The National Integrated Coastal Management Framework (NICMF) and Implementation Strategy for Vanuatu is a cross-sectoral strategy enacted in 2010 that seeks to give substance to the national vision for sustainable coastal environmental management by prescribing institutional arrangements needed for management of the coastal ecosystem, and identifies relevant stakeholders to support the process for implementing management and development activities.

As negotiations on the shape of REDD+ continue at national and global levels, REDD-Net’s network of civil society organizations has identified the issue of trust as a high priority for further examination. In this issue RECOFTC explores the importance of trust in REDD+, why the success of REDD+ depends on trust, and how trust may need to come with its own set of warnings.

REDD+ is a proposed mechanism to make forests more valuable living and healthy than dead or damaged. Its advocates believe it could help fix a lot of persistent problems in forest management. Its opponents fear it will make these things worse. It's too early to tell, but this brief covers some important lessons learned after decades of successes and failures in forest management, and it asks how REDD+ could benefit, or burden, Asia-Pacific's forests and the people who need them.

Forests in Asia-Pacific are under threat. That's not a new story, though it becomes more important with every lost hectare and every family denied their means of survival. The big new question that journalists should be asking themselves, and their sources, is what climate change means for the forests of the region and the people who depend on them. This media brief provides an overview of REDD+ and things to watch as efforts to protect forests in the name of carbon gather momentum.

A single word can describe the history of forest management in the region: conflict. Too often this happens because local people are excluded from decision-making and the benefits of forest management. REDD+ is a proposed mechanism to make forests more valuable standing than destroyed. This media brief looks at the reasons for forest conflict and how REDD+ could impact this contested terrain.

Violent conflict affects three quarters of Asia’s forests and tens of millions of people. In Cambodia, for example, nearly half of the 236 land conflicts recorded in 2009 escalated to violence. Because forest conflict is such a major issue in the region, we need a better understanding of the underlying causes, impacts, and management solutions. This issues paper sheds light on these topics, drawing lessons from eight new case studies.

Incentive-based programs to reduce deforestation are expected to play an increasinglyimportant role in global efforts to protect ecosystems and sequester carbon but theirenvironmental effectiveness is not clear. We investigate program effectiveness and slippage in the context of Mexico's national payments for hydrological services program, which pays private and communal landowners to maintain forest cover on enrolled lands. To measure program impacts, we use matched controls drawn from the program applicant pool to establish counterfactual deforestation rates in the absence of payments.

Trends and Emerging Needs for 2020, Asia-Pacific Forestry Sector Outlook Study II

This paper updates an analysis of returns from major productive land uses in New Zealand carried out in 2008. Trends in profitability over time are shown, and a preliminary investigation of the relationship between land-use change towards forestry (new land planting) and forestry profitability is described.

Community forestry in Nepal is intended to reduce poverty by sustainable management of forests. Timber is one of the most high-value forest products, especially in the case of Sal (Shorea robusta) forests in the Terai region of Nepal. Despite having several advantages, including high value forests on fertile land, connection with transportation networks, and being close to regional markets, community forests in the Terai region produce little or no timber from their Sal forests. This research looks at what is affecting the production of Sal timber from community forests.

This guide intends to assist forestry lecturers in Southeast Asia in developing their forest policy curricula with a particular focus on policy analysis. As an initial step in this direction, it is hoped that lecturers will use the guide to tailor their courses to the specific requirements of their students whose experiences and lessons will be shared with others in the future; this will produce better grounded and more relevant sets of course materials and handouts in the future.

The lowlands of the Caribbean slope of northern Costa Rica constitute one of the priority hotspots for biodiversity conservation in Mesoamerica.Nevertheless, the landscape has undergone a process of strong fragmentation that threatens its connectivity between protected areas in Costa Rica and southeastern Nicaragua.