RECOFTC and partners recently conducted a national-level expert panel discussion in Myanmar on gender mainstreaming in national forestry and REDD+ initiatives.

PES is a new concept gaining momentum in the Asia-Pacific region. But what are the enabling conditions for employing PES schemes, and how can they be made pro-poor? Payment for Environmental Services (PES) sets up systems where beneficiaries of environmental services reward the providers of such services with payments or other non-financial goods (market access, land security, public services, infrastructure, capacity building).

This toolkit is designed to demystify the concept of business incubation as something that is not only relevant for and applied in urban sectors, but also in rural contexts and with a focus on the forest sector. The toolkit offers a framework specific to the forest and farm landscape — in which there are peculiarities of context that require special treatment.

Over 200 participants including 134 international delegates from 20 countries convened on 8–9 August 2011 in Bangkok, Thailand, for two days of deliberations on the potential of community forestry to address some of the biggest challenges we face today. Be it persistent rural poverty, climate change, governance, deforestation, or rights of indigenous and local people, there were questions raised and solutions offered in several packed sessions ending in a Vision 2020 exercise and a Call for Action at the close of the Forum.

เอกสารที่รวบรวมข้อมูลพื้นฐานของชุมชนบ้านห้วยระหงส์ไว้อย่างครบถ้วน เหมาะสำหรับผู้ที่สนใจทั่วไป

What do opportunity costs mean in the context of REDD+ and what are the implications for local communities? Farmers intuitively know the importance of opportunity costs. To tackle deforestation in a socially equitable way, we must consider what the drivers of deforestation are and what incentives and livelihood opportunities accompany them.

This brief outlines the lessons learned from developing CF-MPs and business plans for 30 community forestry sites in Cambodia, trial of three Alternative CF Modalities (ACFMs): Community Conservation Forestry, Community-based Production Forestry and Partnership Forestry; and implementation of four Commune Land Use Plans (CLUPs). The project ‘Strengthening Sustainable Forest Management and Bioenergy Markets to Promote Environmental Sustainability and to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Cambodia’ was implemented from April 2012 to February 2015, funded by UNDP-GEF.

RECOFTC conducted a review of the linkages between community forestry and poverty, with an emphasis on Asia. The analysis shows that clear empirical evidence exists, demonstrating that community forestry has provided tangible benefits to poor people. However, the evidence is limited to a few cases and there is no clear indication that these benefits have been scaled-up across a wider range. This has been a general pattern across the whole development sector, not just within forestry.

เอกสารที่รวบรวมข้อมูลพื้นฐานของชุมชนบ้านเขาราวเทียนทองไว้อย่างครบถ้วน เหมาะสำหรับผู้ที่สนใจทั่วไป

This literature study, conducted under a collaborative framework between NAFRI and RECOFTC, was developed to analyze the status of community contribution to forest resource management in Lao PDR and the modes and extent that communities are or have been involved in the different applied models. The report aims to give an overview of community based forest initiatives up to now, analyze lessons, challenges and opportunities and give guidance for future work.

In Thailand, COVID-19 has made life harder for communities, many of which are already facing droughts, stagnant wage growth and rising poverty. Poverty rates had already risen in 2016 and 2018 in Thailand, according to the World Bank.  Now, with large parts of the economy shuttered or slowed because of the crisis, poor families are struggling as incomes vanish.

Agricultural tractors with attached winches, grapple tongues and log trailers with cranes are the key machines for small-scale forestry work in developed countries. In the near future, a similar role is also foreseen in small-scale community forestry work in Asia and the Pacific.