We need to see a dramatic increase in properly managed areas over the next 20 years, not a return to the business-as-usual exploitation of forests. Ollivier Girard/CIFOR

Nearly 20 years ago, when I was working as a PhD student with the Tropenbos Cameroon Program, we hosted a team of researchers from the Center for International Forestry Research studying sustainable forest management in Africa. The team needed to test its criteria and indicators in an area with a forest management plan. The only problem: the country’s forestry law had only recently been adopted, and so no forest management plan had been set up yet.

Management of the forests of the Congo Basin in Central Africa, my home, has come a long way in the past 20 years. Before 1992, there was only one Ministry of Forestry in Gabon; in other countries forestry issues were tucked away inside the various ministries of agriculture. There was little discussion of the role of forests in mitigating climate change and no mention of it in the laws of Central African countries.

Laws and policies did not provide for the role of communities or women in forest management and access. Forest concession management plans, the first step in sustainable forest management, were almost unheard of and rarely in use. The importance of forests in ensuring food security and nutrition for tens of millions of people was taken for granted. China had not yet arrived in Africa. Biofuels were still in research labs and there were few oil palm plantations. The idea that forests transcended national borders and should be managed collectively remained a long way off.

But vast changes swept across the region shortly after the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) – or Rio Summit. Ministries governing forests alone were introduced in country after country, along with supporting institutions. Officers went to work drafting new and extensive legal frameworks for forests.

Forest management needs to evolve from a colonial model that was ‘exported’ to the tropics in the 1950’s, existing forest management plans need to be implemented, and law enforcement and governance need to be bolstered.

The Forest Stewardship Council was born in 1993 and the first certified forests appeared in Africa in 2005. The European Union launched the FLEGT (Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade) Action Plan in 2003. The nearly 50 percent increase in population across the region put a spotlight on the critical link between forests and food security and nutrition. The progress of forest-based climate mitigation schemes at the UN Climate Change conferences has seen an increased understanding amongst African policymakers of the importance of the Congo Basin forests.

While not an exhaustive list, it’s clear the sustainable forest management in Central Africa seems to have made some progress. But there are still some questions in the air – and a conference held by the Center for International Forestry Research next week will aim to provide insight for researchers and development institutions alike: What has really been done? What has been the impact of these changes? Where are we today? And what are the challenges ahead? What are the priorities for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners?

Annual deforestation rates have been comparatively low over the past 20 years, however there are strong indications that Central African forests are at a critical turning point.

If current rates of demographic growth remain constant, the population of the Congo Basin will double in the next 25 to 30 years. Forest roads associated with logging are slowly penetrating previously untouched forest areas, increasing accessibility and opening up forests to more indirect threats.

Central African countries are facing large-scale acquisition of land by foreign investors to develop agro-industries, and the mining sector. Vulnerability of forests and forest-dependent populations to climate change is a cause for concern at the local, national and international levels.

Legal frameworks put in place to promote the sustainable management of forests are inconsistent. Informal and illegal activities have continued to grow uncontrollably. Knowledge on available resources, their dynamics and their interactions still seem insufficient. Problems of governance and corruption persist.

We have come a long way in 20 years in Central Africa, but there is still much more to be done. Forest management needs to evolve from a colonial model that was ‘exported’ to the tropics in the 1950’s, existing forest management plans need to be implemented, and law enforcement and governance need to be bolstered. We need to see a dramatic increase in properly managed areas over the next 20 years, not a return to the business-as-usual exploitation of forests.

Richard is the Regional Coordinator of CIFOR’s Central Africa office. He can be contacted at r.atyi@cgiar.org

Without the extensive forests of the Congo Basin, rainfall processes would be severely disrupted.

Responses to climate change are grouped into two main categories: mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change) and adaptation (adjusting livelihoods and life styles due to the influences of climate change). Amongst adaptation strategies, ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA) is an approach that promotes ways to use natural resources and biodiversity to help develop adaptation strategies for vulnerable communities. In this context, recent studies highlight the role that the Congo Basin forests play in generating rainfall, both regionally and in the continent as a whole.

Rainfall in an ecosystem originates from three main sources: moisture that is already in the atmosphere, moisture from outside the region, and evapotranspiration from surfaces within the ecosystem (forests and other land uses). Pokam et al. studied how the climate of the Congo Basin is primarily a result of moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and the recycling process of evapotranspiration. Previous studies had established that tropical forests such as the Congo Basin can evaporate up to 1 to 2 meters of water per year. In addition, research by Makarieva et al. suggests that forest cover in the region acts like a pump, moving oceanic moisture towards the continent to eventually become rainfall in that region.

