Definition of "forest" still being thought by Ministry
New Delhi, July 3 (PTI) What constitutes a forest in India?
There is no answer for this simple and plain question even 62 years after independence if one goes by a RTI reply from the Ministry of Environment and Forests.
The reason cited by the ministry in its reply is that "definition" of forests is under active consideration and it is yet to be "finalised".
2012 Forestry Finance event call for presentations
The Forest Industry Engineering Association together with most of the major financial and forestry industry associations in Australia and New Zealand ran an inaugural Future Forestry Finance Conference series in Sydney and Auckland in early March 2010. The turnout exceeded expectations.
Ethiopia’s Challenge: Balancing Agriculture with Environmental Protection
Atnafu Endashaw, 12, travels on foot two hours every day from home to school. He is from the isolated Menja communities found in Sheka zone of Southern region of Ethiopia, 765 kilometers southwest of Addis Ababa. Unlike the members of Sheka tribe, Menja communities are mainly marginalized because they feed on leftovers of dead animals. “My mother told me that we (Shekas and Menjas) were brothers of the same father and mother,” says Endashaw Ayno, father of Atnafu, commenting on the origin of marginalization of Menjas from the rest of Sheka tribe.
Increased pre-commercial thinning and reduced planting in 2010
The data on pre-commercial thinning is the highest recorded in over a year. According to the Swedish Forest Agency’s annual surveys conducted on silviculture measures the soil scarification was carried out on 157,500 hectares and 157,200 hectares were planted with seedlings in 2010.
Understanding and Integrating Local Perceptions of Trees and Forests into Incentives for Sustainable Landscape Management
We examine five forested landscapes in Africa (Cameroon, Madagascar, and Tanzania) and Asia (Indonesia and Laos) at different stages of landscape change. In all five areas, forest cover (outside of protected areas) continues to decrease despite local people’s recognition of the importance of forest products and services. After forest conversion, agroforestry systems and fallows provide multiple functions and valued products, and retain significant biodiversity. But there are indications that such land use is transitory, with gradual simplification and loss of complex agroforests and fallows as land use becomes increasingly individualistic and profit driven. In Indonesia and Tanzania, farmers favor monocultures (rubber and oil palm, and sugarcane, respectively) for their high financial returns, with these systems replacing existing complex agroforests. In the study sites in Madagascar and Laos, investments in agroforests and new crops remain rare, despite government attempts to eradicate swidden systems and their multifunctional fallows. We discuss approaches to assessing local values related to landscape cover and associated goods and services. We highlight discrepancies between individual and collective responses in characterizing land use tendencies, and discuss the effects of accessibility on land management. We conclude that a combination of social, economic, and spatially explicit assessment methods is necessary to inform land use planning. Furthermore, any efforts to modify current trends will require clear incentives, such as through carbon finance. We speculate on the nature of such incentive schemes and the possibility of rewarding the provision of ecosystem services at a landscape scale and in a socially equitable manner.
Certifying forests: How REDD+ can learn from experience
BOGOR, Indonesia (6 July, 2011)_REDD+ proponents can learn from the multistakeholder approach of experienced certification body, the Forest Stewardship Council, helping to avoid treacherous forest management politics and better engaging civil society and the private sector in sustainable forest p
World Bank: Registering UN forestry projects is too complex
The World Bank has warned that the complicated processes that afforestation and reforestation projects have to adhere to in order to qualify for the UN's planned forest-based carbon trading system could stifle growth for the embryonic sector.
