This is a legal toolkit to help decision-makers use laws to reduce forest conversion and minimise the environmental and social impacts of deforestation. It offers countries a starting point to reform laws governing forest conversion.
Despite the local and global importance of forests, deforestation driven by various socio-economic and biophysical factors continues in many countries. In Nepal, in response to massive deforestation, the community forestry program has been implemented to reduce deforestation and support livelihoods.
Most of the world’s remaining tropical forests lie in areas that are customarily managed and/or legally owned by Indigenous Peoples and local communities. In the context of climate change and global efforts to protect and enhance the capacity of forests to capture and store greenhouse gas emissions, the question of who owns the trees and the carbon stored therein is paramount.
Restoration in Niger and neighbouring countries has helped to “re-green” vast areas of rural West Africa with impressive results for agriculture and livelihoods – and at very low cost.*
Five years of afforestation and restoration in Turkey have dramatically extended tree cover, reduced the land’s vulnerability to erosion, helped combat global warming and greened thousands of public spaces.*
Teaching and helping farmers to integrate trees into their lands is integral to a restoration project in a district of Rwanda that supplies most of the water used in the capital city*
Pig-rearing, essential oils, fruit trees and beekeeping: establishing additional sources of income has been key to a restoration project on the biodiversity-rich island of Madagascar.*
A private company is restoring degraded forest reserves in Ghana with commercial as well as native tree species, applying a business model that also brings strong community and environmental benefits.*
After a quarter-century of restoration in a heavily degraded river basin in Costa Rica, a “model forest” platform is helping a local foundation to promote the benefits of its work and boost business in an economically depressed region.*