The Massachusetts Woodlands Cooperative, LLC (MWC) is working to help members conduct sustainable forestry of the highest standards while increasing financial returns from harvest activities. The forests of Massachusetts, the 3rd most densely populated of the United States, are threatened....

Shifting cultivation is one of many phenomena involving the interaction of humans with their natural environment, for which the spatial and temporal dimensions are essential to understanding the system. As a spatiotemporal phenomenon, shifting cultivation uses forest resources to provide the...

Shifting cultivation is the primary means of livelihood for subsistence farmers in the Congo Basin of central Africa. This agroforestry system, which depends on long periods of forest-fallow to maintain soil fertility as well as for the provision of non-wood forest products, is under pressure as...

Shifting cultivation is the primary means of livelihood for subsistence farmers throughout the humid forests of the tropics. They rely on the forest landscape as a source of fertile land to sustain their livelihood. Sustainable use of the resource base requires long periods of fallow and the...

The economic literature of property rights has been assessing the impact of different community based arrangements on the efficiency of natural resource management of specific areas. Differently, other strands of development economics and policy-oriented research have been concerned with issues...

Despite growing policy interest in using tropical forests as carbon sinks, relevant evidence is sparse. To provide such evidence, our project advances and integrates two disciplinary analyses, and applies them for a case study of Costa Rica. First, we estimate how much C sequestration will be...

In recent years there has been a great deal of discussion on the working of village forest institutions (VFI) in developing countries with a view to understanding their role as rural institutions. In a tropical country like India, the success of any community based forest management effort...

Smallholder tree cultivation and management is a common form of land-use in high-potential areas of Kenya. Some practices, such as the planting of trees on field boundaries, are strongly embedded in customary notions of land and tree tenure. Others, such as the planting of black wattle (Acacia...

Climate change mitigation can be achieved, according to many, by means of Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in the Tropics (REDD). Within the climate change policy debate we thus find discussions on how to reduce GHG emissions by designing appropriate REDD programmes...

The paper discusses basic facts and frameworks about the externalities associated with lands covered with forests, such as externalities related to soil and water; biodiversity and genetic resources preservation; carbon sequestration and stock; and aesthetic, option and existence values. The...