Forest tenure reforms are occurring in many developing countries around the world. These reforms typically include devolution of forest lands to local people and communities, which has attracted a great deal of attention and interest. While the nature and level of devolution vary by country, all have potentially important implications for resource allocation, local ecosystem services, livelihoods and climate change. This book helps students, researchers and professionals to understand the importance and implications of these reforms for local environmental quality, climate change, and the livelihoods of villagers, who are often poor. It is shown that local forest management can often be more successful than top-down management of common pool forest resources. The relationship of local forest tenure reform to the important climate change initiative REDD+ is also considered. The work includes a number of generic chapters and also detailed case studies from China, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Tanzania and Uganda. Using specific examples and a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, including quantitative and qualitative analytical methods, the book provides an authoritative and critical picture of local forest reforms in light of the key challenges humanity faces today.

The purpose of the report is to: - review and analyze forestry and climate change policies, institutions, governance, regulations, technical assistance, capacity building and communication with a particular focus on the pilot countries. - evaluate the new challenges, opportunities and constraints posed by climate change to forest management in the pilot countries - identify if and how forest managers are adjusting their management practices to accommodate climate change considerations and what changes they might make in the near and medium term - identify gaps in knowledge, policies or regulations required for adequate management responses to climate change.

As the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity 2011–2020 comes to a close and countries prepare to adopt a post-2020 global biodiversity framework, this edition of The State of the World’s Forests (SOFO) examines the contributions of forests, and of the people who use and manage them, to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. Forests cover just over 30 percent of the global land area, yet they provide habitat for the vast majority of the terrestrial plant and animal species known to science. Unfortunately, forests and the biodiversity they contain continue to be under threat from actions to convert the land to agriculture or unsustainable levels of exploitation, much of it illegal. The State of the World’s Forests 2020 assesses progress to date in meeting global targets and goals related to forest biodiversity and examines the effectiveness of policies, actions and approaches, in terms of both conservation and sustainable development outcomes. A series of case studies provide examples of innovative practices that combine conservation and sustainable use of forest biodiversity to create balanced solutions for both people and the planet.

This handbook, produced by world renowned experts from the World Conservation Union (IUCN), spans the full terrain of protected area management and is the international benchmark for the field. The book employs dozens of detailed international cases studies, hundreds of concise topical snapshots, maps, tables, illustrations and a colour plate section, as well as evaluation tools, checklists and numerous appendices to cover all aspects of park management from biodiversity to natural heritage to financial management. The book establishes a conceptual underpinning for protected area management, presents guiding principles for the 21st century, reflects recent work on international best practice and provides an assessment of skills required by professionals. As the most authoritative guide ever compiled to the principles and practice of protected area management, this volume is essential for all professionals and students in all countries and contexts.

C.O.OKIDl1 I welcome the opportunity to prepare a Foreword to the book on Environmental Policy and Law in Africa, edited by Kevin R. Gray and Beatrice Chaytor. It is a pleasure to do that because the book is a contribution to the cause of capacity building for development and implementation of environmental law in Africa, a goal towards which I have had an undivided focus over the last two decades. There is still some belief in and outside Africa that for developing countries in general, and Africa in particular, development and implementation of environmental law is not a priority. This belief prevails strongly in many quarters of the industrialised countries. In fact, the view is held either out of blatant ignorance or by some renegade industrialists who fail to appreciate Michael Royston's 1979 thesis that Pollution Prevention Pays.2 That group, for obvious reasons, must have their correspondent counterparts in Africa to provide hope that industries rejected as derelict in the West or inoperable due to rigorous environmental regulation, can find homes to which they can escape and dump their polluting industries.

In the 1990s the world community has arrived at a particularly in developing countries and in econo historical turning point. Global issues- the decline mies in transition. These three organizations have of biological diversity, climate change, the fate of different backgrounds and focuses, but have found forest peoples, fresh water scarcity, desertification, it relevant and rewarding to their core operations to deforestation and forest degradation - have come collaborate in WFSE activities. The intention of to dominate the public and political debate about these organizations is to continue supporting the forestry. In the economic sphere, forest industries WFSE research and developing the mutual collab have assumed global dimensions. oration. The World Forests, Society and Environment In the year 2000,WFSE took on anewchallenge, Research Program (WFSE) is a response by the re extending its research network to involve five new searchcommunity to thisglobalization. The WFSE Associate Partners: the Center for International slogan 'Globalization calls for global research' re Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Indonesia;the Cent flects both the means and the end of the program. er for Research and Higher Education on Natural The program is involved in promoting and execut Resources of Tropical America (CATIE) in Costa ing research in different parts of the world, and Rica; the International Centerfor Research inAgro through its publications and communications net Forestry (ICRAF) in Kenya; the World Forestry work, linking researchers worldwide.