After Frances Seymour’s keynote talk yesterday afternoon, Friday started with an introductory address by Dr. Anna Herforth on nutrition and joining forces with conservation through forestry.
In her talk, Dr. Herforth raised the question of what food security is. According the FAO (World Food Summit 1996) “Food security exists when all people, at all time, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for a healthy and active life.” While being pretty comprehensive, this definition leaves out the physical access to food. Convenient access to food is often a concern in remote areas. Furthermore, food needs to be nutritious besides providing calories. Dr. Herforth used the example that many of us take power bars and extra vitamins with us when…
Frances Seymour, former Director General of CIFOR, gave the keynote address of the Conference of Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters after an introduction by Sir Peter Crane. The talk, entitled “Forests and food security: Questions and quandaries” gave an overview of some of the many challenges of conserving nature and alleviating hunger while increasing social well-being.
Forests have many functions on different geographic scales. Forests have positive impacts on the farm- and the landscape-level, and also a continental and global scale. Services provided by forests reach from habitat and pollination, to water and materials, to climate regulation and climate change mitigation, to mention only a few. There is still a lack of appreciation of the many ways in which forests contribute to food security. Increasing agricultural production…
Gary Dunning of The Forest Dialogues will convene a workshop on Facilitating Multi-stakeholder Dialogues, as part of the 19th Annual Conference of the Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters. The workshop will be held on Friday, January 25, 2013, 3:15-5pm, in Burke Auditorium of Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT.
Workshop topic--
Conflicts related to forests are complex, persistent and range widely across scales, time frames, players, and goods and services. Particularly challenging are the inequalities in power, resources and capacity of those with a stake in the forests, which can create fundamental stumbling blocks to finding solutions. Multi-stakeholder dialogue (MSD) processes can significantly reduce conflict among forest stakeholders and greatly improve outcomes by engaging divergent actors in the pursuit of common action. This hands-on workshop will…
Anna Herforth, of the Division of Nutritional Science at Cornell University, will give an opening lecture on Friday, January 25, the first full day of the 19th Annual Conference of the Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters. The talk will take place at 9:15AM in Burke Auditorium of Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT.
About the Speaker-- Anna Herforth is a consultant specializing in nutrition as a multisectoral issue related to agriculture and the environment. She consults for the World Bank, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and USAID’s SPRING project. She is also a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University. She has worked with universities, nonprofit organizations, agencies of the United Nations and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) on nutrition policy and programs…
Frances Seymour, Former Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) will give the keynote lecture of the 19th Annual Conference of the Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters on Thursday, January 24, 2013 at 6pm in Burke Auditorium of Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT.
About the Speaker-- Frances Seymour is currently a Senior Advisor to the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. From 2006 to 2012, she served as Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), an international organization headquartered in Indonesia. She led the development of a new strategy for CIFOR, guided the launch of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, and contributed to CIFOR publications on forests and climate change. Prior to CIFOR, Ms. Seymour…
From January 24th to January 26th, 2013, Yale's chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters will host a conference, "Food and Forests: Cultivating Resilient Landscapes," which will assess the complexities of building equitable and resilient food systems while facilitating tropical forest conservation. The conference will commence with a keynote speech delivered by Frances Seymour, the former Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research and will feature a workshop on facilitating multi-stakeholder dialogues led by Gary Dunning of The Forests Dialogue. For more information and to register please visit: http://www.yale.edu/istf/ and http://forestsandfood.eventbrite.com/. Please register by January 15th.
Dr. Robin Chazdon has shared a bibliography of papers referenced in her Keyonte Address, "Making Tropical Forest Succession Successful" at the 18th Annual Conference of the Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters.
ABSTRACT - 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. Local people value regrowth for numerous ecosystem products and services. Ecotourists value regrowth forests for recreation and viewing wildlife. Today, most successional forests in the tropics were not planned…
Planting Empowerment presented at the ISTF on how its private sector model for mixed native species timber plantations is implemented with Indigenous Peoples communities and small landowners. Planting Empowerment suggested four main lessons for private sector restoration to be successful and scale-up:
1. Reduce Upfront Risk for Partners: Small landowners and Indigenous Peoples often don't have many assets or safety nets, so placing land into a long term plantation, investing scarce cash into reforestation is not viable and short term income is needed from any project. Planting Empowerment reduces this risk by covering all expenses related to the reforestation (planting, pruning, etc.) and providing initial or monthly lease payments to partners.
2. Maintain Land Ownership: For Indigenous Peoples, "Land is Life.", is a common refrain, thus to partner with Indigenous…
Before I became deeply embedded in the sphere of environmental policy, I used to be a chemical ecologist who spent two summers researching the Costa Rican and Ecuadorian tropics. Yesterday, I decided it was time to go back to my "roots," and attend a session of the International Society of Tropical Forests conference. I landed in a workshop on Intellectual Property Rights and Ethics led by New York Botanical Garden's Ina Vandebroek, who is an ethnomedical research specialist.
Ina's work, particularly in Bolivia, involves close interaction with communities who have a lot of local knowledge about plant and tree species endemic to their areas. The knowledge of medicinal plants, in particular, is of potential interest and value to pharmaceutical companies who may stand to profit from discovering a…
Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light. Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862).
