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 With today being World Forestry Day, we are pleased to send you this second edition of our News Update, a monthly wrap of everything happening at the Center for International Forestry Research. This month we are delighted to share with our 15,000 subscribers the re-launched POLEX, an initiative of CIFOR to keep opinion leaders, policymakers and researchers up to date on path-breaking research on forests. POLEX started in 1997 and is sent monthly by email in English, Japanese, Spanish French and Indonesian. Each article includes a concise highlight of a timely and important research report. This month, Dr. Christine Padoch, CIFOR's new Director of the Forests and Livelihoods Program, writes an article entitled, "5 Actors, 5 Trends, a Continent of Complexity."
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 This month we celebrated International Women's Day. CIFOR Director General Frances Seymour used the occasion to write a blog post about the importance and challenges of promoting women in the forestry sector: "I can tell you that we've got a lot of work to do," she wrote. We also had blog stories about women and forests from Latin America, Africa and Asia. The Collaborative Partnership on Forests issued a press release quoting a CIFOR scientist saying that while women are the main users of forests in developing countries − gathering food and firewood − they continue to be sidelined in how the forests are managed despite years of efforts to mainstream their involvement. We launched a new gender portal on our website. And we released a video that includes interviews with gender experts from CIFOR, IUCN and FAO.
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 The number of people visiting our blog continued to climb, with a 50% jump this month from February. We had several articles from around the world about the role of women in the forestry sector, including an interview with indigenous rights activist and leader Myrna Cunningham. Another blog story looked at how the media is shaping the debate on climate change in Central Africa. We blogged from a climate change conference for youth in Indonesia. We also kicked off a bi-weekly review of media articles in Indonesia on REDD+, which is done as part of our Global Comparative Study of REDD+.
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One of CIFOR's top publication downloads in the past few months has been A guide to learning about livelihood impacts of REDD+ projects. "While there exist many guides on how to structure the monitoring and evaluation component of projects, and many toolkits on how to measure changes in well-being of the rural poor, these guides are not adapted to the context of forest conservation and many of the well-being indicator toolkits do not embrace the 'counterfactual thinking' that is necessary to attribute observed outcomes to the project/program of interest," said co-author Pamela Jagger. "We seek to bridge these two worlds and create a guide that is uniquely suited to uncovering the social impacts of REDD+ and creating a common language and structure for learning about REDD+ projects." The guide was published as part of the CIFOR's Global Comparative Study on REDD+. An executive summary of the guide is available in Spanish.
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 How can we convince farmers that they should not cut down trees which bring them much needed energy and shelter? How can a country be so rich in natural resources yet still be home to some of the poorest people in the world? What can be done to preserve the Congo Basin from complete deforestation? Getting REDD+ to work: The Challenge in DR Congo will take you on a journey through the forest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on which some of the poorest people in the world depend for food, energy and shelter. Sadly, 134 million hectares of this forest, representing 60% of the Congo's total land cover, is currently under threat of deforestation. Made by Snöball Film, a Norwegian production company, with funding support from NORAD, the video includes an interview with CIFOR Senior Associate Arild Angelsen and explores some of the environmental challenges being faced in the DR Congo and how REDD+ may help overcome them.
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Forest Day 4 in Cancún in December on the sidelines of COP16 was our biggest Forest Day yet. More than 1,500 people attended, including 106 journalists and 280 climate negotiators. This month, we released our report on the event, which you can download here. We are now focused on Forest Day 5 in Durban, South Africa in December 2011.
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Tropical Wetlands Ecosystem of Indonesia
11 April – 14 April 2011 in Sanur, Bali, Indonesia. more
3rd Indogreen Forestry Expo
14 April – 17 April 2011 in Jakarta, Indonesia. more
Delivering Transformative Solutions - WWF
27 April – 30 April 2011 in Jakarta, Indonesia. more
Event calendar
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