Livelihoods and Landscapes will also seek to impact the larger forest governance context, particularly vis-à-vis current forest policies such as the domestic logging ban.  Livelihoods and Landscapes will also encourage the Chinese Government to join the Global Partnership on FLR and to incorporate FLR approaches into national reforestation policies and programmes. The project will further engage the Chinese Government on the management of Chinese companies carrying out logging and forestry activities in Russia and Africa.

In 2007, the Forest Conservation Programme and the Beijing Forestry Society (BFS) launched a Livelihoods and Landscapes demonstration project in the Huayuan watershed, which is located in the catchment area of the Miyun Reservoir. Located to the northeast of Beijing, the reservoir is the main source of drinking water for the 16 million residents of Beijing municipality, a city that faces a serious water crisis. For years inflows have been limited by poor forest functionality and inappropriate activities in the reservoir catchment area. The Miyun Reservoir catchment has significant forest cover, but the forest is unhealthy and is poorly managed, partly due to national policies that ban all forms of logging and limit access to mountain areas. Such policies also severely curtail the development of livelihoods for communities in the catchment.

The Huayuan project aims to restore the watershed landscape through participatory processes, thus optimizing the biodiversity and productivity of the forest landscape. The project also seeks to improve the livelihoods of local residents, particularly poor households, by promoting more appropriate uses of forest resources. The project will be executed in collaboration with the Sino-German Financial Cooperation Project “Watershed Management on Forest Land, Beijing” and builds upon nine years of learning through the Sino-German Technical Cooperation Project “Protection and Management of the Watershed Area of the Miyun Reservoir”.