A selection of nine short videos from InsightShare;which in October 2019 hosted a grassroots gathering in South Africa of African Indigenous activists representing 12 diverse communities from across the continent;who came together to discuss;strategise and skill up on issues of Indigenous cultures;rights and lands;and how to harness video for change. The nine videos are:

This chapter deals with the issue of land tenure;which has been identified as one of the major institutional problems in Benin. It deals specifically with the recent land reform that was enacted by the 2013 Code Foncier et Domanial (Land and Domain Code). The orientation of the chapter is not so much a question of proposing an institutional diagnosis of the sector and highlighting desirable areas for reform;as of analysing an ongoing reform process.

The globally driven acquisition of land puts rural farmers across the globe at risk and Africa is the hotspot of global land grabbing. Shows the ongoing work of the Remote Sensing Research Group (RSRG);University of Bonn;to map land grabbing events in Southern Africa;with examples from Mozambique and Zambia. Provides an overview of current land grabbing databases;their lack of spatial information and how remote sensing datasets can overcome this lack when being used to detect large scale agricultural production schemes.

This edition of Unasylva comes in the wake of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20,which, among other things, produced a document called The Future We Want. In it, world leaders renewed their commitment to sustainable development and stated that “the wide range of products and services that forests provide creates opportunities to address many of the most pressing sustainable development challenges”. Foresters should be pleased with these words because they indica te that forests are starting to get the recognition they deserve.

The critical role of forests in climate change mitigation and adaptation is now widely recognized. Forests contribute significantly to climate change mitigation through their carbon sink and carbon storage functions. They play an essential role in reducing vulnerabilities and enhancing adaptation of people and ecosystems to climate change and climate variability, the negative impacts of which are becoming increasingly evident in many parts of the world.

In the last 40 years, large areas of the Mau forest, the largest contiguous tropical montane forest in East Africa, have been cleared for agriculture. To date, there are no empirical data on how this land use change affects carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes from soil respiration and soil methane (CH4) fluxes. This study reports measured annual soil CO2 and CH4 fluxes from the native Mau forest and previously forested lands converted to smallholder grazing land, smallholder and commercial tea plantations and eucalyptus plan- tations.

In this study, methods, originally developed to assess life course trajectories, are explored in order to evaluate land change through the analysis of sequences of land use/cover. Annual land cover maps which describe land use/land cover change for the 1985–2017 period for a large region in Northeast Brazil were analyzed. The most frequent sequences, the entropy and the turbulence of the land trajectories, and the average time of permanence were computed. Clusters of similar sequences were determined using different dissimilarity measures.

The Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley, Mexico, is the semiarid region with the richest biodiversity of North America and was recently recognized as a UNESCO’s World Heritage site. Original agricultural practices remain to this day in agroforestry systems (AFS), which are expressions of high biocultural diversity. However, local people and researchers perceive a progressive decline both in natural ecosystems and AFS.

Deforestation and forest degradation (D&D) in the tropics have continued unabated and are posing serious threats to forests and the livelihoods of those who depend on forests and forest resources. Smallholder farmers are often implicated in scientific literature and policy documents as important agents of D&D. However, there is scanty information on why smallholders exploit forests and what the key drivers are. We employed behavioral sciences approaches that capture contextual factors, attitudinal factors, and routine practices that shape decisions by smallholder farmers.

Ce rapport vise à donner des lignes directrices pour l'élaboration de cadres juridiques sur la foresterie communautaire. Il offre des recommandations et un cadre de réflexion pour l'ensemble des acteurs engagés dans la création, la mise en œuvre ou la révision des législations relatives à la foresterie communautaire, en particulier la société civile.

This report is intended to provide guidance to develop enabling legal frameworks governing community forestry. It offers recommendations and a framework for reflection for all actors engaged in creating, implementing or revising laws on community forestry, and for civil society in particular.

Drawing lessons from the design and implementation of community forestry laws in Nepal, the Philippines, and in Tanzania, this report revolves around the ten following building blocks to consider in order to develop supportive frameworks governing community forestry: