On May 7-11, CIFOR led a study tour through the provinces of West Sumatra and Riau in Indonesia. The trip, from Padang to Pekanbaru, covered a range of contrasting land uses from fishing, farming and small-scale agroforestry, to massive pulp and paper and oil palm plantations.
The pace of change has been particularly dramatic in Riau: forest cover has gone from 78% in 1982 to 33% in 2005. But other provinces and forests around the world are at risk as large scale investors seek more farmland. Will the "great sucking sound" coming from fast-growing global commodity markets leave room for…
Impact Stories
May 05, 2025 - 09:17PM
The quality of governance often determines whether forest resources are used efficiently, sustainably and equitably and whether countries achieve forest-related development goals. In that respect, a systematic approach to identifying areas of forest governance weakness, devising and implementing responses, and monitoring results is key to successful forest outcomes.
Over the last two years, PROFOR, the FAO and other partners interested in forest governance issues have worked to build a common framework for diagnosis, monitoring and assessment of the state of forest governance in various…
May 05, 2025 - 09:17PM
When the marula fruit falls to the ground in mid-January, it turns yellow, signaling the beginning of traditional beer making season in this part of eastern South Africa. The marula tree (Sclerocarya birrea subsp. caffra) dominates the rolling communal pastures and family courtyards in Bushbuckridge, a rural municipality in the province of Mpumalanga, near Kruger National Park.
In a landscape where most of the bush has long been cleared for timber, firewood or farmland, the marula’s survival is a function of its special status and multiple uses: the large tree (7 to 11 meters tall)…
May 05, 2025 - 09:17PM
PROFOR has uploaded a new tool on its website which should be of interest to a variety of exporters, wood association members and specialists: the VERITAS Timber Volume Calculator.
This product, in conjunction with context-specific volumetric tables, has the potential to be used globally by forest stakeholders to complement verification of timber legality and chain of custody initiatives, by helping to identify red flags or anomalies in timber flow data and accounts.
Support for the national yield tables and the VERITAS Calculator has directly contributed to the CITES International…
May 05, 2025 - 09:17PM
Dr. Tony Simons, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre, delivered a talk on "The Science Needs of Development: A perennial perspective" to an audience of World Bank and CGIAR staff on January 12, 2012.
The presentation gave rise to many questions: How do you nudge societies to adopt a tree planting culture? Why is the science of scaling up successful agroforestry programs still lagging? Can we emulate the health sector in this regard? (The question of scaling up successful tree-based models was also very much on the agenda of the Nairobi forum hosted by the World Agroforestry…
May 05, 2025 - 09:17PM
A Systems Ecologist with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa, Bob Scholes delivered a keynote address entitled "Forests matter; dry forests matter most" at Forest Day 5 in Durban, South Africa, on December 4, 2011. The transcript of his opening plenary speech is attached as a link below. His talk included a slide that cast some light on the way in which global forests act as a carbon sink.
Even though we took careful notes, the slide went by too quickly. Now that CIFOR has posted the speech online, we can now ponder the meaning of this math at leisure. The…
May 05, 2025 - 09:17PM
PROFOR first supported the mapping of landscape restoration opportunities at the global level (see the 2-billion hectare map (pdf) published by World Resources Insitute). Then kick-started similar work at the national level, starting with Ghana.
We recently spoke to one of this ongoing work's active proponents, Foster Mensah, Executive Director of the Centre for Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Services at the University of Ghana, about the different things that happen when you go from a planetary map to a finer-grained assessment.
He had several interesting observations:
-- Social…
May 05, 2025 - 09:17PM
To commemorate and honor the life of Professor Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Laureate who died earlier this year, the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF) opened Forest Day 5 with a short and moving video about her work.
Many of the participants credited Maathai for inspiring them to act on behalf of their environment -- from Odigha Odigha, the chairman of the Cross River State Forestry Commission, who has devoted his life to the protection of the last tropical rainforests in Nigeria, to the child advocate Felix Finkbeiner who created an organization…
May 05, 2025 - 09:17PM
A few minutes’ drive from the COP 17 convention center, traders and healers are hard at work processing and selling bark, roots, tubers and animal parts endowed with medicinal and magic powers. The fifty or so stalls at the thriving outdoor market in Durban’s Victoria Street Market area, are a graphic reminder of the millions of people who depend on informal activities and “free” resources from dry forests and woodlands not captured in national statistics.
Dry forests, where many of these Non-Timber Forest Products are gathered, hardly register in the global forest consciousness either.But…
