Community forestry supports local level climate change adaptation by enhancing resilience in multiple ways: supporting livelihoods and income, increasing food security, leveraging social capital and knowledge, reducing disaster risks and regulating microclimates. However, adaptation planning has, by and large, not included community forestry as a viable climate change adaptation tool.

Read RECOFTC’s digital annual report, “Building resilience through community forestry.” This report covers the period October 2017 to September 2019.

PES is a new concept gaining momentum in the Asia-Pacific region. But what are the enabling conditions for employing PES schemes, and how can they be made pro-poor? Payment for Environmental Services (PES) sets up systems where beneficiaries of environmental services reward the providers of such services with payments or other non-financial goods (market access, land security, public services, infrastructure, capacity building).

RECOFTC, in partnership with ICRAF, has developed a regional training manual on agroforestry for climate-resilient landscapes with the objective to train future extensionists and practitioners working on agroforestry. To ensure the efficacy of the manual, each training sessions has been tested with a range of audiences at national and international levels. These include mid-level government officers, NGO staff and academics from Thailand, Myanmar and Viet Nam.

Dr. Juan Pulhin reports how the forest sector is addressing this challenge with some ambitious targets that include: uplands poverty halved in 15 years; forests under sustainable management, within 10 years; healthy forest-based industries, within 5 years in this report.

This policy brief was developed based on findings from a series of sub-national and national multi-stakeholder workshops organized between July and November 2018. These workshops shared the experiences of community forestry enterprise (CFE) development and private sector partnership in Myanmar. This report highlights the findings. 

A collection of practical experiences and lessons on Payments for Environmental Services (PES)

Developed by ICRAF as part of the ASFCC program, these guidelines were adopted by AMAF in October 2018 and seek to provide technical support to ASEAN Member States pursuing agroforestry development. 

The project covers two pilot sites encompassing 41,000 ha of forest land: Vinh Tu Commune in Quang Tri Province and Huong Son District in Ha Tinh Province. Both sites are commercially used forest and have potential for a certification mechanism. The certification project presumes that ecosystem services can be provided alongside sustainable forest management. Innovatively, the pilot test will help develop national standards and indicators for ecosystem certification.

Forinfo aims to strengthen the capacity of the Provincial Agriculture and Forestry Office (PAFO) by supporting the implementation of improved bamboo management within the two concession areas in Meung district. The project is partnering with officials from the Government of Lao PDR (GoL), from the national to district level, private enterprises, community associations, and other NGOs to foster a wider stakeholder responsibility and ownership of the activities.

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 Philippines under the FINNIDA APPRODEV project.

Community forestry has great potential to improve the welfare of the estimated 450 million impoverished people living in and around forests in Asia. But the extent to which this potential is realized depends strongly upon whether communities are able to secure the benefits that community managed forests generate, and whether these actually reach the poorest at the community level. The real benefits obtained in return for the time and energy expended by communities in forest management helps to gain their long-term commitment to sustainable forest management.