With this role of forests as rainmakers in mind, Nogherotto et al. explored the impacts of deforestation in the Congo Basin on regional hydrological cycles, including the effects on the African monsoon. They modeled scenarios where the Congo Basin is forested versus those in which it is deforested (that is, modeling a situation where forest cover is transformed to short grass cover). Their findings indicate that deforestation in the Congo Basin would lead to modifications in rain behavior in the Sahel and over southern equatorial Africa.

Taken together, these three studies show how the Congo Basin acts as a mechanism for pumping water from the Atlantic Ocean, from underground sources, and from the soil. These sources then mix with atmospheric water, leading to the generation of rainfall both locally and on a sub-continental scale. Without the extensive forests of the Congo Basin, this process would be severely disrupted. In addition, these studies help highlight other important functions of the Congo Basin forests beyond biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation.

With the growing scientific evidence of the multiple roles that the Congo Basin forests play at regional, continental and global scales, the case for forest conservation, for good forest management, and for multiple income streams to support the forests’ multiple roles becomes stronger. Given their rainmaker role, sustaining the Congo Basin forests might be one of the foundations for EBA to climate change for much of Africa.

Denis Sonwa is a scientist with CIFOR’s Forests and Environment Programme. Denis can be contacted at d.sonwa@cgiar.org

About 40 percent of food in the developing world is produced by smallholder farmers, often in complex multi-functional landscapes, dependent on integrated crop management. CIFOR/Ollivier Girard

Recent news headlines, a plethora of scientific publications and the creation of new academic think tanks all reflect growing concerns over how to achieve global food security — a centerpiece of donor commitments and the focus of many research and development organisations.

The renewed emphasis on global food security is stimulated by projections that show the global human population will grow from 7 billion to an estimated 9 billion people by 2050.

Central to the current discourse on food security is the perceived need to increase food production to feed the 870 million people — one in eight worldwide, according to U.N. food agencies — who do not have enough to eat.

Food security concerns are also in the news as the world counts down to 2015, the year the 2000 U.N. Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halving the proportion of hungry people in the world must be met.

Scientific and popular literature alike are replete with calls for increased food production to solve the hunger problem which, according to some estimates, should be up to as much as 100 to 110 percent.

For example, in his 2012 book “One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?”, author Gordon Conway, a professor of international development and director of advocacy group Agriculture for Impact at Imperial College London, emphasizes the importance of reducing hunger and poverty in part by significantly increasing food production.

It is a remarkably compelling and simple concept: more mouths to feed equates to the need to produce more food.

However, the pervasive model of agricultural production is that of intensification, which leads to a need for more fertilizer, more water and quite probably the conversion of remaining natural ecosystems to arable farmland.

The intensification of agriculture experienced through the green revolution of the 1940s to 1970s, which led to the development of high-yielding varieties of cereal grains, expansion of irrigation and greater use of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, certainly resulted in increased yields, but it also came at the expense of the wider environment.

Furthermore, a paradox of the current model of food production is the inequity that characterizes it.

There are almost one billion hungry and nutrient-poor people on earth, yet more than one billion are overweight or obese, a figure increasing each day – along with many waistlines.

Simply put, each morning many millions of people are facing a daily “feast or famine”.

Some contend we grow enough food to provide a healthy and nutritious diet for current and projected human populations, but uneven distribution, a lack of purchasing power and policies that favour industrial agriculture mean that it often doesn’t reach those that need it most.

Food production need not be solely based on intensive agriculture focused on a few, high-yielding crops.

Estimates show that 40 percent of the food in the developing world is produced by smallholder farmers, often in complex multi-functional landscapes, which depend on integrated crop management.

In addition, recent estimates from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) suggest that around 1.6 billion people rely on forests and other natural systems in some way for their diets, health and wider livelihoods.

Forests, and the wider landscapes in which they occur, potentially have a considerable role to play in the emerging strategies to achieve global food security.

Forests not only contribute to diverse and nutritious diets, particularly for the poorest members of society, but also sustain agriculture through the provision of critical ecosystem services such as pollination, soil stabilization and watershed protection.

However, recognition of the role of forests in food security is not new: 1985 was designated the year of Forests and Food Security and a special issue of the FAO journal, Unasylva was subsequently published.

The forests and food security agenda was gradually replaced by other pressing development concerns. Until recently, it was off the agenda altogether.

However, with “mainstream” food security issues coming to the fore, the role of forests in securing nutritional and food security is back in the frame.

This week, the FAO International Conference on Forests for Food Security and Nutrition in Rome will feature discussion on how we can ensure that sustainable food production can take place without compromising the wider environment.

We seem to have come full circle. Given the evidence, we should not be surprised that the issue of forests and food security is once again at the forefront of the international development agenda: the challenge will be to keep it there.

Women in Indonesia’s forests are seen as better than men at taking care of family resources. They are thereby intimately involved in family efforts to gain, maintain, and sometimes hide wealth. CIFOR/Tomas Munita

In recent months, two new “third-wave feminist” writings have become the talk of the town: Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Why Women Still Can’t Have it All and Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. Critics have argued that such “elite women” are too concerned about their own affect — personal satisfaction, prestige, comfort — and too little concerned with issues of social justice.

