As the terrestrial human footprint continues to expand, the amount of native forest that is free from significant damaging human activities is in precipitous decline. There is emerging evidence that the remaining intact forest supports an exceptional confluence of globally significant environmental values relative to degraded forests, including imperilled biodiversity, carbon sequestration and storage, water provision, indigenous culture and the maintenance of human health. Here we argue that maintaining and, where possible, restoring the integrity of dwindling intact forests is an urgent priority for current global efforts to halt the ongoing biodiversity crisis, slow rapid climate change and achieve sustainability goals. Retaining the integrity of intact forest ecosystems should be a central component of proactive global and national environmental strategies, alongside current efforts aimed at halting deforestation and promoting reforestation.

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The exceptional value of intact forest ecosystems

Plant biomass are woody and non-wood materials (e.g., oil palm, bamboo, rattan, bagasse, and kenaf) and are abundant and renewable resource. Unfortunately, the heavy reliance on this resource is a threat to forest ecosystems and a recipe for accelerated land resource degradation. Due to the increasing scarcity of wood resources, many rural communities have shifted to utilization of crop residues for many different applications. The non-wood biomass is readily available, environmental friendly, and technologically suitable, and therefore, an excellent raw material for the future. The non-wood materials like bamboo, rattan, oil palm, and bagasse have superior properties and durability, which can be further prolonged by the modifi cation treatment. The modifi cation treatments increase the performance of the non-wood and could make it suitable for applications in many fi elds ranging from construction industry to automotive industry. This chapter deals with the properties improvement techniques of the selected non-wood biomasses and evaluates its applications for various purposes. The new developments dealing with the improvement of non-wood properties have also been presented in the chapter. The performance of non-wood biomass materials has been compared to the wood-based materials. Recent studies pertaining to the above topics have also been cited. Finally, the advanced applications of the improved non-wood biomasses have been highlighted.

Biomass and bioenergy

A major global effort to enable cost-effective natural regeneration is needed to achieve ambitious forest and landscape restoration goals. Natural forest regeneration can potentially play a major role in large-scale landscape restoration in tropical regions. Here, we focus on the conditions that favor natural regeneration within tropical forest landscapes. We illustrate cases where large-scale natural regeneration followed forest clearing and non-forest land use, and describe the social and ecological factors that drove these local forest transitions. The self-organizing processes that create naturally regenerating forests and natural regeneration in planted forests promote local genetic adaptation, foster native species with known traditional uses, create spatial and temporal heterogeneity, and sustain local biodiversity and biotic interactions. These features confer greater ecosystem resilience in the face of future shocks and disturbances. We discuss economic, social, and legal issues that challenge natural regeneration in tropical landscapes. We conclude by suggesting ways to enable natural regeneration to become an effective tool for implementing large-scale forest and landscape restoration. Major research and policy priorities include: identifying and modeling the ecological and economic conditions where natural regeneration is a viable and favorable land-use option, developing monitoring protocols for natural regeneration that can be carried out by local communities, and developing enabling incentives, governance structures, and regulatory conditions that promote the stewardship of naturally regenerating forests. Aligning restoration goals and practices with natural regeneration can achieve the best possible outcome for achieving multiple social and environmental benefits at minimal cost.

Natural regeneration as a tool for large-scale forest restoration in the tropics: prospects and challenges.

Over 140 Mha of restoration commitments have been pledged across the global tropics, yet guidance is needed to identify those landscapes where implementation is likely to provide the greatest potential benefits and cost-effective outcomes. By overlaying seven recent, peer-reviewed spatial datasets as proxies for socioenvironmental benefits and feasibility of restoration, we identified restoration opportunities (areas with higher potential return of benefits and feasibility) in lowland tropical rainforest landscapes. We found restoration opportunities throughout the tropics. Areas scoring in the top 10% (i.e., restoration hotspots) are located largely within conservation hotspots (88%) and in countries committed to the Bonn Challenge (73%), a global effort to restore 350 Mha by 2030. However, restoration hotspots represented only a small portion (19.1%) of the Key Biodiversity Area network. Concentrating restoration investments in landscapes with high benefits and feasibility would maximize the potential to mitigate anthropogenic impacts and improve human well-being.

