Hydropower development in the Lower Mekong Basin is occurring at a rapid pace. With partial funding from international financial institutions has come pressure on the riparian governments to ensure that the potential environmental and social impacts of hydropower projects are properly considered…

Voluntary certification programs are one type of intervention used to incentivize the commodity agricultural sector in tropical forest landscapes to reduce deforestation and improve sustainability. These programs encourage supply-chain actors to produce and source products according to agreed…

East–Southeast Asia is currently one of the fastest urbanizing regions in the world, with countries such as China climbing from 20 to 50% urbanized in just a few decades. By 2050, these countries are projected to add 1 billion people, with 90% of that growth occurring in cities. This population…

Mobile motor winches play an important role in forest harvesting. They are used in situations where winches mounted on tractors and forwarders cannot reach logs or other objects to be moved.

This two-part infographic explains the importance of social equity in forests and the basics on putting it into practice. The infographic defines equity and provides an easy to understand overview of the key elements that will empower forest-dependent communities. Through understanding equity,…

Wooden chutes for big, heavy timber built with round logs can provide permanent transportation solutions. However, their use in tropical natural forests cannot be generally recommended due to the fact that their construction needs specially trained labor and that extractable volumes are often…

Agricultural tractors with attached winches, grapple tongues and log trailers with cranes are the key machines for small-scale forestry work in developed countries. In the near future, a similar role is also foreseen in small-scale community forestry work in Asia and the Pacific.

The introduction and safe use of chainsaws is arguably the biggest improvement in small-scale forestry harvesting. Felling timber with chainsaws can be accomplished over a relatively short period of time while requiring only a small investment – that is, if laws allow the use of this type of…

Two-wheeled manual sulkies were developed in the 1970s for use in the tropics by forest development projects of mainly Scandinavian countries. In its final development stage, a sulky with double bogie wheels was designed in 1985 in Finland and applied widely in east African countries and the…

Hand tools are the most commonly used for subsistence or household use when harvesting bamboo or fuelwood. Axes, two-man handsaws and other hand tools are presented and discussed in this factsheet.

Steep-slope harvesting probably poses the biggest challenges in forest harvesting throughout the world. Traditionally, on slopes above 30 percent, gravitational transport is applied in manual harvesting operations by simply sliding logs downhill.