A leaked draft impact assessment, informing the EU Commission’s coming legislative proposal for minimizing the risk of deforestation and forest degradation associated with products placed on the EU market, has led to recent debate. A key point of contention is the scope of the proposed regulation: the impact assessment recommends that some key forest-risk commodities – maize and rubber – be left out of the regulation. The authors of this new Focali brief show that the analysis that underpins this conclusion has severe flaws and that current evidence does not support such a recommendation.
Tropical forests in Africa’s mountains store more carbon than previously thought. At the same time, vast amounts of the forests have already been lost. “This draws the attention to the importance of conserving these forests“, says Göran Wallin Focali member at the University of Gothenburg, co-author of the new study published in Nature.
The EU is currently a major contributor to deforestation through the consumption of forest risk commodities such as palm oil, soybeans, cocoa, and coffee. This new Focali brief, written by Simon Bager and Focali member U. Martin Persson, offers insight on how to assess policy proposals which address the tropical deforestation generated from EU imports and recommends two comprehensive proposals which meet the developed guidelines.
Do multifunctional landscapes hold specific opportunities for women in enhancing food production and food security? Lisa Westholm (SLU) and Madelene Ostwald (GMV) find in this literature review that products controlled by women in multifunctional settings risk being ignored in decision-making, and that increasing the value of these products might have adverse effects on women's empowerment. To remove these barriers, traditional gender roles have to change.
Research from Focalimembers Florence Pendrill, Martin Persson, Javier Godar and others reveal that up to 39 % of emissions from deforestation are driven by international trade, where Europe and China are major importers. In fact, a sixth of the carbon footprint of an average EU-diet is due to deforestation emissions. This calls for implementation of policy measures that cross international supply-chains if deforestation emissions are to be effectively reduced.
Throughout the tropics, forests are increasingly devoid of larger mammals - a condition referred to as empty forests. Large mammals and birds fill important roles for forest structure and composition and their depletion have implications for the forests carbon storage capacity. This new article by Focali-member Torsten Krause shows that effects of defaunation are ignored in REDD+, which compromises not only the forest ecosystem function, but also the objectives of the program.
Human induced faunal loss - defaunation - has been greatly overlooked when it comes to forest conservation and management. This recent study by Focali-members Torsten Krause, Tobias Nielsen and Fariborz Zelli with colleagues, analyzes the impacts of defaunation and associated multi-level governance gaps using Nigeria´s Cross River State forests as a case.
A significant share of Sweden's environmental impact occur overseas. Sweden's large dependency on food imports cause not only tropical deforestation but also a vast use of pesticides. In this new paper, Focali-researchers Christel Cederberg and Martin Persson with colleagues present footprint indicators to measure environmental pressures from Swedish food consumption.
The scientific community represents different viewpoints on forest-climate interactions and how to prioritize to meet the goal of the Paris Agreement. Focali-researcher Göran Berndes is co-authoring this report from KSLA that showcases discussions and conclusions from a conference with the aim of identifying knowledge gaps and priorities for future research and data collection.
New study from Rwandan researchers together with Focaliresearchers Johan Uddling and Göran Wallin on climate sensitivity of tropical trees along an elevation gradient in Rwanda. The study finds that gas exchange strongly decrease at lower sites in the dry season, which indicates that primary production as well as transpiration would decline in a climate with more pronounced dry periods.
Contestation over the use of land and forest areas in the Amazon have a long history, is heavily influenced by global consumption demands and as often the devil is in the details and paragraphs. A new study published in Nature Sustainability shows that up to fifteen million hectares of land might lose its current protection due to a paragraph in the Brazilian Forest Act, the most important legal framework for nature conservation on privately owned land in Brazil.
Agroforestry is a sustainable, proven and efficient land management system, according to the experts behind the report Achieving the Global Goals through Agroforestry, launched on October 1, 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden.
The consideration of gender issues and women’s rights in REDD+ policy formulation and implementation can be seen as a moral imperative, but it is also based in legal texts and
institutional commitments. This new Focali brief, written by Lisa Westholm, provides an overview of the work with gender issues in REDD+ policy making to date, and brings up some key issues relating to gender equality in the design and implementation of REDD+ programs.
This new Focali brief, written by Liv Lundberg and Martin Persson, offers guidance to policy makers on PES program design. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs are an increasingly popular policy tool to conserve nature. A recent study conducted by the authors shows that considering context - be it political, economic or geographical - is key in designing PES programs for maximum conservation impact.
As part of the SIWI/SWH Cluster Group on Water in the Landscape, Focali-researchers Aida Bargués Tobella and Ulrik Ilstedt are co-authors to new report on water for productive and multifunctional landscapes. The report is based on the outcomes of a series of seminars on different themes surrounding issues on water in the landscape, spanning from practical knowledge to governance challenges.
