FOCUS: Coming Up to Speed on PROFOR
 from Community Forestry and REDD+ to ICTs for Forest Governance

It's been some time since our last newsletter, so there's a lot of news to share! Since we last wrote, PROFOR has published several reports, starting with Community Forest Management and REDD+ and most recently ICTs for Forest Law Enforcement and Governance: Lessons from a Two-Country Project in Lao PDR and Moldova. PROFOR recently reached a record level of activity with 49 activities underway. This full portfolio is yielding forest-related tools and knowledge to strengthen forests' contribution to poverty reduction, sustainable economic development, and the protection of global and local environmental values.

For example, in El Salvador and Honduras, PROFOR is building evidence and a knowledge base about how to enable the collective action and coordination required to make landscape restoration a reality and mitigate climate change vulnerability. In India, PROFOR is enabling intra- and inter-ministerial convergence for improved watershed management at the landscape scale. In Mexico, PROFOR decision-support tools are bringing stakeholders together to chart out a road map for benefit sharing from REDD+ activities. In Africa, PROFOR is developing tools to track opportunities for growing domestic wood markets in the Congo Basin, generating evidence about how to reduce negative environmental and social impacts and forest loss from mining, and building evidence of the economic and climate resilience benefits of tree-based systems and landscape restoration. 

NEW ACTIVITIES  

Livelihoods

• Building National-Scale Evidence on the Contribution of Forests to Household Welfare - documenting the importance of the forestry sector to national economies using a Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) approach.

• Trees and smallholder agriculture in Subsaharan Africa- improving understanding of the role of tree farming and agroforestry in Africa's agriculture and the livelihoods of its farmers.

• A National Silvo-pastoral Strategy for Tunisia - establishing a national silvo-pastoral strategy for Tunisia and a framework M&E.

• The potential for India's Forests to Combat Poverty and Promote Shared Prosperity - building the knowledge base on the links between poverty and forest dependence of some 100 million people.

Financing SFM

• African Wood Products Price Index (AWPI) - creating an AWPI will help overcome uncertainty about domestic wood markets in Africa and help encourage private investment across the region.

• Scaling up native species forest plantations in Sao Paulo, Brazil - assessing the feasibility and readiness of Sao Paulo's native forest replanting program. 

• Commercial Reforestation Potential in Colombia - defining the most appropriate model for commercial reforestation in Colombia that is economically-profitable, socially-inclusive and environmentally-friendly.

Governance

• Calculating Budget Losses and Local Revenue Impacts of Illegal Logging - developing a unified method for estimating the economic impacts of illegal activities, particularly the budget losses and unreported local revenues in the Russian Federation. 

• Collaborative Stakeholder Mapping to Promote Legal Timber Trade - using Net-Map, complex timber trade networks will be charted out to inform understanding of their functioning.

Cross-sectoral

•  Workshop on Sustainable Productive Forest Landscapes in Mexico - equipping stakeholders with information and good practices for a multi-sectoral and inter-institutional landscape approach.

Information about additional new activities is available at PROFOR.info.

AROUND PROFOR

New faces PROFOR welcomed Laura Ivers as Senior Communications Officer in September. Laura brings a passion for the forest sector and sustainable development to her work. She previously worked with PROFOR from 2001-2007 and is delighted to again be part of the PROFOR team.