Specifically, critics are dissatisfied with Slaughter’s and Sandberg’s inadequate attention to more fundamental, structural disadvantages (livelihoods, equitable pay, working conditions) of non-elite women.

However, the voices of such “elite women” bringing these issues forward for discussion is one of the ways that forest-dwelling (and other “non-elite”) women can strengthen efforts to move forward on related issues of concern to them. “Elite women” talking about the need for help with childcare, a more equitable division of domestic labor, a stronger political voice, in some sense “gives permission” to others to discuss these issues that are of central concern to women in a variety of circumstances.

As an anthropologist who has lived and worked with rural peoples throughout the forests of the world for over 40 years, a fair amount of my professional attention has been focused on the lives of women in tropical forests. These experiences have convinced me that these women are not so very different from elite women.

Forest women take pride in their productive work, and they struggle with their desire to better look after their children – what we call “work-life balance”. For over a year, I lived with Uma’ Jalan Kenyah women in the remote center of Borneo. When introduced to birth control, they quickly grasped the potential to time births when husbands were present (their men often left in short-term search of cash), and to reduce the time spent nursing their children, thus freeing them for their central productive role: providing their families with rice. They are every bit as personally invested in this role as elite American women are in their careers.

Forest women seek wealth and prestige – what we call “ambition”. Women in Indonesia’s forests are seen as better than men at taking care of family resources. They are thereby intimately involved in family efforts to gain, maintain, and sometimes hide wealth. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, women and men in the same household keep their incomes separate; and women are actively involved in efforts to make money selling non-timber forest products and agricultural produce.

“Poor women” want knowledge, intimacy and self-actualization – what we call  “affect”. The care taken by Kenyah women to produce beautiful beadwork goes far beyond what is required by practical standards. Although prestige accrues to those who bead well, it is also clear that they take pride in the quality of their work – just as we may delight in our professional or personal efforts as an element of self-actualization. I also remember a young woman in the forests of Jambi, Sumatra, who cried as she recounted how her parents had taken her out of school to marry (even though she loved her husband); she longed to study, to learn. She worked with our CIFOR project partly to fulfill this longing to learn and to contribute.

Forest women, like elite women, have work-related emergencies that can interfere with their family responsibilities. Slaughter emphasized having to stay late at the office, which both required emergency childcare arrangements and conflicted with her desire to take good care of her children.  Among “poor women”, the emergencies are more likely to be brought on by weather conditions or warfare or poor health. But such emergencies are no less demanding of women’s wholehearted attention.

While I was living in Borneo a terrible flood came, ruining the rice on which the women had labored for three long months. In the midst of their dismay about their lost effort and worry about their future, they had to quickly gather the wood floating by in the flood (to use as firewood); and from their canoes, they paddled from submerged rice stalk to rice stalk, harvesting the edible grasshoppers that were feasting on whatever grains of rice remained. Someone else — usually either an elder or a young child, too sick, weak or untrained to help in the emergency — had to be found to look after the children, wash the clothes and prepare the meals.

What is the difference, from the standpoint of work-life balance, between these emergencies and those requiring an elite woman to return to the office for a late-night meeting?

One difference is that the former may be one of life or death for an individual or a family. But the latter could, as Sandberg so eloquently portrays, be the difference between policies that harm or help women employees in a company or women citizens in a country (depending on the scale at which elite women contribute).  Elite women’s awareness of issues that affect women can (though does not necessarily) have ripple effects that positively influence many non-elite women.

There is no doubt that far greater attention needs to be focused on revamping global structures to expand social justice (see recent stories in Al-Jazeera and USA Today). Besides making better lives for themselves, gender-aware elite women, women with power, can have a positive effect on the working conditions, the salaries and the “work-life balance” of women (and men) affected by the policies they help to make.

The blatant global inequities that exist are a travesty and will surely be seen historically as a stain on our era.  But one way to begin to address these inequities is for us all to analyze our own contributions to gender inequities—as Sandberg and Slaughter have done quite eloquently—and communicate those so that others might consider and learn and begin to act differently.

As such, the voices of “elite women” such as Sandberg and Slaughter can contribute to addressing social justice, even though they do not knowingly target such issues.

Satellite Image. Digital Globe/350.org

BOGOR, Indonesia (16 April, 2013) – A recent article in The Economist magazine asserted that the air temperature of the planet has been flat for the past 15 years despite a steady increase in the greenhouse gas concentration of the atmosphere.

The authors find the lack of warming surprising, given the large volume of greenhouse gases that were pumped into the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010.

