A law can be a powerful tool for poverty alleviation and rural development.
In most developing countries, a majority of the population lives in rural
areas. Most rural residents—and especially the poorest people—depend
on the land for their livelihoods and long-term social security. Laws that
give people access and secure rights to land and encourage investment in
the land can establish a foundation on which rural families can grow their
incomes and assets. Good land laws can help create an environment that

A law can be a powerful tool for poverty alleviation and rural development.
In most developing countries, a majority of the population lives in rural
areas. Most rural residents—and especially the poorest people—depend
on the land for their livelihoods and long-term social security. Laws that
give people access and secure rights to land and encourage investment in
the land can establish a foundation on which rural families can grow their
incomes and assets. Good land laws can help create an environment that

Many information technology initiatives have emerged in recent years with the aim of improving natural resource management. These take a variety of technological forms designed either to directly curb corruption in resource extraction and production, or to enhance information flows, facilitate citizen participation, and hold specific actors accountable. Donors can play a role in connecting the divide between development practitioners, technologists, and researchers by supporting the use of tools in programs and evaluations.

Forest landscape restoration (FLR) provides an opportunity to transform degraded lands into productive landscapes that yield numerous ecological, economic, and social benefits. Many countries have made large-scale commitments under the Bonn Challenge, a global effort to bring 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested land into restoration by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030. Achieving this commitment requires decision-makers to address the diverse ecological, sociopolitical, and economic factors that impact restoration efforts at different scales.

This guide aims to assist non-lawyers to better understand investment contracts that concern forestry projects. These "forestry contracts" can be complex, and some provisions may be difficult to understand. This guide aims to assist the reader in understanding technical provisions found in these contracts, by providing explanations for common provisions, as well as a glossary of certain legal and technical terms.

This resource is part of the CCSI’s Directory of Community Guidance on Agreements Relating to Agriculture or Forestry Investment.

We are probably at the most crucial crossroad of humanity’s history. We are changing the earth’s climate as a result of accelerated human-made Greenhouse Gases Emissions (GHG) and biodiversity loss, provoking other effects that increase the complexity of the problem and will multiply the speed with which we approach climate chaos, and social too.

In collaboration with the University of Riau, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) has established permanent plots in Tanjung Leban village, Bengkalis regency, Riau province. The site, which is owned by the local community, is about 50 km east of the city of Dumai and easily accessed by car.

The Community Land Protection Initiative provides land rights defenders with the practical skills to support communities to document and protect their indigenous and customary lands. It includes practical how-to videos, blogs and other tools that will help you design interventions to protect community land rights.

Protected areas (including areas that are nominally fully protected and those managed for multiple uses) encompass about a quarter of the total tropical forest estate. Despite growing interest in the relative value of community-managed lands and protected areas, knowledge about the biodiversity value that each sustains remains scarce in the biodiversity-rich tropics. We investigated the species occurrence of a suite of mammal and pheasant species across four protected areas and nearby community-managed lands in a biodiversity hotspot in northeast India.

Public participation theory assumes that empowering communities leads to enduring support for new initiatives. The New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy, approved in 2000, embraces this assumption and includes goals for community involvement in resolving threats to native flora and fauna. Over the last 20 years, community-based ecological restoration groups have proliferated, with between 600 and 4000 identified. Many of these groups control invasive mammals, and often include protection of native species and species reintroductions as goals.

Assessment of the progress of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets set by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the safeguarding of ecosystems from the perverse negative impacts caused by Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus (REDD+) requires the development of spatiotemporally robust and sensitive indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem health. Recently, it has been proposed that tree-community composition based on count-plot surveys could serve as a robust, sensitive, and cost-effective indicator for forest intactness in Bornean logged-over rain forests.