Commodity-driven deforestation and forest conservation efforts in the Mekong region have placed multiple pressures on community-based resource systems, undermining tenure security and livelihoods. In response, several initiatives have been mobilized by states, communities, and civil society organizations which aim to recognize and formalize customary forest tenure rights.
Cambodia has recently demonstrated one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world. While scholars have long explored the drivers of tropical forest loss, the case of Cambodia offers particular insights into the role of the state where transnational governance and regional integration are increasingly the norm. Given the significant role logging rents play in Cambodia’s post-conflict state formation, this article explores the contemporary regime and its ongoing codependent relationship with forested land.
Sarawak, Malaysia, is home to a wide range of native fruit tree species (NFTs) that contribute to the livelihoods of rural women and men. Yet, most agricultural research in the area, and elsewhere, has focused on commercial, non-native species, and the economic potential of lesser-known NFTs has often been overlooked. What is more, little attention has focused on research for development tools that can build on the local ecological knowledge of both men and women while supporting forest-based livelihoods and biodiversity conservation.
Participatory research and the social learning it supports are increasingly being used to improve forest management. Yet, the participation of women and other marginalized groups is often limited in these processes. This is a serious shortcoming, not only due to concerns for gender and social equity, but also because socially excluded, forest-dependent groups hold specific ecological knowledge, skills and interests that influence prospects for sustainable forest management.
The Shangri-La County of the Yunnan Province, SW China, is an economically and ecologically important area. This is especially true for Jiantang that is famous for the Napahai, Bitahai and Shudu Lake wetlands. However, continuing development has threatened the wetland ecosystems and the associated biodiversity in these areas. To better document such changes in land use and their effect on the ecosystem, land use was mapped using a time series of satellite images acquired in 1974, 1993, 2000 and 2012. The results of this survey suggest that forest cover first decreased and then increased.
In order to identify sustainable management solutions for small-scale farmer agroecosystems, a better understanding of these dynamic forest–farmland systems, existing farming and forestry strategies, and farmer perspectives is important. We examined the relationship between agricultural land use patterns and farmers’ practices and identified existing and potential characteristics of healthy agroecosystems at local scale in the context of village communities in Zanzibar, Tanzania.
Agricultural and forest productive diversification depends on multiple socioeconomic drivers—like knowledge, migration, productive capacity, and market—that shape productive strategies and influence their ecological impacts. Our comparison of indigenous and settlers allows a better understanding of how societies develop different diversification strategies in similar ecological contexts and how the related socioeconomic aspects of diversification are associated with land cover change.
Background: It is essential that systems for measuring changes in carbon stocks for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) projects are accurate, reliable and low cost.
The robustness of the physically-based, semi-distributed hydrological model ECOMAG with respect to changing (climatic or land-use) conditions was evaluated for two basins, considered within the modelling workshop held in the frame of the 2013 IAHS conference in Göteborg, Sweden. The first basin, the Garonne River basin, France, is characterized mostly by changes in climatic conditions, while the second, Obyån Creek, Sweden, was exposed to drastic land cover change due to deforestation.
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