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Now showing 1 - 10 of 1858
  • Journal Article
    Agenda 21 - Chapter 11 - Combating Deforestation: Ecosystem Management
    (1998) Bucknum, Susan
    "This note discusses the United States' adherence to its Agenda 21 commitment to combat deforestation. Section II of the paper discusses the specific provisions of Chapter 11 that recommend strong governmental policy schemes and advocate a sustainable ecosystem management approach to the forests. Specifically, this section explains the concepts of Chapter 11 provisions and their importance to the United States. Section III examines actions taken by the United States to sustain its National Forests both before and after the Earth Summit. Section IV evaluates the United States' actions by analyzing the efforts of the United States Forest Service in implementing ecosystem management and determining the consistency of those efforts with Chapter 11 and the Forest Principles. Finally, Section V provides recommendations for future United States action in managing its National Forests so as to achieve the goals expressed in Chapter 11 of Agenda 21."
  • Journal Article
    Global-Scale Patterns of Forest Fragmentation
    (2000) Riitters, Kurt; Wickham, James; O'Neill, Robert; Jones, Bruce; Smith, Elizabeth
    "We report an analysis of forest fragmentation based on 1-km resolution land-cover maps for the globe. Measurements in analysis windows from 81 km 2 (9 x 9 pixels, 'small' scale) to 59,049 km 2 (243 x 243 pixels, 'large' scale) were used to characterize the fragmentation around each forested pixel. We identified six categories of fragmentation (interior, perforated, edge, transitional, patch, and undetermined) from the amount of forest and its occurrence as adjacent forest pixels. Interior forest exists only at relatively small scales; at larger scales, forests are dominated by edge and patch conditions. At the smallest scale, there were significant differences in fragmentation among continents; within continents, there were significant differences among individual forest types. Tropical rain forest fragmentation was most severe in North America and least severe in Europe-Asia. Forest types with a high percentage of perforated conditions were mainly in North America (five types) and Europe-Asia (four types), in both temperate and subtropical regions. Transitional and patch conditions were most common in 11 forest types, of which only a few would be considered as 'naturally patchy' (e.g., dry woodland). The five forest types with the highest percentage of interior conditions were in North America; in decreasing order, they were cool rain forest, coniferous, conifer boreal, cool mixed, and cool broadleaf."
  • Conference Paper
    State Formation in Community Spaces: Control over Forests in the Kumaon Himalaya, India
    (1999) Agrawal, Arun
    "In the early part of this century, 1916 and 1921 were especially dry years in the Kumaon region of the Indian Himalaya. In each of these years, forest fires racked the countryside, burning beyond the power of the colonial British government to control or extinguish. It was not just the dry weather that was to blame. Villagers in Kumaon set the forest on fire; the dry weather merely helped their efforts along. The containment of this 'planned incendiarism' was one of the main planks of the scientific forestry that the colonial state had begun to introduce in the hills in the last quarter of the 19th century, and especially from around 1910."
  • Working Paper
    The Understanding of Institutions and their Link to Resource Management from a New Institutionalism Perspective
    (2002) Haller, Tobias
    "This paper looks at the theory of the New Institutionalism and how it helps to understand livelihood strategies and institutional change in regard to resource management. This economic theory makes use of methodological individualism and looks at the role formal and informal institutions (rules, norms, values and laws) play in lowering or rising transaction costs in resource management. The paper argues that this approach is a useful tool in order to discuss livelihood strategies. The New Institutionalism looks at historic changes and at power questions (bargaining power of individuals or groups) that are so crucial in the debate on natural resource management. One of the themes useful to illustrate the position of the New Institutionalism is the debate on common property resource management where the notion of the Tragedy of the Commons can be critically questioned. This is done by showing cases where institutions work in order to regulate a sustainable use of common property resources and cases where such rules are absent or do not work (Ostrom 1990). The approach is interesting because it also focuses on the role of the state and external economic, political, demographic and technical changes and how these influence prices for goods and the terms of trade (changes in relative prices). These prices then have an influence on the local level and lead to changes in informal, local institutions, organisation, ideology and bargaining power (Ensminger 1992). In order to illustrate the approach and its use an illustrative example on the institutional changes in African floodplain wetlands is given in the paper."
