data visualization
This infographic allows you to navigate the process for a community seeking formal land rights in Indonesia, versus for a company securing an oil palm concession.
forests
blog post
by Laura Notess and Peter Veit - July 11, 2018The Santa Clara de Uchunya community has lived in a remote section of the Peruvian Amazon for generations, relying on the forest for hunting, fishing and natural resources. But in 2014, someone started cutting down large sections of their ancestral lands. They've been struggling for their land rights ever since.
project
Measuring the impact of restoring degraded forests and landscapes from the local to the global level.
publication
by Frances Seymour, Belinda Morris and Amy Dickie - June 2018Demand for biofuels has grown rapidly in the past decade, driving conversion of forests to produce food-based feedstocks. This paper highlights three competing views regarding how substituting biofuels for fossil fuels affects climate emissions, and the role of accounting for indirect land-use change in biofuels policies.
publication
by Charles Victor Barber and Kerstin Canby - June 2018Combating illegal logging is a key strategy for strengthening forest governance and eradicating forest-related corruption. This paper assesses how recent advances in forest monitoring, national regulations, and international cooperation have enabled more effective law enforcement measures, and identifies remaining challenges including illegal conversion of forests to agriculture, pervasive corruption, and the need for legal reform.
publication
by Rod Taylor and Charlotte Streck - June 2018Hundreds of companies with exposure to deforestation driven by palm oil, beef, soy, or wood production have committed to eliminating deforestation from their supply chains by 2020. This paper reviews the coverage of those commitments, the dearth of information regarding their impact on deforestation to date, and the barriers and systemic challenges to effective implementation.
publication
by Frances Seymour and Tom Evans - June 2018Conserving and expanding global forest cover is widely accepted as necessary for climate change mitigation and other environmental goals, but the importance of forest quality is less widely recognized. This paper focuses on the controversial issue of whether remaining intact forests should be opened for timber harvest as a way of providing incentives for limiting forest degradation and conversion to other land-uses.
publication
by Frances Seymour, William Boyd, Claudia Stickler, Amy Duchelle, Daniel Nepstad, Nur H.A. Bahar and Dawn Rodriguez-Ward - June 2018Throughout the tropics, a growing number of states, provinces, and districts have embraced a jurisdictional approach to forest and land-use governance across a defined territory as a strategy to protect forests and reduce land-use emissions at scale. This paper discusses the opportunities provided by the jurisdictional approach, such as partnerships with supply chain actors and indigenous communities, as well as the challenges such as political turnover and limited public-sector capacity.
publication
by Frances Seymour, Peter Graham, Gabriel Thoumi and Erika Drazen - June 2018There is a wealth of financial data and corporate governance information available that can be used to hold companies accountable to zero deforestation commitments and for activities linked to legal and illegal deforestation. This paper shows how radical transparency techniques have the potential to hold companies accountable for illegal or unethical activities and argues that the full potential of transparency solutions has yet to be unleased.
publication
by Nancy Harris and Michael Wolosin - June 2018Recent analysis shows that forests are essential to meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement, and contribute to climate stability through multiple pathways across local to global scales. This paper illustrates how reducing emissions from deforestation, enhancing the role of forests as carbon sinks through restoration, and recognizing the non-carbon pathways through which forests affect the climate are all elements of a cost-effective solution to climate change.
publication
by Rachael Petersen, Crystal Davis, Martin Herold and Veronique De Sy - June 2018Advances in satellite-based remote sensing and other technologies provide low-cost, frequently updated, and consistent information on the extent, characteristics, and changes in forest cover. This paper assesses the advances in national forest monitoring systems supported by REDD+, explores reasons why there is a gap between what is now technologically possible and what is practiced in tropical forest countries, and explains how proliferating data and methods are generating confusion and in some cases redundant investments.
publication
by Nancy Harris, Crystal Davis, Elizabeth Dow Goldman, Rachael Petersen and Samantha Gibbes - June 2018This working paper explains how much and why results differ between nationally reported deforestation estimates and the Global Forest Change (GFC) tree cover loss data of Hansen et al. (2013).
publication
by Frances Seymour, Amy E. Duchelle, Arild Angelsen, Anne M. Larson, Moira Moeliono, Grace Y. Wong, Thu Thuy Pham and Christopher Martius - June 2018Although the novel feature of REDD+— result-based payments at jurisdictional scales—remains largely untested, national and subnational REDD+ initiatives have made progress toward creating domestic conditions for addressing deforestation and forest degradation. This paper analyzes both national and subnational REDD+ initiatives to better understand lessons learned and how these lessons can support future forest-based climate change mitigation.
blog post
by Mikaela Weisse and Elizabeth Dow Goldman - June 26, 2018The tropics lost 15.8 million hectares of tree cover in 2017, an area the size of Bangladesh. That’s the equivalent of losing 40 football fields of trees every minute for an entire year!
blog post
by Frances Seymour - June 26, 2018Even though more and more companies are committing to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains, the tropics lost a Vietnam-sized area of forest in just the last two years. Why aren't forest protections working?
blog post
by Aurélio Padovezi and Mariana Oliveira - June 21, 2018Brazil's semi-arid Caatinga region is a living laboratory for climate change impacts, with record-breaking droughts from 2010 to 2016. Local farmers are using landscape restoration techniques to boost climate resilience -- and are creating jobs for women in the process.
blog post
by James Anderson - June 21, 2018Rangers in Uganda take mobile phones and tablets on their forest patrols. But they aren't texting friends or playing Temple Run during downtime. They're following up on deforestation alerts generated by satellites circling the earth.
blog post
by Mikaela Weisse and Katie Lyons - June 19, 2018Satellite data reveals new deforestation in Colombia, Brazil and Indonesian Papua.
blog post
by Lauren Williams and Theodore Trefon - June 13, 2018Community forestry has long been hailed as a strategy for reducing poverty and improving conservation by empowering communities to directly manage their forest resources, but it is a recent experiment in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A recent visit to North Kivu showed signs of progress.