The REDD+ instrument, aimed at conserving tropical forests and its stored carbon, have explicit considerations of gender sensitivity, poverty reduction and respecting local communities embedded in the program. Still, considerations of gender issues tend to be pushed to the future and to side activities specifically directed at women. In this dissertation, Lisa Westholm argues that gender must be considered as a matter of social relations of power that is relevant at all levels of policy making, in order to avoid that policies perpetuate or exacerbate existing inequalities.
New paper by Focali researcher Martin Persson and colleagues Liv Lundberg, Francisco Alpizar and Kristian Lindgren explores the effectiveness of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) program designs to maximize service provision for a given budget. The findings show that context matters and should be taken into serious consideration when a PES program design is chosen.
This book chapter, written by Focali members Javier Godar and Toby Gardner together with other members of the Trase team, outlines steps to facilitate implementation of supply chains free of deforestation. One key challenge is transparency; seeing who trades forest-risk commodities and when and where they do so. Here, Trase could be part of the solution.
New publication on whether or not commodity driven deforestation is acknowledged within national strategies to reach UN biodiversity and climate conventions. Evidently, most documents do not link deforestation to commodity production and consumption, which limits the prospects of safeguarding tropical forests and might jeopardize the conventions overall effectiveness. By focali researchers Madelene Ostwald and Sabine Henders together with Vilhelm Verendel and Pierre Ibisch.
Focali researcher Javier Godar together with nine other researchers has recently published an article on the dynamics of agricultural frontier expansion and how these are formed and shaped, specifically investigating the roles of corporate vs. smallholder driven expansions. The paper sheds light on the ongoing dynamics in the poorly investigated but socio-ecologically very important Gran Chaco region - a deforestation hot spot for soy and cattle production, shared by Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay.
Focali researcher Göran Berndes is one of the main authors of the Global Land Outlook working paper on energy and land use - one in a series focusing on the land-energy nexus. This paper identifies and compares the land impact of all terrestrial energy forms and provide recommendations on how to deliver a sustainable global energy system - hectare by hectare.
New Focali brief where Eskil Mattsson and Madelene Ostwald, together with S. P. Nissanka seek in the literature for evidence and information on the food security link to homegardens; a traditional agroforestry system promoted by the Sri Lankan government.
New article with agroforestry focus by Focali researchers Eskil Mattsson and Madelene Ostwald, together with S. P. Nissanka. A synthesis of the current scientific knowledge of a multifunctional land-use system in Sri Lanka.
This joint Focali/SIANI/SLU Global Policy Brief shows how natural resource management policies and institutions influence livelihoods and food security for communities in upland areas of Thailand, Vietnam and Nepal.
This joint Focali and Triple L report by Eric Röhss, Gert Nyberg and Per Knutsson, describes the process and results of a workshop arranged by the Triple-L research initiative, focusing on the development of future dryland scenarios in West Pokot County, Kenya.
Focali member Torsten Krause and colleague Barry Ness has just published a paper on agroforestry and the crop guayusa (Ilex guayusa) in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Guayusa - a native tree of the western Amazon region with leaves used for brewing tea, is grown by indigenous farmers in traditional agroforestry systems.
New paper co-authored by Sam Airey and Focali member Torsten Krause, examines to which extent the indigenous population of Guyana is included within the Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS). This single site case study concludes that significant adjustments are needed, e.g. more contextualised governance and decentralising power.
New paper from Focali members Aida Bargués Tobella and Ulrik Ilstedt together with 20 other authors from different universities, organisations and institutes; e.g. ICRAF, CIFOR, CIRAD and FAO. In this review they study the tree-climate relationships. The authors suggest that the direct effects via rainfall and cooling may be more important than the well-studied effects through the global carbon balance.
New article by Focali member Robin Biddulph and colleague Pelle Amberntsson published in Journal of Economic and Social Geography on livelihood trajectories and deforestation. This study examines livelihood trajectories over two decades in a village affected by deforestation in Northeast Cambodia. The objective was to use quantitative and qualitative methods to identify critical junctures structuring those trajectories. The junctures suggest an analytical framework for understanding deforestation-livelihoods dynamics in other contexts, which can disrupt narrative simplifications associated with community forestry.
New article by Focali member Lisa Westholm published in International Forestry Review analyzes REDD+ documents and data on resource use in two villages in Burkina Faso. The article examines how the participatory approach in Burkina's REDD+ program risks marginalizing certain groups, by failing to recognize how social relations of inequality shape resource use and access.
