Forest Tenure

Reducing uncertainty in forest carbon estimates at local and regional scales has become increasingly important due to the centrality of the terrestrial carbon cycle in issues of climate change. In Victoria, Australia, public natural forests extend over 7.2 M ha and constitute a significant and important carbon stock.

In addition to being a global strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from tropical deforestation, Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) intends to protect and improve the well-being and income of local stakeholders. The intention is to provide livelihood support in exchange for local stakeholder involvement in protecting forests.

Co-management has been introduced into Special Use Forests (SUFs) of Vietnam for more than 10 years. However, the extent to which Vietnamese laws and policies support co-management remains unclear. This paper reviews existing policies and laws from the national to commune levels and assesses their facilitation of co-management in SUFs.

Mexico has had a non-state forest certification system under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) since it was initiated in 1993, and developed a new state-sponsored Mexican Forest Certification System (MFCS) that began in 2008. Several analyses have been made of FSC forest certification in Mexico, but none have summarized the new MFCS system or compared its standards with FSC.

This study presents for the first time in Venezuela a joint analysis of deforestation and forest degradation processes, including its effects on carbon emissions. The Caparo Forest Reserve, located in the Western Plains ecoregion, in one of the national hot spots of deforestation, served as a case study using three different periods: 1990–2000, 2000–2010 and 2010–2015.

This paper provides an overview of China’s climate mitigation policy related to the forestry sector, with a special focus on the development of carbon forests which are established to mitigate climate change. A total of 3.5 million ha of carbon forest were planted in the past decade. In recent years, the number of Voluntary Emission Reduction forest carbon projects has increased rapidly.

Areas of land abandonment and agriculture expansion usually differ in location and associated environmental characteristics; thus, land-use redistribution affects the provision of ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation.

Land change modeling has become increasingly important in evaluating the unique driving factors and proximate causes that underlie a particular geographical location.

Academic research on smallholders’ forestland-use decisions is regularly addressed in different streams of literature using different theoretical constructs that are independently incomplete.

The REDD+ program provides a mechanism for providing financial rewards to forest owners and users who contribute to the reduction of carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

Individuals and families collectively own more than 118 million ha of forestland in the USA. Using data from the USDA Forest Service’s National Woodland Owners Survey (NWOS), we characterize ecosystem services being produced on family forests as well as the beneficiaries who enjoy them. Approximately half of family forest owners provide one or more provisioning services.

Under what conditions do private forest governance standards influence state policy and behavior to become more oriented toward sustainability? We argue that governance schemes targeting firms may indirectly shape state behavior, even when designed to bypass state regulation.