  • Conference Paper
    Migration and Property in Mangrove Forest: The Formation and Adaptation of Property Arrangements of the Buginese in an Open Delta in Mahakam, East Kalimantan, Indonesia
    (2013) Safitri, Myrna A.
    "By defining local property arrangement as internal rules of the games used by people whose no property rights to protect their land claims and resource utilization, this paper discusses how migrants have invented and adapted their property arrangement in a de facto open access tropical delta in Mahakam, East Kalimantan. Unique due to its diversity of mangrove species and specific geological formation, the Mahakam Delta has been facing devastating mangrove destruction. The Delta land is designated as state forest areas; however, it is open access since pre-colonial times. In such a situation, migrants, mainly the Buginese, have occupied the land. This paper aims to explore the relationship between migration and the formation of property arrangement and semi-formal property rights. Migrants are more vulnerable than indigenous people in the sense that they have not been able to establish their community property rights and the state does not grant them with legal rights. As such, they have to bargain with street-level officials to seek for semiformal rights by accepting any written documents provided by these officials to confirm their land claims. The case study of the Mahakam Delta migrants conceptualizes that property rights evolve from property arrangement. Migration and de facto open access regime are the formative elements of such property arrangement. This paper describes types of local property arrangements related to land, sea and river in the Mahakam Delta; how these arrangements have emerged; how migration and state regulations related to these arrangements; what the main conflicts of interests between stakeholders are, how these conflicts related to the property arrangements crafted by the migrants and how the changes of livelihood have influenced these arrangements."
  • Conference Paper
    Exclusion, Poverty and Inequality in Decentralized Kenyan Forests: Bridging the Divide
    (2008) Obonyo, Emily; Mogoi, Jephine; Oeba, Vincent; Ongugo, Paul
    "Women's contributions are essential to the functioning of Kenya's economy. However, because women's contributions are not valued in the same way as men's, women consistently find themselves at a lower economic status than men. Women are largely excluded from economic decision-making, face low wages, have poor working conditions, limited employment and professional opportunities. Their unpaid work is also not measured and not valued in national accounts. Women often face inequality due to the fact that they earn less income and face unequal distribution of resources. The situation is further aggravated by lack of access to education and job segregation. "In the forestry sector, women face similar challenges. Despite the African women's role in the management of natural resources, the limited access to and lack of property rights has continued to escalate the cycle of poverty in which they are trapped. The traditional division of labour has also meant that women are almost solely the food providers for their families. In Kenya, this has forced women to depend more on the natural resources and being the main gender that produces food crops, they have a profound knowledge of plants, animals and other ecological processes. This calls for a more integrated approach in the decentralized forest management. "This paper therefore analyzes the situation of women with regard to decentralization of forest management in Kenya. Using IFRI/SANREM approaches, the paper identifies the major problems faced in promoting womens participation in the management of forests, and outlines the roles of women in forest management. "Results indicate that there are marked differences in participation in community projects and social groups/associations. There is an indication of uneven access, control and distribution of property rights and natural resource benefits. The paper further highlights power relationships in gendered environments and its impacts on the dominance of certain interest groups. Finally, the paper recommends strategies that can be used to overcome the constraints faced by women in NRM."
  • Working Paper
    Bridging the Gap: Communities, Forests and International Networks
    (2003) Colchester, Marcus; Apte, Tejaswini; Laforge, Michel; Mandondo, Alois; Pathak, Neema
    "Community forestry has transformed over the past 25 years from being an experimental means of providing wood-fuel for the rural poor to a community-led movement demanding reform of the forestry sector. International networks to promote community forestry, which emerged at very different moments in this history with different visions, goals, targets, and participants, have played a key role in this transformation. Based on a review of seven countries and ten networks, the study compiles the main lessons learned from this experience in terms of advocacy effectiveness, communications techniques, network governance, relations with donors and linkage to social movements. The increasing mobilisation of community-based organisations means that supportive NGOs and government agencies now need to play a different role to the one they gave themselves 25 years ago."
