In West and Central Africa, home to 25% of the world’s tropical forests, the climate challenge is set against the threat of deforestation. In light of this threat, national laws and regulations seek to protect, restore, and manage the use of these forests for national development.

International initiatives such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) have identified that strengthening national laws to improve forest governance is an important tool to strike a balance between protection of forests and national development.

This executive summary offers recommendations based on lessons learned from Ghana, Liberia and RoC, for other countries of West and Central Africa who are considering how to embed REDD+ social safeguards into their national laws.

The full report is available from here.

Rangelands are recognized for their importance and value in providing society with valuable products and ecosystem services. In such ecosystems, effective management is needed for sustainable plant growth and survival in a context characterized by rainfall unreliability, poor soil nutrient status and high uncontrolled grazing. Therefore, cost-effective techniques/tools for slowing down and eventually reversing this degradation are needed. This paper promotes identifying and combining various tools for degraded arid ecosystems as strategies aimed for rangeland restoration/ rehabilitation.

Climate change is shaped and understood through assumptions of causality and temporality that enable and constrain feasible approaches to environmental governance, approaches that may reproduce inequalities. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) provides an entry point to examine the intersecting assumptions and politics around climate change and how it is managed. Actors in the REDD+ regime promote particular assumptions about the causality and temporality of climate change, which are often privileged over local ways of being and knowing.

In some landscapes, effective conservation of wildlife habitat requires extending beyond the boundaries of reserves and addressing stewardship of private lands. This approach could be especially valuable for the conservation of farm ponds, which are abundant and serve key agricultural functions on private lands. Though farm ponds also provide wildlife habitat, little is known about how they are managed or how values and beliefs of their owners relate to their quality.

Flooding is a routine occurrence throughout much of the monsoonal tropics. Despite well-developed repertoires of response, agrarian societies have been ‘double exposed’ to intensifying climate change and agro-industrialization over the past several decades, often in ways that alter both the regularity of flood events and individual and community capacity for response.

David Barrio - Oficial de Asuntos Económicos de la División de Desarrollo Sostenible y Asentamientos Humanos de la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) habla sobre el ODS 15. La desertificación y la deforestación son dos grandes retos para el desarrollo sostenible de la región, pues la pérdida o daño a los recursos naturales supone graves consecuencias ambientales y económicas.

The climate crisis demands urgent action, yet we live in a politically polarized and paralyzed world. As governments and other actors struggle over climate change, our environment is irreversibly changing. A United Nations report on the Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services revealed that three-quarters of the earth’s land-based environment has been significantly altered by human actions.

A Portucel Moçambique está a desenvolver um projecto florestal integrado com uma indústria de produção de pasta para papel em Moçambique, assegurando a partilha de valor para promover o desenvolvimento socioeconómico sustentável das comunidades e melhorar o conhecimento e o respeito pelo ambiente.

Presentation on Cost-effectiveness of erosion control measures on sloping lands, delivered during the CACIP Regional Consultation meeting which was held in Dushanbe Tajikistan on the 27th of September 2019.

CACIP Региональная консультация. Презентация: Программа по адаптации к изменению климата и смягчению его последствий в бассейне Аральского моря (CAMP4ASB)

Presentation on Measurement of the Costs of Land Degradation in the Mountains of the Republic of Tajikistan delivered during the CACIP Regional Consultation Meeting held in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.