The ‘WISE-UP to climate’ project aims to demonstrate the value of natural infrastructure as a ‘nature-based solution’ for climate change adaptation and sustainable development. Within the Tana River Basin, both natural and built infrastructure provide livelihood benefits for people. Understanding the interrelationships between the two types of infrastructure is a prerequisite for sustainable water resources development and management. This is particularly true as pressures on water resources intensify and the impacts of climate change increase.

Since President Soeharto stepped down, decentralization has offered a better governance system for this nation of more than 220 million people of varied ethnic groups spread over more than 15,000 islands. Despite its potential, implementation of decentralization has been riddled with unexpected problems. Decentralization turned out to have created problems, ranging from conflicts among people who refused regional fragmentation, conflicts between newly-created districts and the original, larger district from which they were created, and between local and central government.

Cooking and lighting from home-made gas

How livestock can improve on-farm energy flows

Decisions on land use in Vietnam are often only based on biophysical and economical assessments, with little consideration for the local people’s opinions or perspectives. This can lead to conflicts over natural resources management, unsustainable land use and decisions that are unfair to local people. In the landscape surrounding Khe Tran, a village in Central Vietnam lives a Pahy minority group. The driving force in this area has been different land use policies, resulting mainly from a government ‘top down’ approach, and the consequent changes in local forest status.

Ever since the oil, financial and food crises of 2008, sub-Saharan Africa has witnessed a marked increase in large-scale investment in agricultural land. The drivers of this investment are varied and include growing food, water and energy insecurity as well as social and economic interests of investors and recipient countries. The shape of these investments and their eventual outcomes are equally influenced by the existing land and water governance systems in the host countries.

The desire for research to be policy relevant has caused many social science studies to have “engineering” dimensions. With respect to the engineering of property rights, economic approaches indicate that we require knowledge regarding the makeup of current property rights structures, how changes to current structures affect the use and management of natural resources, and how property rights have evolved.

CIFOR facilitated 27 communities in the Upper Malinau watershed to develop agreements about their village boundaries and map them through participatory methods. Decentralization reforms created new values of forest resources and uncertainties that increased conflict over local resources. The authors report on the nature of these conflicts, the stability of agreements and the factors affecting how agreements were reached.

On-site sanitation systems, such as septic tanks and pit latrines, are the predominant feature across rural and urban areas in most developing countries. However, their management is one of the most neglected sanitation challenges. While under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the set-up of toilet systems received the most attention, business models for the sanitation service chain, including pit desludging, sludge transport, treatment and disposal or resource recovery, are only emerging.