Livelihoods

It is commonly claimed that forest tenure reform that provides rural people with rights to access and use of forest resources can contribute to improved forest management and poverty alleviation. But, at least with respect to poverty alleviation, there are few experiences with formal forest tenure reform that have demonstrated this to date. Given how difficult it is to achieve pro-poor tenure reform, an important question is whether modest informal changes can achieve results.

This paper examines how interventions intended to improve functionality and productivity of forested landscapes to improve livelihoods of the poorest populations, might actually yield co-benefits in terms of biodiversity conservation. It argues in favour of a ‘landscape’ approach to achieve these co-benefits.

The Doi Mae Salong watershed in the north-west of Thailand is the headwater of the Mae Chan River, a tributary of the Mekong River. As such, it is an extremely important landscape for the economy of the region. The landscape has the particularity of being designated a Military Reserved Area and coming under the control and command of the Royal Thai Armed Forces (RTAF).

This study, based on a colloquium, field assessments of development activities and technical analyses pertaining to barrier-built estuaries and lagoons, was inspired by the positive response to a preceding report captioned <a href=”http://www.iucn.org/dbtw-wpd/edocs/2011-112.pdf”> ‘An Appraisal of Mangrove Management in Micro-target_idal Estuaries and Lagoons in Sri Lanka’</a>.

This paper focuses on interventions in the Benet landscape of Uganda which sought to improve the income opportunities for inhabitants through efforts to rehabilitate the degraded landscape.

This paper describes Livelihoods and Landscapes Strategy interventions in the Wassa Amenfi West Landscape in the western region of Ghana. The landscape extends over an area of about 120,000 ha. It is a mixed landscape with a variety of agricultural uses; the most important is cocoa farming.

This paper focuses on efforts to create value from non-timber forest products in the Acre region in the north-western part of the Amazon region in Brazil.

The Livelihoods and Landscapes Strategy Miyun project has generated important lessons about the process of working to improve landscapes and livelihoods in a watershed context. This paper documents and shares these lessons. In particular, it summarizes how the project was conceptualized and implemented, how and why this changed over time, and what its key impacts and achievements have been.

This paper documents insights and lessons about using markets and incentives to strengthen forest landscapes and livelihoods. It aims to interrogate just what a ‘landscape approach’ means in economic terms, to identify how markets can be used to generate incentives to share forest benefits more equitably and sustainably, and to highlight which kinds of approaches and ‘packages’ of interventions can assist in this.

It is now unequivocally established that climate change is a reality, and the adversities of climatic transformations pose one of the greatest challenges facing humanity today. The publication on "Protocol for Monitoring of Impacts of Climate Change and Climate Variability in Bangladesh" is a modest yet pioneering attempt to proffer a systemic methodology to quantify and record the impacts of climate change across selected key sectors.