Over the past two decades, growing recognition of forest-based Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs) sparked forest tenure reforms to formalize IP and LC rights to forests and forest lands through a variety of mechanisms. Nevertheless, tenure security, an intended objective of such reforms, has received less attention, despite being integral to the life and livelihoods of IPs and LCs and important for forests.

Context and background:Increasing refugee crisis has focused most host states to integrate refugees with the local communities through land access to customary land whose land rights are not clearly defined and documented.

Context and background:Forest ecosystems have the capacity to regulate the climate as sink of carbon. This function allows them to maintain the ecological balance of the planet.

Arbajahan Ward, located within the arid landscape of Wajir West, Wajir County, is home to a resilient pastoral community heavily reliant on rangelands for sustenance. The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in collaboration with the Resource Conflict Institute(RECONCILE), initiated Participatory Rangeland Management (PRM) to build the capacity of local communities to better manage their lands. A Capacity Strengthening Workshop for the Rangeland Management Committee was a pivotal component to this and was successfully held from October 31st to November 2nd, 2023.

Background: Understanding how local communities perceive threats and management options of wild edible plants (WEPs) is essential in developing their conservation strategies and action plans. Due to their multiple use values, including nutrition, medicinal, construction, and cultural as well as biotic and abiotic pressures, WEPs are exposed to overexploitation, especially within arid and semiarid lands, and hence the need to manage and conserve them. We

Availability is a crucial aspect of wild edible plants (WEPs) consumption by indigenous communities. Understanding the local perception of this availability helps to determine, which contribution WEPs can make to rural communities. We used an integrated participatory approach to investigate important parameters and themes that infuenced the perception of availability of woody WEPs. We demonstrate the approach in three communities in Turkana County, Kenya. By availability, we referred to the ease of accessing, harvesting, transporting, and processing WEPs for consumption.

A major challenge in natural resource management in developing countries is to pursue conservation objectives while avoiding negative impacts on local livelihoods. Inland capture fisheries provide opportunities to demonstrate an integration of conservation and livelihood objectives when managed as a social-ecological system. While numerous marine no-take reserves have been found effective for the recovery of fisheries, few well-documented examples exist in the freshwater realm.

India’s National Food Security Mission, guided by the National Food Security Act, initiated a submission on nutri-cereals focusing on millet crops. In the wake of contestations surrounding different frames of food security and food sovereignty, millet has emerged as a critisector pcal link between women’s labor and local food systems. In Nagaland, the North East Network is leading the revival of millet crops involving local communities, particularly women. In Odisha, a state-supported mission, the Odisha Millet Mission is creating new markets through an institutional process.

This policy brief — produced under the CGIAR Initiative on Asian Mega-Deltas (AMD) — emphasizes the urgent need for promoting inclusive governance in Bangladesh's agri-food systems to enhance resilience in the face of escalating climate risks. Although Bangladesh is transitioning toward climate-resilient agri-food systems, this shift faces challenges. There is notable variation among policies and interventions pertaining to food, water and environmental systems in their acknowledgment of socio-ecological interdependencies and representation of marginalized communities.

The convergence of the biodiversity and climate crises, widening of wealth inequality, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic underscore the urgent need to mobilize change to secure sustainable futures. Centres of tropical biodiversity are a major focus of conservation efforts, delivered in predominantly site-level interventions often incorporating alternative-livelihood provision or poverty-alleviation components. Yet, a focus on site-level intervention is ill-equipped to address the disproportionate role of (often distant) wealth in biodiversity collapse.

Participatory rangeland management (PRM) is a process building the capacities of local communities to better manage their lands, reduce natural resource conflicts, and build good governance. This film shown through the eyes of two local protagonists – one in Kenya and Tanzania – describes the PRM approach and how their communities are benefiting from it. A beautiful film highlighting some of the challenges that pastoralists face as well as solutions to overcome them.

The CGIAR Initiative on Aquatic Foods partnered with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Water Research Institute (CSIR-WRI), the Fisheries Commission, and collaborated with local government departments and local communities to implement fish cage culture in selected small reservoirs in Ghana. This brief highlights the technical and institutional principles that were applied in these sites for inclusive and sustainable aquatic food production in the year 2023.