Loggers, miners and rural communities all exploit forests in unsustainable ways in search of profits and means of subsistence. They are the primary actors in forest decline and their immediate motivations are the direct causes of deforestation and degradation. However, these motivations are determined, through complex causation chains, by deeper and much more fundamental forces: the underlying causes of deforestation. Effective action against forest decline requires an understanding of these underlying causes and their distant impacts on forests.

Rapid land transformation driven by large scale investments is one of the big trends defining this century. In a virtual briefing for the Global Donor Platform members CIAT agriculture expert Deborah Bossio dismisses the cry for more investments often heard in development circles. From her perspective a lack of investments is not the problem. The more pressing question is whether these large scale investments could be sustainable and socially inclusive. How are they going to play out in the end?

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Tier 1 methodologies commonly underpin project-scale carbon accounting for changes in land use and management and are used in frameworks for Life Cycle Assessment and carbon footprinting of food and energy crops. These methodologies were intended for use at large spatial scales. This can introduce error in predictions at finer spatial scales. There is an urgent need for development and implementation of higher tier methodologies that can be applied at fine spatial scales (e.g.

Improved understandings of the agricultural and range ecologies of semi-arid Africa require better information on the spatiotemporal distribution of domestic livestock across agropastoral landscapes. An empirical GIS-based approach was developed for estimating distributions of herded livestock across three agropastoral territories (around 100 km2 each) over a two-year period.

Conservation agriculture (CA) is increasingly promoted in Africa as an alternative for coping with the need to increase food production on the basis of more sustainable farming practices. Success with adopting CA on farms in Africa has been limited, despite more than two decades of research and development investments. Through analyzing past and on-going CA experiences in a set of case studies, this paper seeks to better understand the reasons for the limited adoption of CA and to assess where, when and for whom CA works best.