Smallholder farmers and indigenous communities must cope with the opportunities and threats presented by rapidly spreading estate crops in the frontier of the agricultural market economy. Smallholder communities are subject to considerable speculation by outsiders, yet large-scale agriculture presents tradeoffs that they must navigate. We initiated a study in Sintang, West Kalimantan in 2012 and have returned annually for the last four years, building the baselines for a longer-term landscape approach to reconciling conservation and development tradeoffs in situ.

Recent decades have seen a rapid movement towards decentralising forest rights and tenure to local communities and indigenous groups in both developing and developed nations. Attribution of local and community rights to forests appears to be gathering increasing momentum in many tropical developing countries. Greater local control of forest resources is a response to the failure of government agencies to exercise adequate stewardship over forests and to ensure that the values of all stakeholders are adequately protected.

Competing interests in land for agriculture and commodity production in tropical human-dominated landscapes make forests and biodiversity conservation particularly challenging. Establishment of protected areas in this regard is not functioning as expected due to exclusive ecological focus and poor recognition of local people’s traditional forest use and dependence. In recent years, multifunctional land-use systems such as agroforestry have widely been promoted as an efficient land-use in such circumstances, although their conservation effectiveness remains poorly investigated.

International market forces have played an increasingly important role in shaping land use dynamics through complex supply chains. In Costa Rica, the shift from a net loss to a net gain in forest cover was facilitated by forest plantations and the replacement of extensive cropland and pastures by export-oriented, high-yielding crops. However, agricultural intensification generated several feedbacks affecting forests. We analyzed the interactions between Costa Rica’s agricultural and forestry sectors associated with the use of wood pallets for commodity exports over 1985–2013.

To understand the rainfall-runoff process and sediment delivery process in headwater catchment, hydrological observation and the monitoring of suspended sediment concentrations (SSC) was conducted at a forested headwater catchment in Japanese Alps region. The study site is Nodagasawa watershed (37 ha) within Terasawayama Station, Research Forest of Shinshu University, Japan. At this catchment, notably quick rainfall-runoff response was observed as with the runoff characteristics reported in other catchment underlain by granite.

It was not all smooth process to transfer of jurisdiction to Terasawayama Station from a part of Terasawayama national forest at 1968. This report supplement previous researches that based on historical documents owned Tera community by using documents of Shinshu University. It became clear that a community's movement against the transfer was caused by not only insecure about permanent use of forest resources but also tension concerning water right within the community.

This paper explores some of the challenges involved in replicating and scaling-up systematic land registration over a large and diverse geographical coverage and how programmes can work through decentralised government systems..This resource was published in the frame of the Land Investment for Transformation (LIFT) Programme. For more information;please check: https://landportal.org/community/projects/land-investment-transformation...

This report presents findings from a rapid field investigation into levels of certificate uptake..This resource was published in the frame of the Land Investment for Transformation (LIFT) Programme. For more information;please check: https://landportal.org/community/projects/land-investment-transformation...

Over the past 30 years, The Center has worked to secure the rights of local communities over forest resources and to increase their participation in forest management to ensure optimum social, economic and environmental benefits.

The relative scarcity of land resources to meet the growing needs of land-users has compelled land specialists to consider the need for a better system in the proper use and management of land resource. Forestlands comprise a major component of the national land and are currently the most degraded areas.

Secure land tenure in rural landscapes is widely recognized as an essential foundation for achieving a range of economic development goals. However, forest areas in low and middle-income countries face particular challenges in strengthening the security of land and resource tenure. Forest peoples are often among the poorest and most politically marginalized communities in their national contexts, and their tenure systems are often based on customary, collective rights that have insufficient formal legal protection.