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FOCUS: From Forest to Farm
When climate change negotiators gather in Durban this week, most commentators will be on the lookout for progress on big ticket items: whether the various players can establish a functional $100 billion Green Climate Fund, for example, or find a compromise on emission reduction targets and extend the Kyoto Protocol. But sideline questions could be momentous as well.
The 17th Conference of Parties offers an opportunity to include agriculture in the arsenal of tools backed by negotiators to achieve global climate change goals. Political support for "climate-smart agriculture" could help expand our collective focus from dense tropical forests to mixed landscapes where forests and people intersect in challenging but vital ways. As climate change and food security concerns dovetail with population pressures, degraded land, biodiversity losses and poverty, there is growing demand for "landscape solutions" that take an integrated look at agriculture, land, water, and forest management.
In support of this integrated agenda, PROFOR and partners helped shape in May a discussion around what it would take to scale up investment in trees and landscape restoration in Africa. (The background papers and forum proceedings are now available in a published volume on PROFOR's website.)
Agroforestry and landscape restoration also featured prominently among the solutions that were discussed at an African Ministerial Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September. The challenge of balancing competing demands for national forest lands from agriculture, mining, pulp and paper and other development objectives, was the theme of the Forests Indonesia conference organized by CIFOR in Jakarta with financing from PROFOR. Synergies and trade-offs at the forest-farm interface will take central stage again next week during a session on Landscape Approaches at Forest Day 5: Change and Adaptation in African Drylands: reversing deforestation while contributing to food security. We hope you will join us to discuss this key question.
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In the pipeline: Our work on sharing the benefits of REDD+ payments with forest dependent people is coming together. We have published a briefing note and the first of three related reports online on this 
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