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.