  • Journal Article
    Deforestation and Forest Cover Changes in the Himachal Himalaya, India
    (2007) Gupta, Hemant Kumar
    "The extent of forest cover resources on land surface governs many important earth system ecological processes and is the foremost requirement characterizing sustainable forest management. The extent of forest area and decline in forest resources due to deforestation and changes in forest cover have been estimated by conventional and remote sensing techniques by various agencies for India and state of Himachal Pradesh (HP) located in the Western Himalayas. The various forest cover assessments by National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) and Forest Survey of India (FSI) shows that deforestation has been halted since 1980s onwards and forest cover has been stabilized in HP. During the nine biennial forest cover assessment conducted by FSI since 1987 onwards the estimated forest and tree cover have shown an increase, until 2001 assessment and minor decline of 7 km2 during 2003 assessment in HP. The changes with in forest cover between dense forest to open forest however indicates decline in the productivity of forests. State of Forest Report (SFR) 2003 estimates 778,229 km2 (23.65%) of total geographical area of India under forest and tree cover, whereas, in HP recorded forest area constituted 66.52% of its geographical area and only 26.66% area is under forest and tree cover. National Forest Policy 1988 needs to be modified since analysis shows that in HP only 35.5% geographical area is capable of sustaining forest and tree cover against 66% envisaged by policy to be brought under forest and tree cover in mountainous and hill states of India."
  • Journal Article
    Gender and Sustainable Forest Management in East Africa and Latin America
    (2011) Mwangi, Esther; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth; Sun, Yan
    "This paper presents a comparative study of forest management across four countries in East Africa and Latin America: Kenya, Uganda, Bolivia, and Mexico. It focuses on one question: Do varying proportions of women (low, mixed, high) in forest user groups influence their likelihood of adopting forest resource enhancing behavior? We found that higher proportions of females in user groups, and especially user groups dominated by females, perform less well than mixed groups or male dominated ones. We suggest that these differences may be related to three factors: gender biases in technology access and dissemination, a labor constraint faced by women, and a possible limitation to women’s sanctioning authority. Mixed female and male groups offer an avenue for exploiting the strengths of women and men, while tempering their individual shortcomings."
  • Journal Article
    A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Social-Ecological Feedbacks Between Urbanization and Forest Persistence
    (2014) BenDor, Todd; Shoemaker, Douglas A.; Thill, Jean-Claude; Dorning, Monica A.; Meentemeyer, Ross K.
    "We examined how social-ecological factors in the land-change decision-making process influenced neighboring decisions and trajectories of alternative landscape ecologies. We decomposed individual landowner decisions to conserve or develop forests in the rapidly growing Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S. region, exposing and quantifying the effects of forest quality, and social and cultural dynamics. We tested the hypothesis that the intrinsic value of forest resources, e.g., cultural attachment to land, influence woodland owners’ propensity to sell. Data were collected from a sample of urban, nonindustrial private forest (U-NIPF) owners using an individualized survey design that spatially matched land-owner responses to the ecological and timber values of their forest stands. Cluster analysis (n = 126) revealed four woodland owner typologies with widely ranging views on the ecosystem, cultural, and historical values of their forests. Classification tree analysis revealed woodland owners’ willingness to sell was characterized by nonlinear, interactive factors, including sense of place values regarding the retention of native vegetation, the size of forest holdings, their connectedness to nature, ‘pressure’ from surrounding development, and behavioral patterns, such as how often landowners visit their land. Several ecological values and economic factors were not found to figure in the decision to retain forests. Our study design is unique in that we address metropolitan forest persistence across urban-rural and population gradients using a unique individualized survey design that richly contextualizes survey responses. Understanding the interplay between policies and landowner behavior can also help resource managers to better manage and promote forest persistence. Given the region’s paucity of policy tools to manage the type and amount of development, the mosaic of land cover the region currently enjoys is far from stable."