Indonesia has lagged behind other countries in preserving forest land while expanding its economy. The palm-oil and pulp-and-paper industries employ several million people and reap billions of dollars of annual revenue in a country that struggles with inequality. “The reason fires happen is because people are making a lot of money off of them,” said Louis Verchot, director of environment research at the Bogor-based Center for International Forestry Research.

Climate change may be the one thing that threatens everyone on Earth. But the peril is much more dire for people in some countries if negotiators fail to reach a climate deal in Paris.  The Central African Republic, one of the world’s poorest nations, is experiencing intense civil unrest following the ousting of its leader that will only get worse with climate change. “By building adaptive capacity, you’re really taking care of some of the development issues, and by bringing people together in a genuinely participatory process, you can really contribute to reducing the conflict and tension within the country,” Denis Sonwa, a scientist and agro-ecologist at Center for International Forestry Research, said.

CIFOR meminta pemerintah bekerja keras mewujudkan target pengurangan emisi gas rumah kaca sebesar 29 persen pada tahun 2020–2030. “Indonesia harus berusaha mencapainya dengan sekuat tenaga. Kalau semua berjalan dengan ideal, pasti bisa tercapai,” kata peneliti CIFOR Herry Purnomo. Ideal, maksud Herry, adalah pembangunan di Indonesia berjalan dengan ramah lingkungan dan penegakan hukum terlaksana dengan baik.

Bukan rahasia umum jika selama ini pelaksanaan pilkada tidak lepas dari politik uang yang begitu kental. Lembaga peneliti kehutanan dunia, Center for International Forestry Research (Cifor), Senin siang, merilis temuan bahwa terdapat korelasi antara pembakaran lahan yang masif di Indonesia dan pelaksanaan pilkada. Peneliti Cifor, Herry Purnomo di Pekanbaru, Senin siang, mengungkapkan, pihaknya mengambil sampel 11 daerah di Riau terkait korelasi para calon kepala daerah yang berkampanye dengan janji pemberian atau pembukaan lahan. Padahal, lahan yang dijanjikan itu milik negara atau bahkan konsensi perusahaan perkebunan.

Papua New Guinea has not gone through its forest transition yet. According to the Center for International Forestry Research, it is probably at stage two, known as “frontier conditions”, where things really start to speed up. According to the government, some 15m of its 37m remaining hectares of forest are currently earmarked for timber production

A conservation expert and his team challenged the notion that expert help from the outside is the only way to preserve some of the world’s most valuable and unique ecosystems. Three years later, he went back and documented what they were doing as a case study, which he and his co-authors recently published. The study addresses a conflict Douglas Sheil has seen before: professional conservation organizations saying they need to protect unique resource-rich lands, and locals not getting credit for already protecting the land and often getting blamed for not doing it right.

The Building Biocarbon and Rural Development in West Africa (BIODEV) project is a biocarbon project funded by the government of Finland and implemented by the a consortium composed of World Agro-forestry Centre (ICRAF), Centre for International Forest Research (CIFOR), University of Helsinki, University of Eastern Europe along with national partners identified in sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Mali. BIODEV has held a two days workshop on capacity needs assessment on agro-forestry, mitigation and adaptation options to manage the effects and opportunities of climate change in Sierra Leone and Guinea.