They then provided a lucid explanation of climate sensitivity and suggested that the apparent pause in temperature increase may mean that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration could lead to a lower than expected temperatures and that as a result, perhaps social and environmental policy should focus on adaptation rather than mitigation.

We question both the claim that global temperature has stabilized and the policy conclusions drawn.

Scientists always struggle with inflection points in trends. It is difficult to predict when a dramatic change in a trend is likely to occur, and normally it can only be done long afterwards.

Society asks scientists to make reasonable guesses about the future, whether it is in markets, disease spread, or rates of deforestation.

When the past is no longer a good predictor of the future, our ability to do this is weak in all fields. However, we still need to make economic policy, health policy and environmental policy. We have to accept that no matter how good our science is, the information about the future will always be imperfect, and that we have to act based on imperfect information.

Is the global temperature increase slowing down?

There is not one, simple measure of the global temperature, but well-respected datasets are the HADCRUT4 and NASA’s GISS.

Interested readers should have a closer look these datasets. They have different approaches to filling in spatial gaps in the temperature record, but they both underscore the same point: one needs to look at the long-term trend to understand changes in global temperature, not just the last 30 years.

The figure below presents the HADCRUT4 dataset used in The Economist article to draw their policy conclusion.

Figure 1: The HADCRUT4 dataset.

Temperatures were relatively steady between 1850 and 1900 (black line). There was a reasonably robust increase in temperature between 1900 and 1940 (red line), a 30-year hiatus (even a slight negative trend) between 1940 and 1970 (green line), followed by more than 30 years of very steep increases in temperature (blue line).

Some argue that there was an inflection point in the 30-year trend around 2006. Others suggest this happened earlier because of the very high temperature anomaly measured in 1998 (a year with the strongest El Niño of the century). One could argue either way, but it is not clear that we can detect a slowing signal against the background noise.

For us, the take home message is that 8 out of the last 10 years have been the warmest on record. The 2000s were much warmer than the 1990s, and (even since 1970) there have been periods of faster and slower growth in surface air temperatures.

We had a period in the 1990s where it looked like the best scientific estimate of climate sensitivity to CO2 was below the actual rate of temperature increase; we have a period in the 2010s where it looks like the best scientific estimate is too high.

So while the temperature curves drawn by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a scientific body that provides comprehensive scientific assessments about the risk of climate change — tend to be smoother than reality, we really still do not fully know the future and we cannot predict the next temperature turning point.

However, the probability of an increase is much greater than that of a downturn. Our best predictions about the future come from the climate models. A recent study in Nature Geoscience suggests that the early models have done a good job in predicting the recent temperature change.

The perils of focusing on one parameter of climate change

Science continuously brings new knowledge, which helps to reduce uncertainty of predictions. Some of these new findings paint a grimmer picture of our future climate, while others will do the opposite. Nothing would make us happier than if it turns out that the worst case, or even medium case prediction by IPCC becomes more unlikely and does not happen.

But, throwing out long-term trends based on a few observations and making misleading interpretations are dangerous. The Economist article makes two principal errors in its analysis to draw its policy relevant conclusion.

First, the analysis is limited to one type of data – surface air temperature. An article by the American Geophysical Union noted: “Many researchers and professionals work with data from outside their core field of training and lack the knowledge, time, and motivation to thoroughly survey and synthesize the literature and documentation on unfamiliar data sets.”

Focusing on one parameter of climate change, as the article did, is inappropriate for making policy recommendations.

The heat content of the oceans continues to increase, oceanic circulation patterns continue to change, glaciers continue to melt, etc. In fact, the majority of the excess heat in the earth system can be found in the oceans, not the atmosphere. Many of the more damaging aspects of climate change are not captured in measures of surface air temperature.

Second, the article wrongly focuses on the effects of doubling atmospheric CO2. While this is a useful measure of climate sensitivity, there is nothing in the emission trend that suggests that our emissions will stop when atmospheric concentrations reach this level.

There are several scenarios on the table where we hit 2.5 times preindustrial CO2 concentrations by the end of the century. So avoiding emissions reductions in favor of simply adapting to changes is not really an option and it is unfortunate that the article suggests that it is.

So what should scientists be telling climate policy makers?

It is clear that there is uncertainty in the temperature sensitivity of the climate system to greenhouse gases; science has never hidden that fact. Furthermore, we know that the environmental impact of CO2 goes beyond just climate: ocean acidification from rising CO2 levels can cause serious problems for these ecosystems.

We do not think the proposed inflection provides a basis for policy just yet, and it should also not be used as an argument for doing nothing. Scientists still need to tell policy makers that while we should welcome any slowdown it as it gives us some space to put in place measures to limit future damage; we still must put those measures in place.

Current global efforts to curb climate change are lagging seriously behind the schedule needed to get on a 2 degree path. Even if the next one or two decades does demonstrate that the global warming is slower than we anticipated, it would only serve to reduce the gap between the political reality and the climate necessity. The risk of overshooting in current climate mitigation efforts is minuscule.

