Mise en place de services écosystémiques destinés à la réduction de la pauvreté

Resolving land tenure security is essential to deliver forest restoration

Tropical countries are making ambitious commitments to Forest Landscape Restoration with the aim of locking up carbon, conserving biodiversity and benefiting local livelihoods. However, global and national analyses of restoration potential frequently ignore socio-legal complexities which impact both the effectiveness and equitability of restoration. We show that areas with the highest restoration potential are disproportionately found in countries with weak rule of law and frequently in those with substantial areas of unrecognized land tenure. Focusing on Madagascar, at least 67% of the areas with highest restoration potential must be on untitled land, where tenure is often unclear or contested, and we show how unresolved tenure issues are one of the most important limitations on forest restoration. This is likely to be a bigger problem than currently recognized and without important efforts to resolve local tenure issues, opportunities to equitably scale up forest restoration globally are likely to be significantly over-estimated.

Auteur ou autrice(s) : Rakotonarivo, O. Sarobidy, Rakotoarisoa, Mirindra, Rajaonarivelo, H. Manoa, Raharijaona, Stefana, Jones, Julia P. G., Hockley , Neal

Lien externe

Langage : Anglais

Elevated fires during COVID-19 lockdown and the vulnerability of protected areas

There is little robust, quantitative information on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the extinction crisis. Focusing on Madagascar, one of the world’s most threatened biodiversity hotspots, we explore whether the cessation of on-site protected-area management activities due to the pandemic were associated with increased burning inside protected areas. We identify monthly excess fire anomalies by comparing observed fires with those predicted on the basis of historical and contemporary fire and weather data for all of Madagascar’s protected areas for every month 2012–2020. Through to 2019, excess fire anomalies in protected areas were few, short in duration and, in some years, coincident with social disruption linked to national elections. By contrast, in 2020, COVID-19 meant on-site management of Madagascar’s protected areas was suspended from March to July. This period was associated with 76–248% more fires than predicted, after which burning returned to normal. At a time when international biodiversity conservation faces unprecedented challenges, our results highlight the importance of on-site management for maintaining protected-area integrity.

Auteur ou autrice(s) : Eklund, Johanna, Jones, Julia P. G., Räsänen, Matti, Geldmann, Jonas, Jokinen, Ari-Pekka

Lien externe

Langage : Anglais

Blue carbon solutions in Kenya’s climate actions

Blue carbon ecosystems (mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass meadows) are highly efficient carbon sinks with the potential to make an important contribution to the mitigation of climate change. Conservation and management of Blue Carbon ecosystems and commitments in Kenya are summarised in Table 1 of this brief, along with key stakeholders who need to engage with them. The incorporation of ocean climate actions into Kenya’s updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC, 2020) is a significant milestone in climate change intervention measures. Kenya has about 612 km2 and 317 km2 of mangroves and seagrass respectively.

Auteur ou autrice(s) : Lang’at, J.K.S., Shilland, R., Dencer-Brown, A., Huxham, M., Kairo, J.G.

Télécharger le PDF

Langage : Anglais

CLARE - Ecolimits building ecosystem services for poverty alleviation

Gaining access to long-term production data is one of the biggest challenges to climate change adaptation policy planning. The project team successfully engaged the government in the analysis and review process of the Ghana Cocoa Board’s long-term big data sets (over seventy years of production data at multiple scales). Analysis improved the capacity of key stakeholders to understand the inter-relationships between the environment /climate, farming, and people’s lives and livelihoods. The process helped consolidate in-country partnerships including with the Forestry Commission, Cocoa Board, Forestry Research Institute of Ghana, Environment Protection Agency, relevant District Assemblies and Tropenbos Ghana.

Auteur ou autrice(s) : Mason, John, Norris, Ken

Télécharger le PDF

Langage : Anglais

Network to understand the changing socio-ecology of the southern African woodlands (SEOSAW) : challenges, benefits, and methods

Findings from the Socio-Ecological Observatory for the Southern African Woodlands (SEOSAW) will underpin the sustainability of two of the largest industries on the continent: wood fuels and timber.
The article describes a new network of researchers’ (SEOSAW) work in long-term, in situ, measurements that will characterize the changing socio-ecology of the woodlands of southern Africa. These woodlands encompass the largest savanna in the world, hugely important to rural and urban livelihoods, but chronically under-studied. A new development is the use of data from permanent sample plots (PSP) in Bayesian model-data fusion analyses of ecosystem carbon cycles. The article includes an extensive bibliography.

Auteur ou autrice(s) : The SEOSAW partnership

Télécharger le PDF

Langage : Anglais