SUMMARY Fields and forests are gendered spaces. Women's crucial contributions to productive and reproductive work within and beyond the household have been made visible since the 1970s. There has also been a persistent call for mainstreaming gender in sustainable development and environmental concerns. Prior work discusses the importance of women and gender for forests, and provides guidelines and methods to integrate them in forestry research. This paper assesses the uptake of women and gender issues in recent (2014–2016) forestry research. We found that women and gender concerns are still largely absent or inadequately addressed in forestry research published in scientific journals. Despite the call for greater gender integration in forestry, much needs to be done in quantitative and qualitative terms to meet this goal.

SUMMARY The objective of this study was to investigate the design and application of a carbon baseline for commercial timber harvest activities involving conventional timber harvest activities (CNV), relative to reduced-impact logging (RIL) in Sabah, Malaysia. As only RIL is eligible to be practiced in production forests, a baseline of CNV was estimated from the literature. The principle of net present value was applied to the post-harvest accumulation of carbon stocks after RIL to model a conservative ‘crediting’ baseline. Two areas representing opposite ends of a range of anthropogenic disturbance were sampled, with an old growth lower montane forest, and a lowland severely logged-over dipterocarp forest investigated before-, and two- and three-years after harvest, respectively. Areas impacted by CNV were estimated to contain 12–39% of pre-harvest carbon stock, relative to 57–63% under RIL and estimated to accumulate carbon in the range of 0.68–1.25 tC ha-1 yr1, averaging 14–55 years for recovery; in-li...

In depth understanding of variation of biomass and carbon pools in different forest ecosystems is crucial for monitoring, reporting and verification of forest carbon stocks in the context of forest landscape restoration (FLR). The study compares carbon stocks from five carbon pools by the mode of origin (natural vs planted forests) and ecological functions (Special use, Protection and Production forests) of the forests. An intensive forest carbon inventory was conducted in six communes of Dinh Hoa district, Vietnam. Soil organic carbon (SOC) was found to be the largest carbon pool. Mean SOC densities were not significantly different between natural forests and planted forests, but were significantly different among different forest types classified based on ecological functions. When considering the total of all carbon pools, mean carbon densities were neither significantly different between natural and planted forests, nor among Special use, Protection and Production forests. Our study provides evidence that different FLR interventions may provide equivalent potentials for increasing forest carbon stocks. We link FLR with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) initiative Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in developing countries (REDD+) to highlight synergies between processes of regaining ecological functionality, enhancement of human well-being across deforested or degraded forest landscapes, and contribution to the enhancement of forest carbon stocks.

After more than 20 years and substantial investments of time and money, Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification of tropical forest management is due for a stringent impact evaluation. For any social, ecological, and economic outcomes to be attributed to FSC certification, rival explanations need to be ruled out. We recognize that different types of knowledge about FSC impacts derived from information gathered through a range of methods can satisfy the evidence-needs of different stakeholders. But this paper describes a roadmap based on rigorous methods to assess whether FSC certification delivers on its expected outcomes and the underlying mechanisms through which changes can be attributable to FSC. To this end, background studies that provide contextual knowledge related to implementation of FSC certification are proposed to account for any positive self-selection biases and to capture the temporal dynamics of certification including changes in the sociopolitical and economic contexts that influence certification decisions. (Resume d'auteur)

SUMMARY The Chinese government has carried out ambitious reforms in the country's collective forest sector since 2003. Based on two case studies from Yunnan Province, this paper examines the effects of China's Collective Forest Tenure Reform with regard to villagers' participation in their implementation of the reform, their effects on formal tenure rights and the changes to actual tenure rights on the basis of two case studies from Yunnan. The case studies show that higher levels of participation by villagers can lead to changes in formal and actual tenure rights that bring these rights more into line with national objectives. Thus, decentralization may be a critical precondition for successful forest tenure reform in China and beyond.

SUMMARY While gender issues are becoming increasingly integrated in international environment and development policies, the simplistic manner in which they are treated holds scant promise for real change. In the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program in Burkina Faso, women are targeted in projects promoting non-timber forest product commercialisation aimed to incentivise forest conservation. Such policies are often based on essentialist assumptions about what men and women do, ignoring that social relations of inequality need to be understood in context. Drawing on intersectional theory this study analyses REDD+ documents, and data about resource use in two villages in Burkina Faso, showing how the participatory approach in Burkina's REDD+ program is unlikely to encourage currently marginalised voices to be heard in existing forest management organisations. Rather, the lack of acknowledgement of intersecting relations of inequality leads to crucial aspects of NTFP res...

The Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) harnesses the power of trees, forests and agroforestry landscapes to address the most pressing global challenges of our time – biodiversity loss, climate change, food security, livelihoods and inequity. CIFOR and ICRAF are CGIAR Research Centers.