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FOCUS: The Business of Trees
The Nairobi investment forum which was held over three days in May provided a one-of-a-kind inventory of private sector opportunities related to growing trees, marketing tree products and restoring degraded landscapes. Over 100 participants, from a wide variety of shared experiences with investing in trees and landscape restoration. Investments in trees typically deliver multiple benefits (woodfuel, timber, shade, wind protection, fertilizer, fruits and fodder, erosion- and water-control, animal habitat, etc - not to mention carbon sequestration), yet remain vexingly difficult to implement in many contexts in part because of the time lag between the up-front investment and the delayed production of tradable commodities. The forum served as a setting to brainstorm around investment designs that have worked or could work at different scales and for different agribusiness actors in different parts of Africa.
The central question: how to make money off trees while serving the greater good(or how to finance SFM, in the community parlance) has been a constant in PROFOR's portfolio over the years. With PROFOR support, colleagues in the World Bank's Latin America and Caribbean Region have just published a Guide to evaluating the competitiveness of community forest enterprises in Mexico (in Spanish). Along with partners at FAO and IIED, we've also been backing a social network that provides support for small and medium forest enterprises in different parts of the world. The network called Forest Connect now counts over 700 members. In line with our focus on livelihoods, we're also developing guidance on benefit-sharing, so that when money does materialize, it effectively reaches the intended beneficiaries.
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HEADS UP Events and workshops: PROFOR is expecting to support a three-day workshop on evaluating the impacts of certification in Montpellier, France, in November. Participants representing the evaluation community, economists, sociologists, ecologists, and foresters will discuss and decide on an integrated evaluation method to elucidate whether certification is achieving its set objectives in different countries. PROFOR will also be a sponsor of Forest Day 5 and the Dry Forests Conference, which will both be held in Durban, South Africa, alongside the UNFCCC Conference of Parties (COP) in December.
 In the pipeline: A collection of background papers for the Investment Forum held in Nairobi in May will be published along with edited conference proceedings.
PROFOR's work on managing the miombo woodlands of Southern Africa will also be published under a hard cover in time for the Durban conferences. |
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NEW ACTIVITIES
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AROUND PROFOR
Two new faces at PROFOR: Jeff Alumai, an economist from Uganda, has joined the team in Washington DC as a Junior Professional Associate; Veronica Jarrin from Ecuador is our new Operations Analyst.
PROFOR knowledge and videos are featured prominently this month on the World Bank's sustainable development website.
More than 400 people and organizations now follow PROFOR (a.k.a. "forestideas") on Twitter.
PROFOR has posted over 40 short video interviews on Vimeo. Leave us a comment to let us know what you think.
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Photos: Header by Jeremy Horner/Panos; Trees by Flore de Préneuf
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