The saying goes that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Legal systems embody the principle of “duty of care” that establish responsibility when negligent behavior causes damage to society or to third parties.

In international policy we have the “precautionary principle”, which says that when activities raise threats to human health or the environment, mitigation action is warranted even in the absence of certainty of all of the cause-and-effect relationships. These ideas are at the heart of many of the policy positions of developing countries and of the international discourse on climate justice.

The science is settled enough to warrant action to mitigate climate change. Human activity is changing the climate, this is causing harm and the harm will increase if we do nothing.

We have principles embodied in common sense, national law, and international agreements. Given the potential for damage to the climate system and for ensuing negative impacts on people, the conclusion of The Economist article appears reckless.

The world should apply the precautionary principle and limit emissions.

Land cleared for oil palm plantation, East Kalimantan, Indonesia. CIFOR/Mokhamad Edliadi

BOGOR, Indonesia (12 April, 2013) – Norway’s government pension fund – one of the world’s largest – has withdrawn US$ 314 million in investments from a string of companies that it says produce palm oil “unsustainably” – a move environmental advocates are likely to welcome because of links between the industry and deforestation.

Palm oil is found in roughly 50 percent of packaged products on supermarket shelves and interest in using oil palm as a feedstock for biofuel is growing.

Although oil palm can, under optimal conditions, produce more than five times the yield of other vegetable oil crops and is seen by many as a driver of economic development in rural regions, research has shown that its production has encouraged deforestation in South East Asia, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of hectares of tropical forests.

In March, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global released its 2012 Annual Report announcing that it had sold its stakes in 23 of the world’s largest palm oil companies, reducing its investments in the Indonesian and Malaysian palm oil industry by more than 40 percent.

“Several palm oil producers were excluded from the portfolio because their long-term business model was deemed unsustainable,” said the report.

The decision comes in the same year that the fund became a member of the Carbon Disclosure Project, an international not-for-profit organization that “works with market forces to motivate companies to disclose their impacts on the environment.” The organization, which is backed by more than 722 institutional investors representing over US$ 87 trillion in assets, provides investors with information including insight into companies’ greenhouse gas emissions and strategies for managing climate change, deforestation and water.

While Norway has pledged billions of dollars to combatting deforestation through the U.N. mechanism known as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), its government pension fund has in the past attracted attention for its investments in the palm oil industry.

The pension fund’s decision is likely, among other factors such as changes in procurement policies and advocacy campaigns, to put more pressure on palm oil producers to consider environmental sustainability more carefully.

The decision to divest was made by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), the fund manager, independently of Council of Ethics investigations into oil palm companies. Earlier decisions also resulted in divestments from tobacco, timber and gold mining companies.

A rise in sustainable and ethical investment

The role of investors in driving environmental best practice has received increasing attention in the past decade, in particular due to sustainability standards developed by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the World Bank.

IFC’s Sustainability Framework – which outlines its policies on environmental and social sustainability, performance standards and access to information—was one of the fist environmental and social investment standards to emerge. It has become globally recognised as a benchmark for environmental and social risk management in the private sector.

The World Bank has also developed Environmental, Health, and Safety guidelinesthat its projects must abide by. However an independent evaluation by the IFC has criticised the World Bank for poor compliance with respect to these standards, illustrating how difficult these standards can be to monitor.

A similar safeguard mechanism is the Equator Principles, which is used to determine and manage the social and environmental risks associated with loans and investments that fund large-scale development projects. A number of other multi-stakeholder initiatives designed to support and guide sustainable investment practices have been formed, including the UN backed Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI), the Natural Capital Declaration, the OECD-DAC and Basel III.

Several international and commercial banks have signed up to these initiatives, and are now working towards ensuring that the projects they help finance meet stricter environmental and social standards.

What this means for the palm oil industry

Palm oil producers often look to national, commercial banks for funds to expand or create new plantations. However, with some large international banks becoming increasingly environmentally and socially aware, sustainability is playing an increasingly important role in this decision making process.

Ten banks and investment funds have now become members of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) the dominant certification scheme for palm oil. Although the overall influence of these ten financiers may be limited within the palm oil sector as long as funding can be sourced elsewhere, those palm oil companies who choose to seek funding from RSPO-member banks are now required to become members of the RSPO themselves and commit to plantation certification.

Will other investors follow suit?

The decision by the Norwegian government’s pension fund will certainly contribute to increased pressure on the palm oil producers, but without growing support for sustainability issues from the world’s top three palm oil consumers, India, Indonesia and China, and the banks and investors operating within these countries, these standards may have limited impact.

Evidence suggests that current demand for palm oil will continue to drive new investments and additional land use cover change in Indonesia and Malaysia as well as new growth areas such as North East Brazil, Columbia and Cameroon.

