In ten forest hotspot countries across Africa and South Asia, the IIED-steered Forest Governance Learning Group (FGLG) has been working since 2003 on ways to shift power over forests towards those who enable and pursue sustainable forest-linked livelihoods. This report aims to capture the current thinking and plans of FGLG.
This report explores the evidence of whether payments for watersheds can be good for ecosystems and for reducing poverty too. It describes what the protagonists in a range of watershed sites around the world have learned in their efforts to set up such payment schemes.
Benefits to people from water ecosystems like rivers, swamps,
floodplains and groundwater systems are central to human
well-being. But ecosystems are in trouble and the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment, the Comprehensive Assessment of
Water Management in Agriculture, and the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change have each shown that freshwater
Forest issues often concern large amounts of money, long time frames, huge areas of land and diverse livelihoods. This report draws the main findings from a series of six country studies from Costa Rica, Ghana, India, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Zimbabwe and from a review of international policy initiatives.
