Community forestry – as promoted by RECOFTC – provides an effective and cross-cutting solution that is aligned with the SDGs. This includes SDG goal 5 to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. RECOFTC has long understood that the long-term viability of community forest management is dependent on the inclusion of women. RECOFTC works to ensure that policies and programs of forestry stakeholders mainstream gender dimensions so that they are not at risk of creating or exacerbating inequalities, and ignoring women’s contribution to livelihoods.

Local communities and state forest actors, such as Protection Forest Management Boards (PFMBs), State Forest Companies (SFCs), play equally important roles in forest resource management. Yet local communities have limited legal rights. This is one reason that leads to a lack of forest ownership for local communities. In order to support local communities to effectively engage in sustainable forest management and livelihood development, a fuller set of rights should be legally given to them.

Recent research on payments for environmental services (PES) has observed that high transaction costs (TCs) are incurred through the implementation of PES schemes and farmer participation. TCs incurred by households are considered to be an obstacle to the participation in and efficiency of PES policies. This study aims to understand transactions related to previous forest plantation programmes and to estimate the actual TCs incurred by farmers who participated in these programmes in a mountainous area of northwestern Vietnam.

Agricultural landscapes presently cover about 46 % of earth terrestrial surface. This cultivated area is decreasing, whereas the global food demand is projected to increase up to 70 % in 2050. The intensification of agriculture is not a solution to this food issue because intensive agriculture has often resulted in pollution and loss of biodiversity. On the other hand, mechanistic models with optimization algorithms can be used to design alternative land uses for sustainable agriculture.