2017 has been an exciting year for Food Tank! We held Summits in Washington, D.C., Boston, and New York City, traveled the world speaking at events, worked on the forthcoming book Nourished Planet, and met many of our members and readers in person! We hope you enjoyed a few of the more than 500 articles produced by our research staff.

CIFOR hopes to create a world in which forests are high on the political agenda, and evidence-based decisions are made in order to protect the forests and the needs of forest-dependent people. Their work enhances environmental conservation and human wellbeing, and promotes equity through research that aids businesses, governments, and non-governmental organizations.

Planting trees is “among the least painful ways” to meet the country’s goal to slash carbon emissions, experts say

Iceland’s effort to replant relatively slow-growing trees is unlikely to have a significant impact on global climate emissions, said Christopher Martius, a team leader for climate change, energy and low-carbon development at Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research.

The annual Global Landscapes Forum conference, which took place in Bonn, Germany, this week (19-20 December) comes at an opportune time for land-sector advocates to celebrate a recent victory at COP23, and to begin organizing steps to make critical changes in global agricultural practices to assist in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

A United Nations human rights chief steps down citing silencing of human rights defenders, as Myanmar bans a human rights investigator. President Donald Trump threatens to cut funding for countries that vote against formally recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and representatives from development, environment, and finance communities wrap up the Global Landscapes Forum in Bonn, Germany. This week in development.

A Brazilian activist who helped thousands of people in the Amazon rainforest to use their land sustainably won an international environmental award on Wednesday.

She was awarded the $20,000 Wangari Maathai Forest Champions Award – an annual prize named after the late Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmentalist – at the Global Landscapes Forum in Bonn, a conference on sustainable land use. (Reporting by Astrid Zweynert @azweynert, Editing by Katy Migiro. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience.

The scientists and policy makers, who converged in Kampala to share outcomes of research on forestry management, underscored the need for continued inclusion of women in the implementation of forest tenure issues in order to make them more effective.

The Centre for International Forestry Research CIFOR is engaged in partnership with other institutions to spearhead forest research and management across the globe.

The former president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, thinks that most degraded land can be restored in a profitable way — but “creative” approaches are needed to make restoration projects attractive to investors.

Speaking at the Global Landscapes Forum in Germany this week, Calderón talked about the urgent need to restore the world’s degraded land — estimated at 2 billion hectares — and how it can offer governments, companies, and communities both economic and social returns. While stressing the need to preserve pristine forest, Calderón told Devex that “most degraded land could be recovered in a profitable way, in my opinion,” but “you need to be careful that you don’t compete with the nature of the original forest.”

What links climate change, poverty and migration? The Global Landscapes Forum addresses how land-use is central to global challenges that are more interconnected than many of us realize.

“Deforestation and changes in land-use contribute around 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions,” Karin Kemper, senior director for Environment and Natural Resources at the World Bank, said, speaking at the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) in Bonn, Germany.