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04 September 2018 Viet Nam
On paper, land-use planning in Viet Nam stipulates that all relevant stakeholders must be consulted. At the rural commune level, however, this rarely happens. As a result, ethnic minorities and other marginalised groups are sidelined and lack the commitment to implement and abide by spatial and land-use plans.
04 September 2018 Indonesia
The Gunung Tarak Landscape in Ketapang District in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, consists of natural and production forests surrounded by oil palm plantations. Some of these plantations, as well as major roads constructed since the early 2000s, cut through the forest areas. This has had a major impact on the habitat of orangutan groups, especially the 2,500 orangutans living in the Sungai Putri production forest that have become completely cut off from the rest of the habitat.
04 September 2018 Suriname
Unspoilt rainforest covers nearly the entire area of Suriname. The forest offers opportunities to boost the national economy and raise people’s living standards, but only if it is used in a sustainable way. The country’s participation in the United Nations REDD+ programme offers opportunities to contribute to this sustainability.
04 September 2018 Viet Nam
Viet Nam’s forest cover was being lost quickly in the mid 20th century. Today, however, thanks to forest sector reforms that started in the mid-1990s, natural forests cover 40% of the country’s territory. In spite of this achievement, forest encroachment is once again on the rise. Large tracts of forestland are converted to monoculture plantations or destroyed to make way for infrastructure development. Communities that depend on forest resources find it more and more difficult to make ends meet.
30 August 2018
Showcasing the success of large-scale restoration of landscapes burdened by natural or man-made disasters, the Global Partnership on Forest and Landscape Restoration (GPFLR),= of which TBI is partner and collaborator, launched this week the report: Restoring forests and landscapes, the key to sustainable future.
18 July 2018 Ghana
While in the past, traditional customary laws were enough to keep people from trespassing on certain parts of forested landscapes such as sacred groves, which often served as a repository of the original fauna and flora of a forest, and from hunting, farming and fishing on specified days and periods which also sought to arrest the overexploitation of forest and water resources, the advent of Western Civilisation saw the demise of these laws.