Global restoration opportunities in tropical rainforest landscapes

Journal of Political Ecology Vol.1 1994 7 peasant community to support her claims. Berleant-Schiller and Maurer explore the blending rather than the separation of women's private and public roles in Dominica and Barbuda. Several essays in this section consider important Caribbean institutions in new ways. Pulsipher's paper on houseyards in Monteserrat shows how men's and women's places in domestic networks are spatially represented in the yard and how these roles shift over the life cycle. Brana-Schute traces the recent history of women's groups in Suriname, suggesting a mix of political and social functions, while raising questions about why women have not assumed more prominent and powerful political roles. Women's extensive obligations to kin, even after migrating, are explored by Olwig in an essay on women's intra-regional and international migration from Nevis. The second half of the collection, on women in the economy, examines women's work in both rural and urban sectors. Contributions on women in rural economies generally point to women's historically extensive participation in farming. Papers on Barbados, Grenada, and Trinidad describe patterns of work, land control and crop selection. Stubbs' article on women's involvement in Cuban cooperative agriculture in relation to recent changes in political economy is especially interesting. Momsen's comparative analysis of women's farming and patterns of labor force participation in the eastern Caribbean also addresses structural economic changes in the region. Papers on women in the urban sector treat some new dimensions of women's work experience. Pearson's essay on gender and Jamaican information processing firms suggests that while national investment and control has increased industrial dynamism it will help women workers only if their technical abilities are acknowledged and easily transferred to better jobs. McKay's research on women and tourism in Negril, Jamaica, illustrates the constraints women marketers and landladies face from government regulation and from competition and control by men. This collection is significant for its comprehensive scope and its rich empirical base. The second half of the book, on women in the economy, may be more successful in offering new information and ideas than the first, on the relationship of the public and private spheres. Momsen's Introduction and the precis to each section are acute; she could have offered further theoretical synthesis and more comparisons among societies without damaging the integrity of the empirical work. Essays on the English speaking West Indies significantly outnumber offerings on other areas. However, these problems do not diminish the value of the collection and its importance to the study of women and gender in the region.

This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India.

We present a historical overview of forest concepts and definitions, linking these changes with distinct perspectives and management objectives. Policies dealing with a broad range of forest issues are often based on definitions created for the purpose of assessing global forest stocks, which do not distinguish between natural and planted forests or reforests, and which have not proved useful in assessing national and global rates of forest regrowth and restoration. Implementing and monitoring forest and landscape restoration requires additional approaches to defining and assessing forests that reveal the qualities and trajectories of forest patches in a spatially and temporally dynamic landscape matrix. New technologies and participatory assessment of forest states and trajectories offer the potential to operationalize such definitions. Purpose-built and contextualized definitions are needed to support policies that successfully protect, sustain, and regrow forests at national and global scales. We provide a framework to illustrate how different management objectives drive the relative importance of different aspects of forest state, dynamics, and landscape context.

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When is a forest a forest? Forest concepts and definitions in the era of forest and landscape restoration

Reforestation involves potential trade-offs: hard choices between environmental and social benefits, individual and community benefits, and among stakeholders who bear different costs and benefits. In this manuscript, we aim to show that successful long-term reforestation requires stakeholder engagement beyond planning stages and a recognition of the dynamism of stakeholder outlooks as stakeholders’ opportunities, relationships, interests, and roles change over time. We first summarize lessons from recent literature on stakeholder involvement within reforestation efforts. We then present findings from a multiple-stakeholder workshop organized in west-central Mexico, in which we illustrate their choices on how to navigate trade-offs among different reforestation intervention strategies (agroforestry/silvopastoral, natural regeneration, native species reforestation, commercial plantations). We confirm that individual stakeholders’ circumstances, interests, and roles, as well as the contextual factors shaping them, are dynamic, continually changing the nature of the choices stakeholders face. Finally, we propose a four-phase pathway for addressing dynamic trade-offs and synergies in stakeholder participation in order to select, implement, and sustain successful reforestation activities. The pathway comprises four phases: (1) collaborate to devise a reforestation strategy through dialogue about dynamic trade-offs; (2) pledge robust stakeholder commitments to mutual arrangements for implementing reforestation; (3) implement reforestation interventions; and (4) adjust strategy through continuous evaluation of outcomes. We then elucidate how components of these four phases can be operationalized so that, on one side, scientists and practitioners might better understand the dynamic trade-offs reforestation poses for stakeholders, and on the other, stakeholders might balance their hard choices in ways that promote forest recovery.

Stakeholders and tropical reforestation: challenges, trade-offs, and strategies in dynamic environments

Wood charcoal is generally viewed as a rudimentary form of energy. It is often understood in terms of its role of providing rural poor populations with basic energy needs, and/or the contribution its production makes to local forest degradation. More recently, the potentially much larger impact of urban demands on natural resources is attracting attention. Rural/urban supply chains are becoming an important research focus as nations try to start aligning with international environmental agreements by providing more honest environmental data regarding deforestation and associated emissions. This paper presents results from quantitative and qualitative research investigating the commercial charcoal supply chain servicing the metropolitan area of Lima, the capital of Peru. Long-term conservation initiatives protecting the species algarrobo (Prosopis spp.) were found to have caused a leakage effect in which the species shihuahuaco (Dipteryx spp.) from the Amazon region of Ucayali is compensating for the reduced production of algarrobo charcoal. Charcoal production in the urban area of Pucallpa, Ucayali is estimated to be more than eighty times the official figures, the vast majority of which goes to service the thousands of chicken brasseries in Lima. Commercial Amazonian charcoal is produced predominantly from sawmill by-product, and thus not found to be a direct threat to the rainforest. However, reduced availability of the by-product of the preferred species shihuahuaco to charcoal producers raises concern that this species is being heavily overexploited in the region.

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Aoife Bennett-Curry

Papers

When is a forest a forest? Forest concepts and definitions in the era of forest and landscape restoration

Stakeholders and tropical reforestation: challenges, trade-offs, and strategies in dynamic environments

Leakage effects in natural resource supply chains: a case study from the Peruvian commercial charcoal market