Increasing global demand for natural resources is intensifying competition for land across the developing world, pushing companies onto territories that many Indigenous Peoples and rural communities have sustainably managed for generations.

Great emphasis is currently being placed on achieving transformational change and paradigm shift through policies and measures to implement the Paris Agreement and the UN 2030 development agenda, including the Green Climate Fund (GCF). There is a need to improve our understanding on how to enable, operationalize, measure and evaluate the intended, lasting outcomes.

The residents of the Ganges and Mekong River deltas face serious challenges from rising sea levels, saltwater intrusion, pollution from upstream sources, growing populations, and infrastructure that no longer works as planned. In both deltas, scientists working for nearly two decades with communities, local governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have demonstrated the potential to overcome these challenges and substantially improve people’s livelihoods.

Policy reform is required to more accurately value natural capital and incentivize green investments through aligned subsidies, supportive financial measures, and risk mitigation support.

A centralized system that synthesizes evidence and connects projects to investors would both improve awareness of initiatives and funding sources, and build capacity and financial literacy.

Key information gaps persist in reporting, monitoring and impact assessment. Leveraging a centralized system could reduce redundancies, enhance cost-effectiveness and bridge finance gaps.

We are probably at the most crucial crossroad of humanity’s history. We are changing the earth’s climate as a result of accelerated human-made Greenhouse Gases Emissions (GHG) and biodiversity loss, provoking other effects that increase the complexity of the problem and will multiply the speed with which we approach climate chaos, and social too.

In collaboration with the University of Riau, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) has established permanent plots in Tanjung Leban village, Bengkalis regency, Riau province. The site, which is owned by the local community, is about 50 km east of the city of Dumai and easily accessed by car.

Licuri is a highly valuable tree species, both to local ecosystems and in traditional cultural uses, with a clear commercial niche. Its productive and sustainable uses are directly linked to ecosystem conservation and women’s empowerment—which is being further developed to great success. Project partners are working together to increase the mechanization of the licuri harvesting and production process, aiming to lessen the time-burden on women and enhance their livelihood potential.

In Armenia, the forestry sector and forest restoration policy development and decision making in natural resources management processes have been shaped as a result of women’s historical every day practices—which are also often drivers of deforestation and degradation—and yet women’s direct participation in these matters is frequently neglected. Forests in Armenia are state property and the management system is top-down, meaning that decisions are made at the government level and passed down through a hierarchy of power.

Drawing on feminist and development literature, this paper suggests several important lessons and considerations for building equitable approaches to REDD+. Specifically, we illustrate the conceptual and practical significance of women’s participation for achieving the goals of REDD+as well as the limits and opportunities for gendering participation in REDD+.

Increasing demand for food, fiber and raw materials is putting more and more pressure on (often) fragile landscapes. Today, about one-fifth of all cultivated land suffers from some form of degradation, such as salinization, deforestation, erosion, excessive fertilizer use, waterlogging and poor nutrient availability (ELD Initiative 2015). Degradation often goes hand in hand with the worst poverty, affecting the lives, health and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.

The terms “landscape” and “landscape approach” have been increasingly applied within the international environmental realm, with many international organizations and nongovernmental organizations using landscapes as an area of focus for addressing multiple objectives, usually related to both environmental and social goals. However, despite a wealth of literature on landscapes and landscape approaches, ideas relating to landscape approaches are diverse and often vague, resulting in ambiguous use of the terms.

The deforestation-free movement (or “zero-deforestation”) has emerged recently in a context of lower state control, globalization and pressure on corporations by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) through consumer awareness campaigns, acknowledging the essential role of agricultural commodities in deforestation. It takes the form of commitments by corporations to ensure that the products they either produce, process, trade or retail are not linked to forest conversion.