Stakeholders across the palm oil sector will now wait to see if other investors follow suit — whether such investor initiatives will also begin to hold retailers and manufacturers accountable for the palm oil they source, and what impact these initiatives will have on the environmental and social practices of the palm oil industry.

A woman prepares wild, edible mushrooms from Zambia’s miombo woodlands for drying, Northwestern Zambia. CIFOR/Fiona Paumgarten

BOGOR, Indonesia (7 April, 2013)_World Health Day is a time when — as a nutritionist — I think about the links between nutrition and infection.

Current estimates suggest that 30 percent of global child mortality is directly or indirectly linked to malnutrition. This is because infection and malnutrition are linked in a cyclical manner: malnutrition decreases immune function and increases risk of infection (e.g. vitamin A deficiency increases risk of diarrhea and respiratory tract infections) – while infection increases nutritional requirements and the risk of becoming malnourished (e.g. the malaria parasite destroys red blood cells and can result in iron deficiencies).

Forests contribute to both human nutrition and human health and disease. They supply an estimated 75 percent of usable water globally by providing natural filtration and storage ecosystem services. In poor communities that don’t have clean drinking water, virtually every child can be infected with intestinal parasites and suffer from diarrhea, increasing their likelihood of being anemic and stunted.

Change in land use and forest cover has also been linked to changes in rates of malaria. In the Peruvian Amazon, the areas high deforestation had eight times higher rate of mosquitoes bites in than in sites with less deforestation.

This is because human-altered landscapes where water can pool (road ditches, mining pits, and areas of poor clearing) provide a fertile breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. A study from Brazil showed that a 4.3 percent change in forest cover was associated with almost 50 percent higher incidence of malaria.

Forests and trees are also an essential source of fuelwood. A paper by CIFOR staff explores how fuelwood scarcity may pose multiple risks to women’s health: smoke from less-preferred fuelwood species can pose greater risks to respiratory track health. Also, women have less time to procure and prepare healthy food when they have to travel further to find fuelwood.

On the food security and nutrition side of the equation, wild foods obtained from forests and farmland with tree cover (such as fallows and agroforests), most often include fruits, vegetables and bushmeat: good sources of vitamin A and iron.

In Tanzania we found that children who had consumed wild foods from the forest had more diverse and nutritious diets. Although wild foods contributed only two percent of the children’s total calorie intake, they accounted for over 30 percent of vitamin A and almost 20 percent of iron that children had consumed per day (Powell et al. in press).

Bush meat plays an important role in diets of many people living in rural areas of developing countries. Bush meat is important not only as a source of protein, but also because it is a good source of iron and other micronutrients essential for health, growth and development (iron from meat is better absorbed than iron from plants).

A recent study from Madagascar found that without access to bushmeat, approximately 30 percent more children would suffer from anemia.

It is clear that we cannot overcome global malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies without combined improvements to diet and reductions in infection rates.

This year, World Health Day focuses on high blood pressure, a disease that is strongly associated with diet and body weight. Forests may be able to help with high blood pressure too.

New work at CIFOR is currently looking at the role of forests in ensuring access to and consumption of adequate amounts of fruits and vegetables.

Increasing fruit and vegetable consumption not only improves intake of certain micronutrients such as vitamin A, but has also been associated with reduced blood pressure. Look for our new work on forests for food security and nutrition coming out soon!

CIFOR’s research on forests and nutrition is part of the CGIAR Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry and is supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and The Austrian Development Agency.

Few studies have dealt with people’s perceptions about the emergence of tree plantations. Bill Collison

While timber harvested from natural tropical forests is expected to reach “peak production” in the coming decades, the area occupied by tree plantations to supply future wood demand is concurrently increasing. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), tree plantations expanded by about 5 million hectares each year from 2000 to 2010, and expansion of both large- and small-scale tree plantations is underway in many tropical countries.

In many cases, tree plantations are being established on sites that have been deforested for decades, or in places that do not naturally support forest. While tropical deforestation is almost invariably perceived as negative by the public, what about when “no trees” give way to “lots of trees”? Numerous studies on the impacts of tree plantations have focused on environmental issues yet far fewer have dealt with people’s perceptions about the emergence of these novel ecosystems which not always are well received by the public. Two recent studies from South America shed some light on this issue.

In Uruguay, land-use change from cattle raising in rural grasslands to large-scale plantations of non-native pines and eucalypts has been dramatic over the last two decades. In an article published in Forest Policy and Economics, Vihervaara et al. (2012) assessed perceptions by interviewing local people living in the countryside and in towns near the plantations. Seventy percent of the interviewees considered the expansion of tree plantations positive, and had positive attitudes towards the forest industry.

