Check out in-depth coverage of the Global Landscapes Forum 2016—The Investment Case, including shifting trends in private sector funding of landscapes.
This article is part of a special three-part series leading up to the Global Landscapes Forum 2016 – The Investment Case. This one-day experts symposium – to be held in London on June 6 – aims to accelerate investment in landscapes by connecting funds to farms and forests. Issues of provenance – regarding what is […]
Your parents were wrong: money does grow on trees. Cities routinely rake up tens of millions of dollars from their urban forests annually in ways that are not always obvious. Leafy canopies lower summer air conditioning bills, but more shade also means less blade to maintain thousands of acres of grass. Health-wise, trees contribute to […]
Brazil’s economy is teetering on the edge of collapse. The country’s political regime has been rocked by recent corruption scandals, and impeachment proceedings are encircling the nation’s leaders. And yet things couldn’t be much better for Brazil’s soybean farmers. At the beginning of the last decade, Brazil emerged as a major soybean exporter. Today, Brazil […]
Greater recognition of the benefits of urban forests is focusing efforts from all levels of government to defend and improve them. Perhaps the most iconic of these efforts is New York City’s Million Trees Program. Other initiatives of note include the City of Melbourne’s and the City of Sydney’s. Earlier this year, federal Environment Minister […]
In 2015, more than 500 million hectares of forests were held by indigenous peoples. Despite the increase in forest area designated for and owned by indigenous peoples in recent decades, governments still administer 60 percent of these forest areas while firms and private individuals administer 9 percent. Pressure exerted by indigenous peoples over the past […]
The Brazilian agribusiness and forest sectors, aware that the world economy is finding new ways to incorporate carbon into the value equation, have formed an unprecedented alliance, the Brazil Climate, Forest, and Agriculture Coalition (Coalizão Brasil Clima, Florestas e Agricultura). Established in December 2014, the initiative consists of more than 120 sectoral partners—businesses, civil society […]
We are living in the most explosive era of infrastructure expansion in human history. The G20 nations, when they met in Australia in 2014, argued for between US$60 trillion and US$70 trillion in new infrastructure investments by 2030, which would more than double the global total value of infrastructure. Some of the key players in […]
President Obama’s trip to Cuba this week accelerated the warming of U.S.-Cuban relations. Many people in both countries believe that normalizing relations will spur investment that can help Cuba develop its economy and improve life for its citizens. But in agriculture, U.S. investment could cause harm instead. For the past 35 years I have studied […]
Rural communities across Africa face a variety of threats to their customary and indigenous land and natural resource claims. The drivers of these threats are diverse: increasing foreign investment, national elite speculation, rising population densities, climate change, and national infrastructure mega-projects, to name a few. The introduction of such external destabilizing influences often sets off […]
Less than a month after the endorsement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the United Nations General Assembly and in view of COP 21 of the UNFCCC, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and the Institute for Advances Sustainability Studies (IASS) held a conference on bioenergy and development. The conference brought together a unique […]
Wageningen University, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the World Agroforestry Centre have designed a 2-week course on landscape management. Towards innovative arrangements for inclusive decision making at landscape level, is the title of the international course for forest and nature management professionals. Scholarships are available for applicants before 20 October 2015. Where: Bogor, […]
Researchers outline the current state of climate-smart agriculture in West Africa. Agriculture plays a key role in the economic development of West African countries. By directly providing employment and income to about 70% of the population, agriculture is the engine of West African economies. It is also the backbone of food security for rural and […]
In Spanish the word for politics and policy is the same – ‘política’ – reminding us that policy is always political. Although in Spanish the adjective ‘pública’ can be added to distinguish the senses that English tries to maintain, it can serve us well to focus on their overlapping meanings. There is no policy truly […]
Farming and ranching remain the main drivers of deforestation in Brazil, a new study from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) has found. But any new government policy to combat the problem may be undermined by lack of coordination and communication, says one of the study’s authors, Monica Di Gregorio, a senior CIFOR associate. […]
