Agroforestry, a multifunctional and climate-smart method of integrating trees into agricultural landscapes, plays an important role in a number of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and in their implementation Agenda 2030.

Lisa Westholm, Focali member and PhD candidate in rural development at Swedish Agricultural University (SLU), will organize a panel at next year’s IUFRO forestry congress in Freiburg, Germany. The theme for the 2017 congress is “Interconnecting Forests, Science and People”.

Indigenous and local communities, particularly in forest areas, are increasingly affected by environmental degradation and deforestation, which is often the result of unsustainable land use and global demand for commodities and mineral resources.

Restored and sustainably managed forests in cities watersheds can provide cost effective solutions to enhance the quality and quantity of  operation of traditional “grey” water infrastructure.

It has been ten years since the global climate community agreed that a financial mechanism to support reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) must play a role in fighting climate change. Since then, a vast number of research projects have studied how REDD+ can be implemented in practice, and it has become apparent that paying local landowners for keeping trees is not a fix for sustainable forest management in its own right.

This blog is written by Larissa Stiem and Focali member Torsten Krause based on results presented in their article

A new EBA report based on a systematic review of impact evaluations about our understanding of the double objectives, climate benefits and poverty reduction, shows a ‘know-do gap’. Three Focali members, Gunnar Köhlin, Madelene Ostwald and Eskil Mattson, were part of the review that focused on forest conservation and household energy transitions.

The joint SIANI-SLU Global and Focali Workshop on Community resource management, landscapes and climate change in South- and Southeast Asia took place on 16-17 May.

Growing world population drives the demand for food, feed and fiber. And since no country can produce all the products we now can buy in supermarkets, this demand is met through the export of agricultural commodities on the global market. Partly, the global demand is met through a rising productivity on the already established agricultural land.

The background of Focali, a presentation of their major research topics and a summary of their 2015 activities.