To accompany the training video (available here) produced by USAID-funded programs GREEN Mekong and USAID LEAF Asia, a discussion guide is now available for trainers and grassroots facilitators to delve deeper into the gender aspect of social equity in terms of forest-based climate change initiatives, including REDD+. The questions in the guide will help facilitate discussions concerning forest management practices and forest governance in the local and institutional contexts.

The global carbon cycle has feedbacks on the global climate, and climate-carbon cycle interactions are explicitly represented in earth system models (ESMs). In ESMs, leaf area index (LAI) is a key variable for projecting future environmental changes, but it might be one of the most difficult to precisely predict. In this research, historical LAI changes reproduced in the ESM named 'Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate ESM (MIROC-ESM)' are analyzed, focusing on impacts of CO2 fertilization effects, climate change, and land-use change.

The cities that emerge from Indonesia s
rapid urbanization will be key determinants of the country s
overall economic development and competitiveness, as well as
their inclusiveness and environmental sustainability.
However, without strategically planned investments, policy
interventions, and institutional capacity, mismanaged
urbanization could become an obstacle to sustainable growth.
The city planning labs core module will be initially

Himachal Pradesh has the reputation of
being stable, inclusive, cohesive and well-governed and it
stands apart in many respects from its neighbors in northern
India. It has additionally, achieved remarkable growth,
especially in the last two decades, which has been
accompanied by very good human development outcomes. Despite
being a predominantly rural society, educational attainment
in Himachal Pradesh for instance, is among the best in the

The world's urban population is
expected to increase by about 2.7 billion by
2050.Virtually all of the increased population
will be in developing countries, leading to massive needs
for new and improved housing and urban infrastructures
(UNDESA 2012). The planning and design of these new
developments will reshape or create new urban landscapes
with significant implications for energy consumption,

This forest policy note (FPN) offers
an outside view of the Moldovan forestry sector, provides
some strategic guidance to help define sector goals, and
identifies opportunities for consideration in the continued
development of the sector and for the implementation of the
Moldova and World Bank (WB) country partnership strategy
(CPS). This study is based on a number of short visits to
Moldova and on a number of background studies undertaken

This report presents findings from a village baseline study conducted in Rohal Suong village in Cambodia. Findings have been gathered from focus group discussions and participatory resource mapping with community members in Rohal Suong. The site analysis is part of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) Baseline Survey work and provides information on community resources, the organizational landscape, and information networks at the village level.

In recent years, there has been growing attention and effort towards securing the formal, legal recognition of land rights for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Communities and Indigenous Peoples are estimated to hold as much as 65 percent of the world’s land area under customary systems, yet many governments formally recognize their rights to only a fraction of those lands. This gap—between what is held by communities and what is recognized by governments—is a major driver of conflict, disrupted investments, environmental degradation, climate change, and cultural extinction.

This report focuses on the promotion of economic growth and improving ecosystem protection within Brazil’s rural landscape.

The growing use of Payments for
Environmental Services (PES) for conservation has fostered a
debate on its effectiveness, but the few efforts to date to
assess the impact of PES programs have been hampered by lack
of data, leading to very divergent results. This paper uses
data from a PES mechanism implemented in Quindío, Colombia,
to examine the impact of PES on land use change. Alone among
all early PES initiatives, the Silvopastoral Project

What is second-generation biofuel
technology worth to global society? A dynamic, computable
partial equilibrium model (called FABLE) is used to assess
changes in global land use for crops, livestock, biofuels,
forestry, and environmental services, as well as greenhouse
gas emissions, with and without second-generation biofuels
technology. The difference in the discounted stream of
global valuations of land-based goods and services gives the

This paper quantifies the impact of
inundation risk and salinization on the family structure and
economic welfare of coastal households in Bangladesh. These
households are already on the "front line" of
climate change, so their adaptation presages the future for
hundreds of millions of families worldwide who will face
similar threats by 2100. The analysis is based on a
household decision model that relates spatial deployment of