A private company is restoring degraded forest reserves in Ghana with commercial as well as native tree species, applying a business model that also brings strong community and environmental benefits.*

The company, Form Ghana, has leased about 20,000 hectares in three forest reserves in the West Africa country in order to establish and manage sustainable forest plantations. These areas were once productive semi-deciduous forest ecosystems. However, decades of overexploitation, bush fires and conversion to agricultural land left them severely degraded.

After a quarter-century of restoration in a heavily degraded river basin in Costa Rica, a “model forest” platform is helping a local foundation to promote the benefits of its work and boost business in an economically depressed region.*

The area surrounding the headwaters of the Nosara River, which flows from the highlands of the Nicoya Peninsula into the Pacific Ocean, suffered deforestation under a past government policy that encouraged large-scale land clearing for agriculture and cattle ranching.

Farmers in poor rural areas of Guatemala are learning how agroforestry incorporating the culturally important breadnut tree can boost their nutrition and income as well as restoring degraded land through deforestation*.

In a pilot project, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations assisted 38 smallholder families in Petén, the northernmost department of Guatemala, to become “restoration farmers.” Their plots will serve as demonstration sites for efforts to scale up the initiative to the regional level.

The objective of the India Ecosystem Services Project (ESIP), which is under preparation, is to improve forest quality, land management, and nontimber forest produce (NTFP) benefits for forest dependent communities in selected landscapes in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. It is designed to enhance the outcomes of the national Green India Mission, which targets improving the quality of forests in about 5 million hectares.

This project aims to strengthen the National Protected Areas System and to support sustainable land use and restoration practices in selected areas of the Dry Corridor of Nicaragua, in order to foster biodiversity conservation, resilient landscapes, and local livelihoods.

The five Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) are among the Europe and Central Asia Region’s most vulnerable to climate change; building resilience is thus a priority for poverty reduction and shared prosperity in Central Asia. Such impacts are already being felt and are expected to intensify, with the agriculture, energy, and water sectors most at risk.

Desertification in arid and semiarid areas of Northwest China is a major current environmental issue for the country, caused by the interaction of a naturally dry climate, recurrent periods of prolonged droughts, anthropogenic factors over long periods of time, and specific topographic and geographic conditions. Among the anthropogenic factors are poor land management, inadequate farming techniques and over-cultivation, overgrazing and the removal of natural vegetation; misuse of water resources; and poor environmental and ecosystem management.

Constructive critique. This book provides a critical, evidence-based analysis of REDD+ implementation so far, without losing sight of the urgent need to reduce forest-based emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change.

REDD+ as envisioned has not been tested at scale. Results-based payment, the novel feature of REDD+, has gone untested. International funding (both public and private) remains scarce, and demand through carbon markets is lacking.

This collection of 12 stories from women and men in nine countries in different parts of Africa shines a light on the efforts of communities, some of them decades-long, in restoring degraded forests and landscapes. The stories are not generated through any rigorous scientific process, but are nonetheless illustrative of the opportunities communities create as they solve their own problems, and of the many entry points we have for supporting and accelerating community effort.

Existing approaches and methodologies that investigate effects of land degradation on food security vary greatly. Although a relatively rich body of literature that investigates localized experiences, geophysical and socioeconomic drivers of land degradation, and the costs and benefits of avoiding land degradation already exists, less rigorously explored are the global effects of restoring degraded landscapes.

The results of this study reveal that the full inclusion of crop production in the forest landscape restoration approach could produce largescale,
worldwide benefits for food security and therefore facilitate a wide uptake of restoration practices and the implementation of large
restoration projects. The positive impacts are multifaceted and significant in size: a reduction in malnourished children ranging from three
to six million; a reduced number of people at risk of hunger, estimated to be between 70 and 151 million; reduced pressure for expansion

Variants of Indigenous forest management reflect distinct historical and political-economic contexts. Indigenous forest management was largely unrecorded in the colonial period and, in the present, can range from industrial to ecosystem-based forest management, autonomous management and rentier practices. Evidence of Indigenous forest management has assumed political importance in those nation-states that require historical evidence of past land use and occupancy as the basis for negotiation of Indigenous-titled lands.