Climate change

Climate Action and Sustainable Land Use in Forestry and Agriculture. Forests and agriculture play a key role for achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Land used for palm oil production could be nearly doubled without expanding into protected or high-biodiversity forests, according to a new study.

Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals on hunger and poverty will require a 50 percent increase in food production in the next 15 years. In fact, a global food revolution is urgently needed, argues a recent paper by a number of leading scientists working with the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE). Without […]

Climate change is one of the most powerful forces affecting agricultural landscapes today and will only be more so in the future.

While tropical forests continued to decline, a remarkable change is happening: tree cover on agricultural land has increased across the globe.

  This blog by Terry Sunderland was originally posted at Forest News, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) The terms “landscapes,” “landscape approaches” and “integrated landscape management,” among similar “landscape-focused” terminology, underpin much of the discourse in contemporary research, donor and development circles related to conservation, agriculture and other land uses. The plethora of terms […]

Can the current climate change, food scarcity, forest conservation crisis be turned into a global revolution? Daniel Nepstad, Executive Director of the Brazilian Earth Innovation Institute, is convinced it can, and he takes his optimism from encouraging developments in Brazil. Progress has been made in slowing down deforestation in the Amazon, Nepstad says, and the different […]

Vietnam is increasing its forest area by one percent every year. In Finland, one of the leading countries of sustainable forest management, destruction of forests is expressly prohibited by law. More than 90 percent of the sellers of forest produce are women. Russia’s far east is the ground of one tenth of the world’s forests […]

Manuel Pulgar-Vidal is a passionate speaker on environmental issues and a supporter of CIFOR’s landscape approach. On September 25, Peru’s Minister of State for Environment and UNFCCC COP20 President will deliver a keynote address at the inaugural CGIAR Development Dialogues in New York. On December 6-7, his ministry is hosting the Global Landscapes Forum that will take […]

This blog was originally posted on the blog of Felix Dodds, a fellow at the Global Research Institute at University of North Carolina and an associate fellow at the Tellus Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. The opinions expressed are his own. There is, I think, complete consensus among governments and stakeholders that the two co-chairs of the Open […]

In his keynote speech at the recent Forests Asia Summit, Peruvian environment minister and UNFCCC COP20 President calls for reframing the role of forests and landscapes in a new climate agreement. Forests and forested landscapes should not only be treated as means to an end based on their carbon mitigation services. He proposes looking at […]

The Global Landscapes Forum, a two-day event held on the sidelines of the UN climate change negotiations as part of the Conference of the Parties (COP19) in Warsaw on 16-17 November 2013, was attended by over 1,200 experts on landscapes, agriculture and forestry. The Forum was designed to inform the global climate and development frameworks […]

What does a “landscapes approach” mean to the private sector? For Bernard Giraud, Senior Sustainability Adviser at Danone, it is not merely an additional aspect of doing business, but “part of the business model” itself. “Danone bottles its water from natural water sources,” Giraud said. “So the quality of water depends on the watershed management. […]

Focusing on carbon alone not enough to tackle emissions, deforestation: development expert WARSAW, Poland (20 November 2013) — Indonesia’s mission to cut carbon emissions through avoided deforestation can offer lessons to the rest of the world, a top official in the country’s development unit said — not least because focusing on carbon alone often falls […]

Lesotho prince: ‘Evidence at hand points at a landscapes approach as being the renewed opportunity for mitigating and adapting to climate change’ WARSAW, Poland (19 November 2013) — Lesotho’s Prince Seeiso Bereng Seeiso has declared the need for all-inclusive climate solutions as a matter of “urgency” for his “suffering” nation. Speaking recently to agricultural and […]