What do gender and social inclusion have to do with forests and trees? Across tropical landscapes, CIFOR-ICRAF is working with Indigenous Peoples, local communities, women’s organizations, civil society, local governments and private companies to shift longstanding inequalities into opportunities for collaboration and transformative change.

CIFOR-ICRAF led the chapter on Indigenous Peoples and Local Community land rights in the flagship Land Gap Report, which highlights the disconnect between the many carbon-related land pledges and the actual amount of land available. At a COP27 side event, CIFOR-ICRAF raised the importance of placing justice at the heart of climate action.

Launched at COP27, the World Bank’s new Enhancing Access to Benefits while Lowering Emissions (EnABLE) Trust Fund aims to ensure that marginalized and disadvantaged communities are fully engaged in results-based climate finance, participate in the implementation of programmes, and share in the benefits derived from them. CIFOR-ICRAF designed a social inclusion strategy for results-based climate finance for the fund, to provide guidance on how to ensure that social inclusion and gender equity are fully integrated in the World Bank’s results-based climate finance activities.

Our work on equity in multistakeholder platforms shows that having a place at the table is not enough to ensure accountability for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Since we published the tool How Are We Doing? tool in 2020, it has attracted interest from multiple actors for training in its use, along with our other tools for managing landscapes inclusively.

Gender transformative approaches (GTAs) are an essential means to secure women’s land rights. CIFOR-ICRAF has been working collaboratively with staff from the International Fund for Agricultural Development to conduct gender analyses, pilot context-appropriate GTAs to advance the recognition and protection of women’s land rights in various IFAD projects, and scale up the GTA agenda. In Ethiopia, the team held a demand-driven technical support training session on qualitative data analysis to support a better understanding among IFAD project staff of the ‘why and how’ of gender research.

Refugee-hosting or displacement settings face a complex set of social, environmental and conflict-related issues. But despite their relevance, integrated landscape approaches have not been applied or adapted to such contexts. CIFOR-ICRAF and partners joined forces to collect relevant experiences and inputs, releasing a tool called the Guidance for a Landscape Approach in Displacement Settings (GLADS) to build resilience in these settings by ensuring that the voices of the voiceless are heard.

In collaboration with Regreening Africa (see p. 6), researchers applied the asset-based community-driven development (ABCD) approach in Homa Bay County, Kenya, to co-develop individual and community action plans that “start with what you have and where you are” (see video). And as part of a project funded by UK PACT, a series of workshops explored gender-transformative approaches to restoration.