19 July 2016, 18:30-9:50

This publication responds to calls in regional and global forestry forums to strengthen capacity for effectively developing and implementing payment schemes for environmental services in sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, the African Forestry and Wildlife Commission, at its 18th session, called for enhancement of the institutional capacities of member countries and the sharing of knowledge on payment schemes for forest environmental services at the national and subregional levels.

The Commission has been in the forefront of promoting good governance and accountability in the land sector. Progress in the land sector has been mixed. Through the effort of the government, support agencies and other stakeholders the Commission was able to devolve its function to the 47 counties through the County Land Management Boards (CLMBs). The CLMBs have in effect devolved land services throughout Kenya. However, achieving land, better land governance, accountability in the land sector and ensuring secure land rights for all Kenyan is still to be achieved.

Between late 2014 and June 2016, South Africa experienced an El Niño-related drought, which various reports claim to be the worst meteorological drought in the southern Africa region in 35 years. In February 2016, the Southern Africa Food Lab (SAFL) commissioned a drought impact assessment (DIA) in the Mopani district of Limpopo province, as part of its Agro-ecology Awareness (AeA) project, and Supporting Smallholder Agriculture programme. This report provides the findings of this assessment.

There is by now substantial consensus within the development community over the need for a more climate smart agriculture, which consists of three defining principles: enhancing agriculture’s resilience to climate change, reducing agricultural green-house gas emissions, and sustainably increasing production. With 795 million people still not getting their minimum dietary requirements, there is little scope for trade-offs between increasing production and improving agriculture’s environmental impacts.

A partir de meados da década de 2000, a província de Tete passou a constituir um centro de atracção do grande investimento internacional, com particular impacto ao nível da indústria extractiva. De acordo com as informações disponibilizadas pela Direcção Provincial dos Recursos Minerais, o auge da prospecção e pesquisa aconteceu nos anos de 2009 e 2010, sobretudo ao nível do carvão, zinco, platina, ouro e metais básicos. Em 2011 a mineradora Vale iniciou o processo de extracção de carvão, em 2012 começou a Rio Tinto e, em 2013, a empresa Jindal.

Community based goat breed improvement was established to improve the productivity performance of goat through selective breeding and to demonstrate community based utilization and conservation of local breed. The community based breeding with 56 participant farmers have been established since March 2012 at Dinzaz Village Gumara Makseget watershed. 12 bucks user group were established for easy management of the selected bucks. The data were recorded through trained enumerators and best bucks were selected and distributed for buck user group.

This brief presents an integrated CF-CCA framework for practitioners working in rural contexts, including natural resource management user groups and non-governmental and civil society organizations. The framework draws on an integrated landscape approach (Reed et al. 2014) to natural resource management, which aims to reconcile trade-offs, balance competing demands, integrate policies and identify priorities across different land-use sectors.

The rising conflicts between farmers and pastoralists threaten Nigeria’s food security, economic stability and ecological balance. Instead of ‘silently’ resolving the issues, the Nigerian government should intensify all means to end these crimes against livelihoods and address the root causes, like climate change, displacement and appropriation of grazing reserves.

Decomposition, nutrient, and isotopic (deltasup(13)C and deltasup(15)N) dynamics during 1 year were studied for leaf and twig litters of Pinus densiflora, Castanea crenata, Erigeron annuus, and Miscanthus sinensis growing on a highly weathered soil with constrained nutrient supply using litterbags in a cool temperate region of South Korea. Decay constant (kl year) ranged from 0.58 to 1.29/year, and mass loss ranged from 22.36 to 58.43 % among litter types.

South Asia is on the front line in confronting the implications of climate change and addressing the consequences for security.

To analyse this and more, the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change (GMACCC) has just released its report “Climate Change and Security in South Asia”. GMACCC is a global network of military and security experts working on the security implications of climate change. President BIPSS, Major General A N M Muniruzzaman, ndc, psc (Retd) is the Chairman of GMACCC. He is also a lead author of this report.

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is a constitutionally recognized semiautonomous region in northern Iraq. Its government, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), based in Erbil, has the right, under the Iraqi constitution of 2005, to exercise legislative, executive, and judicial powers according to the constitution, except in what is listed therein as exclusive powers of the federal authorities. The Iraqi constitution defines the Kurdistan Region as a federal entity of Iraq. KRG has a parliamentary democracy with a regional assembly that consists of 111 seats.