graphs. The guide is intended for “professionals within governments, universities, research institutions, international or non-governmental organizations and program developers who may use the presented methods and tools to estimate opportunity costs and incorporate these costs into…
October 21, 2024 - 06:50AM
Forest Trends and ACT Brazil have just published a report that looks at how the Paiter-Surui indigenous people came to give their Free, Prior and Informed Consent to the Surui carbon project. According to the abstract:
"This project represents a promising and innovative scenario in the Amazon, because it is designed to enhance environmental conservation and the sustainable use of natural resources, while ensuring financial resources for effective management of indigenous lands and maintaining the ethnic culture of the people that inhabit them."
New satellite images document the withering…
October 21, 2024 - 06:50AM
The current issue of Arbor Vitae, IUCN’s Forest Conservation Program newsletter, focuses on communicating forest values beyond the usual circle of experts and policy makers. The sound of chainsaws and dramatic images of clearcut land do a good job of stressing the need for conservation among the general public but do little to spread an understanding of forests as a sustainable resource, or to inspire people to restore degraded land.
Laurie Bennett, one of the newsletter's contributors, argues that positive messages are more effective than scare tactics to engage the public and win popular…
October 21, 2024 - 06:50AM
We asked Klaus Deininger, lead author of Rising Global Interest in Farmland, to tell us -- in a nutshell -- what recent land acquisition trends mean for forests.
First the good news:
Enough land for food: no need to encroach on forests.
Then, the bad :
When land was presumed to be state land...
Environmental impacts of large farmland purchases .
October 21, 2024 - 06:50AM
As the UN celebrated today the launch of the International Year of Forests, a story in The Telegraph popped on our screens with stark images of deforestation and pollution.
"We sped across the jungle along a narrow manmade path. (...) A sharp turn of the wheel later and the trees vanished, replaced by a vast desert dotted with shacks covered in blue plastic sheets where thousands of miners live. We were at the heart of a 21st-century gold rush that, environmentalists warn, is rapidly destroying the Amazon’s Madre de Dios (Mother of God) region in south-east Peru, 33,000 square miles of low…
October 21, 2024 - 06:50AM
Reuters' special report "In global land rush, a search for fair returns" (Jan 31, 2011) raises questions of governance, benefit-sharing, innovation and foreign investment that PROFOR has been asking as well in recent and ongoing studies. The story, reported from Illinois, Brazil, Sierra Leone and South Africa (plus London and Rome), mentions the World Bank study on large scale land acquisition which PROFOR supported:
The World Bank estimates that 45 million hectares worth of large-scale farmland deals were announced in 2009, more than 10 times the annual average expansion of agricultural land…
