This guidebook - accompained by a series of factsheets - on appropriate harvesting and transport technologies highlights the available options to local communities that can help them realize their greater share in the primary stages of timber and bamboo-based value chains. Scroll down to download the factsheets.

At RECOFTC, we take a long-term, landscape-based and inclusive approach to supporting local communities to secure their land and resource rights, stop deforestation, find alternative livelihoods and foster gender equity. 

Community forestry supports local level climate change adaptation by enhancing resilience in multiple ways: supporting livelihoods and income, increasing food security, leveraging social capital and knowledge, reducing disaster risks and regulating microclimates. However, adaptation planning has, by and large, not included community forestry as a viable climate change adaptation tool.

Local communities and state forest actors, such as Protection Forest Management Boards (PFMBs), State Forest Companies (SFCs), play equally important roles in forest resource management. Yet local communities have limited legal rights. This is one reason that leads to a lack of forest ownership for local communities. In order to support local communities to effectively engage in sustainable forest management and livelihood development, a fuller set of rights should be legally given to them.

The introduction and safe use of chainsaws is arguably the biggest improvement in small-scale forestry harvesting. Felling timber with chainsaws can be accomplished over a relatively short period of time while requiring only a small investment – that is, if laws allow the use of this type of machinery and if service providers for training, maintenance and supply of spare parts, as well as additional support, is in place.

เอกสารที่รวบรวมข้อมูลพื้นฐานของชุมชนบ้านเปร็ดไนไว้อย่างครบถ้วน เหมาะสำหรับผู้ที่สนใจทั่วไป

In Vietnam, forests have been under state stewardship for a long time. Degradation of forest resources under state management together with the high costs of forest protection has led to increased involvement of local people in forest management. Since the early 1990s, the Government of Vietnam (GOV) has been promoting the allocation of forest rights to local people as the foundation for development of community forest management (CFM). The initiative, known as Forest Land Allocation (FLA), has been undertaken in various parts of the country, with mixed results.

There is a vast and unrecognized opportunity for community forestry to strengthen national resilience to climate change through diversifying rural livelihoods, increasing food security, leveraging social capital and knowledge, advancing disaster risk reduction and regulating microclimates. However maximizing the role for community forestry in climate change is an area where clear guidance and recommendations are lacking. 

This publication is focused on oil palm expansion and land tenure in several Southeast Asian palm oil producing countries (the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia) and cross-compares their experiences with the facts and myths, stories and lessons learned from other palm oil producing countries, more specifically, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.

This two-part infographic explains the importance of social equity in forests and the basics on putting it into practice. The infographic defines equity and provides an easy to understand overview of the key elements that will empower forest-dependent communities. Through understanding equity, forest communities will better understand their rights and be prepared to participate in the decision-making process so they gain a fair share of benefits from forest resources.

This regional synthesis paper is part of an overall effort to share the knowledge gained in five years, from 2002 - 2007, of implementing the Small Grant Program for Operations to Promote Tropical Forests (SCPPTF). The findings, lessons, and recommendations presented here emerged from the grantees’ reflections, site visits, project documentation, and discussions and inputs from the eight in-country teams, as well as from the key staff in regional support organizations.

In what is a big step towards commercial community forestry, Cambodia’s Forest Administration, in partnership with RECOFTC and with technical assistance and funding from the Wildlife Conservation Society, began pilot testing in 2008 community-based production forestry in the Seima Biodiversity Conservation Area. It is an innovation unlike any other in the region in which communities are allowed to set up forest-logging operations in buffer-zone forest.