One of the world’s "biodiversity hotspots" is under siege, as a growing number of business interests
seek to cash in the "peace" in northern Burma’s Kachin State... A project is in progress to build a number of roads in Kachin State in return for huge logging concessions.

The result of in-depth research and extensive on-the-ground investigations, the report exposes the scale of illegal logging and illegal timber trade in East Asia with a special focus on Indonesia.

It is widely believed that land tenure insecurity under a customary tenure system leads to a socially inefficient resource allocation. This article demonstrates that the practice of granting secure individual ownership to tree planters spurs earlier tree planting, which is inefficient from the private point of view but could be efficient from the viewpoint of the global environment.

This paper presents an overview of the various approaches that developed and developing countries have used in designing national forest funds. It is based on a study of legislation in over forty countries and a review of some of the few empirical studies of forest fund performance. The overview may serve as checklist of issues and options for policymakers who are designing funds.

Critical shifts are affecting rural resource rights in Africa through widespread reform in land, forestry and other laws. The cutting edge of transformation affecting women is in emerging new provision for wives to hold family property as co-owners with their husbands, which could play a main role in revitalising smallholder agriculture.

This report documents the environmental and social impacts of Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), assesses the role of international financial institutions in fuelling APP’s unsustainable and damaging operations and examines the link between this unsustainable practice and APP's financial crisis.Financial institutions should acknowledge that it is far more than the financial failure of APP that proves

This paper begins by discussing Tanzania's increasing recognition of the need to bring individuals, local groups, and communities into the policy, planning, and management process if woodlands are to remain productive in the coming decades.The article finds that:central control of forests takes management responsibility away from the communities most dependent on them, inevitably resulting in

Report which alleges that International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans and policies have caused extensive deforestation in each of the 15 countries of Africa, Latin America, and Asia studied.This forest loss, the author claims, has occurred both directly and indirectly through:the IMF's promotion of foreign investment in natural resource sectorsausterity measures that cut spending on environmental

The paper is a desk study prepared as a basis for discussion and further field research into land tenure and conflict in the region.The first section provides an overview of land tenure and land utilization issues. This section includes an analysis of gender and other demographic issues as they relate to land tenure and access to natural resources.

This article discusses the extent to which the location of roads s and protected areas affects deforestation in North Thailand. The article stresses that establishing protected areas (national parks together with wildlife sanctuaries) in North Thailand did not reduce the likelihood of forest clearing, but wildlife sanctuaries may have reduced the probability of deforestation.

Using the framework of the Land Use and Cover Change (LUCC) Science/Research Plan this study takes 152 studies of deforestation in different regions of varying size from around the tropics and analyses them to assess how important different causes of deforestation really are.

This paper explores the opportunities for mitigating atmospheric carbon emissions and generating development income in developing countries through a combination of sustainable agricultural practices on existing lands, slowing tropical deforestation, and reforesting degraded lands.The analysis shows that over the next ten years, forty-eight major tropical and subtropical developing countries ha