The project manager at Kalup National Park in Cameroon explains how local rainforest communities, who have lost their access to the park are being supported in finding new ways to earn income, and how the project is making them aware of the need to manage their community forests sustainably.
A forest superintendent from Nigeria explains how policy needs to change in order to reduce the amount of natural forest that is lost to cash crop plantations and agriculture.
This paper is an overview of participatory forest management in relation with property rights issue. It highlights the difficulty in defining property rights. Although the issues presented are applicable throughout tropical Asia, albeit less so in the Pacific, this paper is based primarily on the author's experience in Indonesia, and almost all of examples are from indonesia. This paper discuss the diversity and changing nature of property rights and continues with a discussion on the issue of communities demanding the rights and possible responses of the government.
This book is a compilation of the abstracts of in-house and external publications produced in the year 2001 by CIFOR scientists and their collaborators. The abstracts are grouped into seven themes: general, biodiversity, forest governance and community forestry, forest management, non-timber forest products, plantations and rehabilitation of degraded forests, policy and extrasectoral issues that represent CIFOR's research activities. Indexes are provided by author and keyword.
An agroforester from Zimbabwe describes how a system of ?tree tenure? encourages sustainable harvesting of indigenous fruit trees, explains ways of adding value to the fruit, and how domestication of indigenous fruit trees can take the pressure off natural forests.
A co-ordinator of the Kenya Forests Working Group describes how it has been working with local forest management committees, to set up forest use agreements and educate communities in improved forest management methods.
An NGO in Zambia has volunteers living with forest communities, in order to build up trust and work together on alternatives to slash-and-burn agriculture.
Namo Chuma, of the NGO Environment Africa, explains how traditional arrangements have protected trees in Zimbabwe, and how a new piece of legislation could empower communities to protect their forests against illegal exploitation by commercial interests.
The methods used to value tropical forests have the potential to influence how policy makers and others perceive forest landsforestlands. A small number of valuation studies achieve real impact. These are generally succinct accounts supporting a specific perception. However, such reports risk being used to justify inappropriate actions. The end users of such results are rarely those who produced them and misunderstanding of key details is a concern. One defence is to ensure that the ultimate users appreciate shortcomings and common pitfalls.
The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol raised the hopes of many, that payment for carbon sequestration services would provide a significant incentive for sustainable management practices in industrial forestry in tropical countries. Data to assess how realistic these hopes are, remain scant and high degree of uncertainty about CDM rules make assessment hazardous. The analysis in this paper focuses on the potential for using carbon trading to stimulate adoption of reduced impact logging (RIL)-based sustainable forest management.
This manual is a participatory methods guide (1) to assist those involved with multiple stakeholder situations or groups to appreciate and acknowledge the relevance and impact of micro-politics on stakeholder relations and resultant cooperative behaviour in these groups; (2) to provide a simple and systematic approach or framework to gather and analyse data on micro-politics among multiple stakeholders; (3) to highlight and offer practical suggestions for dealing with some of the methodological issues that influence gathering data on politics and relations among stakeholders; (4) to suggest
