This document is designed to aid foresters and other natural resource managers desiring to more effectively integrate gender in (primarily tropical) forest management. It identifies 11 issues that have been highlighted in the literature on gender. Sample issues, though potentially relevant at all scales — macro, meso, and micro — are examined, each at a particular scale, as shown in the ‘Gender Box’. The purpose is to highlight both the importance of and the interactions among scales, as we consider the lives of individual women and men in forests. Frequent reference is made to the literature, both as a guide for users and as a mechanism to show clearly what gender researchers have found relevant pertaining to the sample issues. Brief suggestions for ways forward are provided in closing.

Although REDD projects can generate benefits for forest communities, they can also create negative social impacts, undermining the rights of indigenous peoples (IP). There is a need to analyze whether current forest carbon standards include adequate requirements to ensure IP's rights in REDD projects. This paper summaries the negative social impacts that REDD projects can cause in forest indigenous communities and establishes an evaluation framework of policies and measures needed to avoid or mitigate those impacts. This framework is used to assess how current carbon standards for REDD projects address social issues and whether they adequately protect IP's rights. The results of this assessment show that carbon standards, by and large, do not adequately include social standards to protect IP's rights. For example, while many standards call for clarification of tenure, few actually include recognition of traditional land and resources right. In addition, only half of the standards analyzed require monitoring of social impacts throughout the project's implementation, or require free prior and informed consent of indigenous peoples. Therefore, forest carbon standards for REDD projects should incorporate social principles in their methodologies or should be implemented jointly with social forest carbon standards.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has been partially attributed to the establishment of settlement projects. Acknowledging the difficulties in quantifying the rate and patterns of deforestation, the objective of this paper is to determine forest dynamics (deforestation and reforestation) in areas where settlement projects have been established, at multiple levels and using different methods. Using satellite images from 1985 to 2010, a study was conducted in five settlement projects in Para State, aiming to determine forest dynamics at municipal and settlement levels. At property level, participatory maps were constructed to understand settlers' perception of forest/non-forest areas. The results show that reforestation is the current process in the municipality and in some settlements. Settlers, however, perceive areas with secondary regrowth as potentially fertile cropland and might deforest again in the future. More research is needed to elucidate whether the observed reforestation will lead to a forest transition or is merely a temporary trend.

Forest Transition Theory predicts that as a country develops the trend in amount of forested areas will be reversed from decreasing to expanding. As in other regions of the world, China's population growth and increasing per capita consumption have led to both a surge in demand for forest products and in pressures on forest ecosystems, which together have resulted in forest loss and degradation. This article analyses the historical process of forest transition in China, marked by a long-term decrease in forests followed by the recent recovery. Aside from impressive economic and technological developments, the causes of the forest transition lie in an unprecedented ecological crisis that has prompted an increased environmental awareness and the subsequent implementation of an active conservation policy. The transition in China's forest has also been linked to a displacement of impacts over other regions.

Community-based forest groups (CBFGs) were developed in eastern and southern Africa based on the assumption that natural resources are best managed by the communities who depend on them. However, many CBFGs have not met expectations due to internal weaknesses and external obstacles. This study describes the current status of CBFGs in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia; identifies drivers and barriers for developing CBFGs; and generates insights about how barriers are best addressed. The report combines case studies of 11 CBFGs and a verification workshop. Several factors suggest that the development of CBFGs in the region has been positive, including a high membership; strong commitment; basic operational skills; the growth of local, regional and international markets; and infrastructure improvements. Impediments to CBFG success include inappropriate registration of the organisations, insecure access rights, weak leadership and organisational capacities, limited resources, weak market access and limited entrepreneurial and value adding capacity. This study concludes by suggesting measures to improve the future development of CBFGs in the region.

Efforts to address wood scarcity have ignored the forestry value chain and extant literature treats commodity chains as static constructs. Using the adaptive cycle framework, the evolution of the sawn wood commodity chain in Uganda was analysed to examine how policy and governance, physical, and socioeconomic factors interacted to shape its profile over time. Results show that the chain has evolved through one adaptive cycle and is currently undergoing reorganisation. The policy and governance environment had the greatest influence but inadequate coherence with the socioeconomic and physical environments resulted in a system vulnerable to exogenous disturbances. The examination of commodity chains as complex adaptive systems provides beneficial insights to supplement traditional cross-sectional studies focussing on structure, functioning and distribution equity. There is a need for adaptive institutions with focus on development of a cogent strategy for proper coordination in the sawn wood production and distribution system.

Over the past decade, many tropical country governments have promoted smallholder timber planting. In Indonesia, the government introduced a program aimed at establishing 5.4 million hectares of smallholder timber plantations by 2016. In order to support the program, the Government of Indonesia provides access to funding through a microcredit loan scheme. However, to date there has been insufficient awareness and interest from smallholder planters. Research conducted in Riau and South Kalimantan provinces found that smallholder borrowers were more likely to borrow from traditional and informal sources than from the government programme. Using a gap analysis, this study identifies a number of fundamental problems caused by mismatches between the loan scheme and the characteristics of borrowers. They include a minimum loan size that is too large for small farmers to manage, an overly burdensome application and reporting process, a lack of loan management at the local level, and improper geographic targeting of the loan programme, among others. Based on these findings, this paper provides a number of recommendations to improve the government loan scheme by adapting it to the needs of its target beneficiaries.

In the framework of multi-objective forest management, ‘priority areas’ which are relatively more important for the selected management objectives are commonly designated. Using a comparative analysis of guided interviews, we examined the use and importance of priority areas in forest planning in nine Central European countries. In all countries, priority areas have been widely used, forest function areas and protected areas being the most common. According to management objectives, more than 20 types of priority areas were recognised, with priority areas for protection against natural hazards, nature conservation, recreation, welfare, and production being the most prevalent. Criteria for the designation differ among the countries; however, site conditions and infrastructure facilities are most often used. The scale of designation ranges from 1:10 000–1:50 000, and the size of priority areas varies from 0.1 ha to several hundreds of ha. The level of participation of stakeholders involved in the designation of priority areas differs among and within the countries. The effectiveness of priority areas for forest management can be improved by transparent designation criteria, objective oriented management measures, and efficient financial instruments.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recognizes protected areas (PAs) as instrumental in fostering the attainment of international targets. At the end of the Rio 20 in Brazil, this paper focuses on PAs created in Cameroon since 1992. Statistics from the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), and other sources illustrate that 15 PAs covering 1 901 739 hectares have been created and 13 others enclosing 666 026 hectares are at different stages of creation. They are 11 national parks covering 1 806 928 hectares representing 95% and 4 sanctuaries wrapping up 5% (94 811 hectares). The tropical humid ecosystem has 56% of the area protected; the tropical wooded savannah 30% and the montane ecosystem 7%. PAs overlap significantly (96%) with Key Biodiversity Areas suggesting they are conferring some protection on biodiversity.

China's latest rural forest reforms have made headways by further devolving the use rights of collectively owned forestland and relaxing government control over private forestry operations. However, there have been policy inconsistencies and conflicts, such as harvest restriction, lack of flexibility in local execution, and takings of devolved forestland without fair compensation. This paper attempts to elucidate the theoretical and practical considerations needed for resolving these and other challenges, which, we argue, crucially hinge on a clear understanding of the advances of institutional economics in such areas as property right, collective action, and transaction cost, and a proper incorporation of the primary features of forest ecosystems and forestry as well as the rural society of China. It is hoped that this effort will contribute to the continued discussion and more effective execution of the tenure reform and institutional change in China and elsewhere.