The ever growing and competing needs for food, fuel and fibre—in many cases at the expense of tropical forest cover—argues in favour of intensively managed tree plantations…provided environmental and social safeguards are respected.

There was a significant gender difference in perceptions: male respondents viewed plantations more favorably than did women (85% vs. 63%). Concerns about the environmental impact of plantations was split: 47% were worried about impacts on water and soils, but 41% were only slightly or not at all worried. About one-third of those living in the countryside considered the impacts on the landscape to be quite or very negative, while about half of those living in rural towns shared the same perception.

Although the sample population was randomly selected in local communities, the study did not report whether any interviewees were associated with plantation forestry activities, which may have introduced some bias into the results.

In Chile, plantations of the non-native pine Pinus radiata started to develop during the 1960s as a way to substitute timber harvesting from natural forests. In their perceptions study published in Revista Chilena de Historia Natural, Püschel-Hoeneisen and Simonetti reported that, even though Chileans put natural ecosystems at the top of their preferences and do not necessarily agree with having exotic pine plantations across the landscape, they nevertheless recognize that plantations can have a conservation value.

Further surveys showed that people would be willing to pay more for forest products coming from these plantations if they were proven to contribute to biodiversity conservation. In fact, 90% of respondents preferred a landscape where exotic pine plantations had undergrowth—thus harboring more biodiversity—than those without. In contrast to the study from Uruguay, people in rural areas had no major opinions when asked whether plantations were a threat to biodiversity, while urbanites from Santiago did not necessarily consider pine plantations as environmentally unfriendly.

Why are these two studies important? As large-scale tree plantations have expanded in the past fifty years, they have often developed a bad reputation. Some plantations have been established in the wrong place, with the wrong plant material, disregarding best management practices and available scientific knowledge and ignoring social concerns. In some countries, local people have even been displaced by corporate forestry.

Yet the ever growing and competing needs for food, fuel and fibre—in many cases at the expense of tropical forest cover—argues in favour of the establishment of intensively managed tree plantations with high productivity per unit of land, provided environmental and social safeguards are respected.

Although the application of voluntary codes of plantation good practice certainly help to mitigate both social and environmental impacts, perhaps what has been missing is more research aimed at understanding societal acceptance and consumer preference for plantation forests and their products— issues that are not often made explicit in management guidelines and certification standards.

The reports from Uruguay and Chile are preliminary, location-specific and based on different assumptions and research methods. But they should generate broader interest by researchers, managers and policy makers on how to account for, in credible and legitimate ways, societal views about the establishment and management of large-scale tree plantations.

This will be increasingly important if we want tree plantations to seriously contribute in reducing unsustainable timber harvesting from tropical forests.

Village children collect firewood for cooking fuel. Tianlin County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China. Nick Hogarth/CIFOR

With almost a quarter of the world’s population relying on forest resources for their livelihoods, understanding how forests can improve the lives of the poorest people is an important topic in economic development. In a recently published World Development article, Nicholas Hogarth and colleagues show that rural households in a poor and remote mountainous region in southern China get more than 30% of their livelihoods from managing plantation forests.

Since 1994, the Chinese government has been engaged in a national poverty reduction plan incorporating a number of important policies to promote forest-based cash crops while increasing both forest cover and the area of forestlands allocated and managed by rural households. In the 15 years since it established its Priority Forestry Programs, including the national Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program, China has become a huge—and unprecedented—source of knowledge and experience on afforestation and promotion of forest product markets for poverty reduction.

Overall, 75% of people surveyed in Tianlin County in Guangxi Province, where Hogarth conducted his fieldwork, perceived an improvement in their living conditions in the five years preceding the study. This was due in part to their improving markets for forest and agricultural products, as well as overall growth in national income levels. Tianlin is an area where 80% of the land is classified as forest, and where, at the time of the study, almost half of the population was living on less than US$1 per day.

Among the 225 households surveyed, the greatest source of cash income (over 20%) came from marketing of forest products, compared to around 10% from crops and business respectively. Although forest-related income was important to households at all income levels, the poorest households got a significantly higher share of their cash income from forests than did better-off households; the poorer the households were, the more important forest income became.

In examining this data, Hogarth et al. reveal that inequality in land ownership and access to off-farm jobs, and market barriers and price fixing, prevent the poor from profiting fully from markets, especially for timber.

Even though China’s national policy on land allocation was intended to give more land to larger families, in reality, better-off households have both more land and smaller families. In absolute terms, the richest 20% of families earn three times as much cash from forests than the poorest 20%. They also derive the biggest part of their income from business activities and have substantial wage incomes, reflecting a very different access to opportunity across the sample population.

Rural poverty remains subbornly rooted in many parts of China. pdvos/flickr.

The data show that economic inequality in Tianlin is clearly linked to the unequal allocation of forest and crop land; those with more land per family member were invested in lucrative activities such as livestock production and other income sources. But many households were left behind, and continue to live in poverty.

