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COLLABORATIVE APPROACHES FOR THE
TREES AND THE COMMUNITY
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Forests are treasure troves of biodiversity, useable goods and invisible services. Our know-how of stakeholder empowerment and governance improvement took us to a new hypothesis: Livelihoods and Landscapes is a series of interventions that tries to prove that forests can be managed for biodiversity values and economic opportunity at the landscape level.
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IUCN’s global experience has shown that to deal with threats to forests we need a diverse range of tactics, based on science and local partnerships. It has led us to assess the market for nontimber forest products and traditional wisdom as a tailored strategy in South Siberia’s Altai-Sayan ecoregion. Or identify the Tropical Rainforest World Heritage Site of Sumatra as threatened by agricultural encroachment, deforestation and roads. Or help ministries, industry and civil society with ecological restoration in Ghana, where 3% deforestation annually shrank forest cover from 7.5 to 6.3 million hectares in a single decade.
Part of the solutions is the empowerment of stakeholders, based especially on recognition of the rights and livelihoods of those who depend on it. In Bangladesh, we trained 200 community members to increase income from medicinal plants through seed banks and nurseries, and make energy-saving cooking stoves. Around Kenya’s last indigenous forests, where 87% live in extreme poverty, IUCN empowered the community through bee-keeping, tree nurseries and piped water schemes. And in Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria and Tanzania, we work in partnership with Unilever, government and communities on the sustainable harvesting of Allanblackia seed-oil, an alternative to palm oil. Our project generated a total income of USD 85,000 for the 3,000 farmers participating; by 2011 it will involve 30,000 farmers with a total income of USD 2,000,000.
Another part is improving governance. Trust between businesses, governments and local communities and access to the same information is needed to tackle illegal logging. Last year, we worked with stakeholders to improve forest law enforcement and governance in Ghana, Russia, Vietnam and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Brazil, we helped forest dwellers and timber companies use a forest certification system to gain equitable access to new markets.
Building on the above, IUCN launched a major initiative called Livelihoods and Landscapes . Funded by the Government of the Netherlands, it enables the rural poor to expand their economic opportunities while sustaining their forests for themselves and our climate. It also works with governments, businesses and industry for collaboration on the sustainable management of forests for a 25% reduction in poverty, new business opportunities and growing national economies. |
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