People matter for peat
Better management of Indonesia’s vast peatlands, some of the biggest and most efficient carbon stores on the planet, which have been extensively degraded, means working with the people who make their living from them.
Rob Finlayson
Robert Finlayson is the Southeast Asia program's regional communications specialist. As well as writing stories for the Centre's website, he devises and supervises strategies for projects and the countries in the Southeast Asia region, including scripting and producing videos, supervising editors and translators and also assisting with resource mobilization.
Biodiesel from palm oil: finding the sweet spot between ecology and economy
Scientists at ICRAF The World Agroforestry Centre have struck the golden mean between intensification and environmental health for oil-palm plantations. Their analysis shows that sustainable systems can significantly boost production but not as high as some analysts believed....
Stakeholders move to enhance productivity and efficiency in Kenya’s dairy sector for lower greenhouse gas emissions
As part of the historic UN Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, countries committed to fight climate change by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions from various sectors, including agriculture. Kenya is not being left behind. Stakeholders from the dairy...
Today we’ve blown our year’s allowance
The global economy is consuming our available resources about one-and-a-half times as fast as they regenerate. Trees play a prominent role in our attempts to buck this trend. Just as companies, countries and households need to keep...
Trees on farms: the missing link in carbon accounting
While tropical forests continued to decline, a remarkable change is happening: tree cover on agricultural land has increased across the globe, capturing nearly 0.75 Gigatonnes carbon dioxide every year. A new study titled Global Tree Cover and Biomass...
Overcoming hurdles: agroforestry as a means to reaching national climate targets in Africa
A side event at the on-going UN climate talks discussed challenges that African countries face in implementing actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and suggested viable low-carbon pathways to overcome these hurdles. Nearly 150 countries worldwide have outlined...
Restoring land for and with Kenyan pastoralists
Finding ways to remedy the world’s degraded grasslands
Oil palm on mineral soil in Indonesia is not changing soil carbon
The amount of carbon stored in mineral soil doesn’t change whether the land has been formerly forested or not, say scientists at the World Agroforestry Centre Indonesia About 15% of the oil palm grown in Indonesia is...
Using agroforestry and forestry management to mitigate and adapt to climate change in Cassou area, Burkina Faso
Cassou forest, located in the south of Burkina Faso towards the border with Ghana, is endowed with indigenous tree species. This is one of the last remaining dry forests in the country. The population around the forest...
Reforestation is more than carbon
A team of researchers are advocating ‘climate-smart reforestation’: reforestation for climate-change mitigation and adaptation that takes into account the impacts of climate change on the reforestation itself. Researchers from different universities and institutions discuss in a recently...
Oil palm can help to sequester more carbon
According to researchers from the World Agroforestry Centre, oil-palm plantations can help climate-change mitigation by not only reducing greenhouse-gas emissions through use as a biofuel but also by sequestering a considerable amount of carbon In the Philippines,...
‘Diversity matters,’ and other secrets of successful landscape restoration
“My thinking about restoration has gone through a complete turn-around since starting work on this project,” Rhett Harrison, a tropical forest ecologist with the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF)’s East & Central Asia regional office, told the audience at...
Is planting trees for carbon worth it?
With increasing interest in the capacity of agroforestry systems to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, farmers might look to planting trees in order to earn money from carbon credits. But would it be worth their while? “Planting...
Female farmers might increase greenhouse gases
Decisions by women can lead to more changes in land use because of their willingness to accept offers from outsiders. To avoid deforestation, the value of natural ecosystems needs to be instilled By Tess Beyer Indonesia...