Although 15 years is enough time to measure change and to assess the initial results of China’s forestry and poverty alleviation measures, there remains more to be done. According to Hogarth, much more research and development work is needed to improve the welfare of the rural poor in places like Tianlin and other remote, mountainous parts of China where rural poverty remains stubbornly rooted.

Greater economic opportunities will come from timber markets once stocks reach harvest age. Better targeting of programs of payment for forest services and efforts to reduce the capture of benefits of such programs by local elites should improve the livelihoods of lower income households. So would better sharing of the total land area. Hogarth et al. suggest that could be achieved not necessarily through a new distribution of land, but potentially through local household-to-household compensation schemes based on the size of local family land holdings, such as have been tried elsewhere in China.

This study is just one of many conducted in 24 countries by CIFOR’s Poverty and Environment Network (PEN). It sheds new light on a key topic in world forestry research: how allocating forestland to the rural poor can contribute to reducing rural poverty and increasing overall forest productivity. The study confirms that forests can play an important role in bringing rural folk out of poverty. While land was unequally distributed and some families were left far behind, even very small forest plots managed by families in Tianlin were important drivers of rural economic development.

Community-controlled forests are proven to bring benefits for the environment, local livelihoods and the global climate. Neil Palmer/CIAT.

BOGOR, Indonesia (4 February, 2013)_The long-running debate about how best to conserve forests and improve livelihoods in forest-rich tropical countries has resurfaced in a very recent (and yet to be officially released) report by the World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), reported in the Guardian and relayed by a blog in REDD-Monitor. In its report, the IEG concludes that there is little evidence that i) support of state-protected areas improved livelihoods of local people, ii) support for industrial timber concession reform has led to sustainable and inclusive economic development, iii) natural forest concessions are being managed sustainably.

In the 2002 revision of its 1991 Forests Strategy, was the World Bank wrong to lift the ban on intervention in places where logging was carried out in tropical moist forests, and consider investments in all types of forests? The Guardian and REDD-Monitor reading of the IEG report says “yes, definitely,” and that the World Bank would do well to shift its funding “away from finance for logging companies and government-run protected areas, towards support for community-controlled forests, which are proven to bring benefits for the environment, local livelihoods and the global climate.”

A reading of the IEG report itself suggests a somewhat more nuanced response, noting achievements – e.g. “World Bank support for industrial timber concession reforms in tropical moist forest countries has helped to advance the rule of law, increase transparency and accountability … and put environmental standards in place.” – as well as shortfalls, in particular related to improved livelihoods, poverty reduction and monitoring of World Bank forest sector operations.

Unfortunately, there is no single, easy answer to how best to conserve forests and improve livelihoods in forest-rich tropical countries. This is illustrated in a recent POLEX focused on evidence from Central Africa, and discussed in a review and associated papers. As these articles and those they draw from explain, the outcomes for forests and people are much more contingent on the design and implementation of the intervention, and on meaningful partnership with local communities, than on whether the intervention is a protected area or a logging concession. It is also clear that external forces, such as wider economic conditions and policies in sectors that affect forests, impact significantly on intended outcomes.

From a scientific perspective, the current debate also illustrates that more rigorous and systematic reference to existing knowledge is required. Contentious policy questions such as “Should public funds be used for investing in sustainable forest management? And if so, how?” should be addressed with evidence-based answers. CIFOR works with partners to establish the concept of evidence-based forestry, following the lead of medical sciences and as suggested by the Research to Action initiative. This is not to say that research can or should provide all the answers, but rather it should ensure that policy debate is appropriately informed by existing knowledge. It would appear that neither the evaluation nor the current high-pitched debate has fully benefitted from such inputs.

Finally, the debate also illustrates that the sustainable forest management concept is neither clear nor does it have an agreed operational framework. Despite over twenty years of talks since the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro resulted in the Forest Principles, sustainable forest management is approached in different ways by different constituencies. In its most narrow interpretation, it is about timber management, and this appears to be the focus of the current debate. Such limited scope of sustainable forestry has also been introduced in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations on REDD+.

In other interpretations, such as the Collaborative Partnership on Forests, sustainable forest management represents a broader sustainable development approach, applied to forests and forestry. Without better agreement on what we mean by sustainable forest management, the current debate is difficult to resolve. We should envision sustainable forest management as a co-evolutionary process between the changing societal demands, the changing forest, the changing market and an industry moving towards higher efficiency standards.

Our aim should be to maintain functional forest ecosystems that provide a continuous flow of goods and services for the benefit of everyone. It is possible that the renewed focus on the landscape as a whole, with an intersectoral perspective, can provide an agreed framework for policy actions. If this is the case, should we dispose of the sustainable forest management concept in the pursuit of sustainable development and wise management of natural resources?