Forest landscape restoration (FLR) initiatives are being launched over much of the global South. These initiatives seek to restore ecological functions and associated ecosystem goods and services while improving social outcomes (Mansourian and Vallauri 2014). The scale of these initiatives is such that large geographic areas as well as large numbers of people will be affected in the countries that choose to participate in them.

Clear and coherent laws are key to successful community forestry.The Republic of Congo is currently developing its first legal framework on community forestry — presenting policymakers with a unique opportunity to design an enabling and comprehensive legal framework that empowers communities. This briefing outlines key areas the framework should be built on, including five that should be addressed as a priority.

"Although locals were unfamiliar with even the local term for ‘biodiversity' they readily understood the concept and its importance after a brief explanation. Furthermore, it became clear that, as a result of the security of use rights in their community forests, locals did indeed value species for their contribution to the overall health of the ecosystem regardless of any other benefits they may bring."

As the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity 2011–2020 comes to a close and countries prepare to adopt a post-2020 global biodiversity framework, this edition of The State of the World’s Forests (SOFO) examines the contributions of forests, and of the people who use and manage them, to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

Tropical forests in Indonesia are subject to major transformation processes from native forests to other land uses, including rubber agroforestry as well as rubber and oil palm plantation systems. Using content analysis of policy documents, this paper aims at (i) analysing the formal administrative responsibilities related to the four rainforest transformation systems and (ii) based on the informal motives of the competing bureaucracies involved generating hypotheses on their future course of action and related research.

Nine Latin American countries plan to use silvopastoral practices—incorporating trees into grazing lands—to mitigate climate change. However, the cumulative potential of scaling up silvopastoral systems at national levels is not well quantified. Here, we combined previously published tree cover data based on 250 m resolution MODIS satellite remote sensing imagery for 2000–2017 with ecofloristic zone carbon stock estimates to calculate historical and potential future tree biomass carbon storage in Colombian grasslands.