... Karenni people celebrated three kinds of pole festivals in a year. The first one is called Tya-Ee-Lu-Boe-Plya. During this festival, the people went to their paddy fields, vegetable farms, picked the premature fruits and brought it to the Ee-Lu-pole. They put the premature fruits on altar, thank god and then pray for good fruits and good harvest. The second one called Tya-Ee-Lu-Phu-Seh. In this festival they pray god to bless the teenagers with good conducts, and good healths. The third one is Tya-Ee-Lu-Du. The festival concerned to everyone.

One of the world’s "biodiversity hotspots" is under siege, as a growing number of business interests
seek to cash in the "peace" in northern Burma’s Kachin State... A project is in progress to build a number of roads in Kachin State in return for huge logging concessions.
While improving and expanding the infrastructure in Kachin State is much needed, the impact of this deal on
the environment could prove to be disastrous...

The result of in-depth research and extensive on-the-ground investigations, the report exposes the scale of illegal logging and illegal timber trade in East Asia with a special focus on Indonesia. The report also highlights the role played by major tropical timber consuming nations including the US, Europe, Japan and China in driving illegal logging by providing a ready market for illegally sourced timber and timber products. In many of the countries of South-East Asia illegal logging outstrips legal logging, and large quantities of this timber finds its way

It is widely believed that land tenure insecurity under a customary tenure system leads to a socially inefficient resource allocation. This article demonstrates that the practice of granting secure individual ownership to tree planters spurs earlier tree planting, which is inefficient from the private point of view but could be efficient from the viewpoint of the global environment. Regression analysis, based on primary data collected in Sumatra, indicates that an expected increase in tenure security in fact led to early tree planting.

This paper presents an overview of the various approaches that developed and developing countries have used in designing national forest funds. It is based on a study of legislation in over forty countries and a review of some of the few empirical studies of forest fund performance. The overview may serve as checklist of issues and options for policymakers who are designing funds. It also may illuminate ongoing discussions about appropriate international roles in forest financing. The paper presents some of the common arguments for and against the use of dedicated funds.

Critical shifts are affecting rural resource rights in Africa through widespread reform in land, forestry and other laws. The cutting edge of transformation affecting women is in emerging new provision for wives to hold family property as co-owners with their husbands, which could play a main role in revitalising smallholder agriculture. Recognition that equity in domestic land relations may ultimately be a prerequisite to the modernisation of subsistence agriculture in agrarian economies is the thesis underlying the analysis of legal texts in this paper.

This report documents the environmental and social impacts of Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), assesses the role of international financial institutions in fuelling APP’s unsustainable and damaging operations and examines the link between this unsustainable practice and APP's financial crisis.Financial institutions should acknowledge that it is far more than the financial failure of APP that proves that they seriously underestimated the risk in financing the company.

This paper begins by discussing Tanzania's increasing recognition of the need to bring individuals, local groups, and communities into the policy, planning, and management process if woodlands are to remain productive in the coming decades.The article finds that:central control of forests takes management responsibility away from the communities most dependent on them, inevitably resulting in tensionsTanzania has enthusiastically established community-owned and -managed forest reservesthe most successful initiatives involving communities and individuals have been those that moved away from

Report which alleges that International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans and policies have caused extensive deforestation in each of the 15 countries of Africa, Latin America, and Asia studied.This forest loss, the author claims, has occurred both directly and indirectly through:the IMF's promotion of foreign investment in natural resource sectorsausterity measures that cut spending on environmental programsprograms that have unwittingly worsened the conditions of povertythe IMF.s insistence upon export-oriented economic growth.The report finds that:IMF induced cuts have impeded:Promotion of resp

The paper is a desk study prepared as a basis for discussion and further field research into land tenure and conflict in the region.The first section provides an overview of land tenure and land utilization issues. This section includes an analysis of gender and other demographic issues as they relate to land tenure and access to natural resources.

This article discusses the extent to which the location of roads s and protected areas affects deforestation in North Thailand. The article stresses that establishing protected areas (national parks together with wildlife sanctuaries) in North Thailand did not reduce the likelihood of forest clearing, but wildlife sanctuaries may have reduced the probability of deforestation.

Using the framework of the Land Use and Cover Change (LUCC) Science/Research Plan this study takes 152 studies of deforestation in different regions of varying size from around the tropics and analyses them to assess how important different causes of deforestation really are.