The Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI) is a joint program of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), whose mission is to enhance environmental management and leadership capacity in the Neotropics and tropical Asia by offering capacity-building and networking opportunities to individuals whose decisions and actions influence the management of forests in working landscapes. A key mission of...

From January 26 to 28, 2012, the Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters convened practitioners and researchers from government, academia, and environmental and development institutions from around the globe for information exchange on challenges and emerging strategies in scaling-up restoration in the tropics to provide ecosystem services and benefit biodiversity and local livelihoods. The three-day conference took place in Kroon Hall at the Yale School of Forestry...

Considerable reforestation was undertaken around the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, very large areas of degraded land and forest still remain present across the tropics. Indeed, these areas continue to increase. Several countries do have experience in undertaking large-scale reforestation including Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam. There are lessons to be learned from their experiences but not simple recipes for others to follow. Ecological and socio-economic...

The conference’s concluding panel discussion among all panelists, which served to synthesize conference outcomes and set steps for moving forward with priorities for realizing landscape-scale restoration.

In this paper we discuss two specific inputs aimed to increase restoration success in Eastern and Southern Africa. While deforestation in this part of Africa has been severe it is also an area that is blessed with old maps and nursery entrepreneurs. Obviously successful restoration requires that a whole range of technical and socioeconomic conditions are fulfilled, but here we will concentrate on two neglected areas that could have profound influence on restoration success. Restoration of...

Many of the same criteria apply to forest restoration and community-based forest management--particularly in vulnerable tropical forests where the two are often closely intertwined. For GreenWood, these are best addressed through a suite of flexible tools that include: 1) Value-added markets; 2) Appropriate harvesting and production technologies; 3) Transparent, legal chain-of-custody; 4) Extensive consultation with local partners; and 5) Practical research that responds to local priorities....

4th Panel discussion moderated by Tim Rollinson, Director General of the U.K. Forestry Commission, Chair of the Global Partnership on Forest Landscape Restoration.

Forest landscape restoration seems to have become a new hype. Driven by climate change, there currently are many efforts to establish restoration projects across the globe. Biophysical and economic potentials are assessed, innovative financial mechanisms are developed, and ambitious targets are set to restore the world’s lost forests. However, landscape restoration is nothing new. People have always been constructing, re-constructing and restoring their landscapes, to safeguard their lives...

The Xingu is famous worldwide, not only for the Amazon forest and its border with the Brazilian savannah (called “Cerrado”), but for the cultural richness of its oldest inhabitants: 24 distinct indigenous ethnicities, who still live, drink, bathe and fish in Xingu’s water. The spread of soy and beef production during the last decades has left 300,000 hectares of degraded areas around rivers and water springs in the Xingu basin, threatening the survival of its original people and their health,...

The Brazilian Atlantic Forest is one of the five top priority conservation areas in the world, due to its exceptional biological diversity, very high levels of endemism, and equally high levels of human pressure, hence a dramatically threatened future. In this scenario, conservation will not be enough to save most of the indigenous species of the Atlantic Forest, nor to maintain the flow and quality of ecosystem services. Consequently, ecological restoration will be required, and at a large...

There is a great deal of political momentum behind policy incentives to reduce deforestation and restore tropical ecosystems. New mechanisms, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation and other pro-forest activities (REDD+), may provide many opportunities for improved land use practices in the tropics. These policies and mechanisms could provide additional incentives for long-standing approaches such as community forestry, or may create new paradigms in economic...

3rd panel discussion moderated by Chadwick Dearing Oliver of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

The municipality of São Felix do Xingu, in the Brazilian Amazon State of Para is considered a “deforestation Hotspot” due to the expansion and low efficiency of cattle raising. However, farms in the Amazon must have a minimum forest cover of 80% of the area of the property, according to the Brazilian forest law. In the other hand, agroforestry systems based on cocoa are indicated to decrease deforestation and recover degraded lands. IMAFLORA´s objective is to use the cocoa system to build a...

2nd Panel discussion moderated by Cullman fellow, Jeff Stoike.

Tropical forest succession follows distinct pathways depending on prior land use, post-abandonment disturbance, faunal diversity, and the dynamics of the surrounding landscape. These distinct pathways determine rates of change in species composition, forest structure, and ecosystem processes. Metrics of “success” during forest regrowth are largely determined by values of different stakeholders. Conservation biologists value regrowth as habitats for endemic species and forest specialists....

Two of the main barriers to adoption of small scale forestry by smallholders and indigenous communities in Panama are 1. The lack of revenue generated by the stands early on, and 2. Resistance to new management models. Planting Empowerment (PE) partners with indigenous communities and individual smallholders to cultivate mixed-species plantations that generate short term economic benefits and preserve traditional practices.

BARCA is a company that works in reforestation and also in restoration in the Central American tropics. Its main restoration projects have been with mix native valuable forest species planted in mosaic patterns and also in mixed planting designs. An example of these is the “BIRDS Project”, established in the years of 1995 to 2000, in the Central Pacific Region of Costa Rica. With and NGO in the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, BARCA has also participated in restoration through “enrichment strips”...

1st Panel discussion moderated by Cullman Fellow, Alder Keleman.

Quintana Roo, Mexico is more than 70% forested and harbors important populations of jaguar, tapir, monkeys and pumas. Most forest land is held communally, through ejidos (land grants to groups) that range in size from about 4000 ha to more than 70,000 ha. More than 150 ejidos manage their forests harvesting mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) and a variety of other species to sell as timber. Outside their forest areas, communities practice slash and burn agriculture to produce corn, beans and...

Despite increasing loss and degradation of tropical rainforest, conservationists frequently overlook the ability of disturbed forest to conserve biodiversity. Restoring degraded forest requires understanding how land-use history and subsequent management affects forest succession and regrowth. The purpose of this study was to evaluate long-term forest dynamics in Kibale National Park, Uganda to 1) examine patterns in forest change and 2) evaluate how regenerating forest can provide food for...

Silvopastoral systems (SPS) enhance milk and meat production, reduce costs and are instrumental for the productive rehabilitation of degraded lands. Intensive silvopastoral systems (ISS) combine fodder shrubs planted at high densities (> 10,000 plants ha-1), trees and improved pastures. The scaling-up of such systems requires incentives to address financial and knowledge barriers, as demonstrated by the Regional Integrated Silvopastoral Approaches to Ecosystem Management pilot project. The...

Forests are the cornerstone of the entire landscape, which includes wetlands, agriculture, mountains, drylands, rivers, biodiversity and people. Landscape restoration and sustainable forest management can only be achieved when all stakeholders, including governments, private institutions and local communities, work together using a cross-sectoral, cross-institutional strategy at a landscape level. The challenge is to explore institutional arrangements that are better suited to each country’s...

An introduction to the three-day conference convening world leaders on forest restoration by the Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.