This week, world population crossed the 7 billion threshold, raising fresh doubts about our collective capacity to meet growing food and energy needs in a changing climate.
The Human Development Index sounded overall alarm regarding the price of environmental degradation borne by the world's poorest countries. (See "Environmental trends threaten global progress for the poor" Nov. 2, 2011 ) The authors warned that:
"Unchecked environmental deterioration—from drought in sub-Saharan Africa to rising sea levels that could swamp low-lying countries like Bangladesh—could cause food prices to soar…
Impact Stories
April 23, 2025 - 05:08PM
Peter Dewees, PROFOR's manager, attended the Forests Indonesia conference yesterday. This is his dispatch:
It’s been really hazy in Jakarta the last couple of days. This is the burning season here, as the clearing of forests and fields in advance of the rainy season is in full swing. Maybe people here have just gotten used to this, and I suppose it is old news, but I was amazed. Earlier in the month, motorists were being urged to turn on their headlights even during the day to accommodate the low visibility caused by the smoke. The obvious health impacts notwithstanding, the fires are…
April 23, 2025 - 05:08PM
Agroforestry and landscape restoration featured prominently among the "climate-smart agriculture" solutions that were discussed this week at an African Ministerial Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa.
But first, what is "climate-smart agriculture"? Climate-smart agriculture seeks to increase sustainable productivity, strengthen farmers’ resilience, reduce agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon sequestration. It strengthens food security and delivers environmental benefits. Climate-smart agriculture includes proven practical techniques — such as mulching, intercropping…
April 23, 2025 - 05:08PM
WRI announced today that "a global effort to restore 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested lands by 2020 is being launched in Bonn, Germany" in the context of the Bonn Challenge Ministerial Roundtable organized by the Government of Germany and IUCN in collaboration with the Global Partnership on Forest Landscape Restoration (GPFLR).
The announcement builds on a revised assessment identifying now more than 2 billion hectares of degraded lands with potential for restoration worldwide. That's twice the amount reported last year!
WRI explains the discrepancy in the following terms:
…
April 23, 2025 - 05:08PM
Once transformed into an amorphous bundle of planks, wood can be hard to identify let alone certify as legal or sustainably-harvested. This fungible, shape-shifting quality has made illegal logging relatively profitable and illegal wood easy to launder. Various information-based tools are being used to respond to the challenge of illegal logging -- from crowdsourcing to map illegal forest concessions, to attaching barcodes to tree trunks so that timber can be tracked down to the point of export. PROFOR recently released a survey of ICT applications in the field of forest governance (Forest…
April 23, 2025 - 05:08PM
PROFOR hosted yesterday two very interesting discussions that are ultimately about keeping track of trees and plants thanks to much-improved information technology:
One with TIST, the International Small Group and Tree Planting Program, which has planted more than 10 million trees since 1999 on small farms and surrounding land in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, India, Honduras and Nicaragua.
The TIST website (www.TIST.org) accounts for live trees on these small farms, grove by grove, using quantifiers on the ground equipped with handheld GPS and camera devices. The idea is to prove that …
April 23, 2025 - 05:08PM
In the last installment of videos we filmed at the Nairobi investment forum (Mobilizing Private Investment in Trees and Landscape Restoration in Africa), we focus on two products that have varying market potential: carbon credits and baobab powder.
We spoke to Bo Lager, program director of SCC-Vi Agroforestry in Eastern Africa. He described the benefits of the Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project, a soil carbon project in Western Kenya that expects to work with 60,000 farmer households to change agricultural practices. Reversing soil degradation will help boost crop yields, increase resilience…
April 23, 2025 - 05:08PM
We wrote earlier this week about Danone’s economic and social interest in restoring ecosystems in different developing countries through its Livelihoods Fund. Danone (with over 17 billion euros in sales in 2010) is a world leader in fresh dairy products. At the other end of the spectrum are dairy farmers like Abraham and Priscilla Kiprotich, who own 6 cows in Kenya’s Rift Valley Province, about an hour’s drive from Eldoret. Like Danone, however, they have a strong interest in planting trees.
As one of roughly 1,000 farmer-trainers selected by the East Africa Dairy Development project, Abraham…
April 23, 2025 - 05:08PM
Danone is a large French agribusiness that sells dairy, water and other food products. Bernard Giraud, VP for Sustainability and Shared Value Creation at Danone, attended the Investment Forum on Mobilizing Private Investment in Trees and Landscape Restoration in Africa to scout out good project ideas and share his corporate experience.
Here he discusses the company's past ecosystem restoration efforts in Senegal and India and the future launch of a mutual fund (“Livelihoods Fund”) based on carbon offset revenue generated by agroforestry and landscape restoration projects.
So far, Danone…
April 23, 2025 - 05:08PM
The Nairobi investment forum which wrapped up last week provided a one-of-a-kind inventory of private sector opportunities related to growing trees, marketing tree products and restoring degraded landscapes. Participants from a wide variety of backgrounds talked about increasing the numbers of trees in productive landscapes -- not only for the good of the planet, but also to make money for their shareholders and employees, in partnership with local communities, NGOs and the public sector. The next step is to draw up an action plan to make sure that the contacts and good ideas generated by the…
