CIFOR

Evolving international sustainability norms demand greater environmental and social responsibility from business across global commodity chains – from countries of origin to countries of consumption. Conventional commandand-control regulation has had limited success in addressing negative environmental and social impacts. As a result, advocacy groups and NGOs have championed a diversity of market-based and multi-stakeholder governance […]

Originally posted on CIFOR’s Forests News. By Suzanna Anderson. The rainy season has begun in Indonesia, dousing most of the fires that have been burning across Sumatra and Kalimantan. Nature may have solved the problem for now—but the threat is far from over. “Some parts of the country are going to be naturally drier in […]

More than 100,000 fires ravaged the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan throughout September and October 2015, producing a noxious haze that affected tens of thousands of people. Seasonal rains began in November, but 2015/16 are El Nino years, so the threat of new fires is far from over. The problem is complex but it can […]

Originally published on CIFOR’s Forests News blog. By John Cannon It’s a daunting challenge whose complexity only continues to intensify: How can we manage the land so that it can provide the food, timber, minerals and other natural resources we need, while also conserving carbon stocks and biodiversity? Enter the landscape approach, designed to manage […]

Originally published on CIFOR’s Forest News. By Harry Pearl. For hundreds of thousands of rural families eking out a living in Brazil’s Amazon estuary, living with flooding is a daily reality. But with climate change tipped to hasten sea-level rise, tidal inundation is set to worsen. How can local government help smallholders—known locally as caboclos—to […]

In Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan province, the peat areas are burning and emitting a toxic smoke causing untold damage to the environment, wildlife and human health. Most of the fires in Central Kalimantan are blazing in former peatland forests, which have been drained, cleared and burned for oil palm and agriculture, large and small. The dried-out […]