CIFOR’s Key Research Areas in Africa

• Adaptive Management of Multi–stakeholder Landscapes: CIFOR conducts action-oriented research to promote inclusive and adaptive approaches to forest management decision-making to encourage sustainable forest use and better balance competing interests of different stakeholders.
  Focus: Central and Eastern Africa.
• Conflict Mitigation and Institution Building: Research focuses on social learning, policies and institutions that can mitigate conflict and the tendency towards violence, and develop long term institutional capacities that support peace and the sustainable use and sharing of forest resources.
  Focus: Liberia, DRC and other parts of the Congo Basin.
• Decentralization: CIFOR conducts participatory research to facilitate learning and capacity building at from local to national levels, to promote decentralization policies and implementation practices that benefit the forests and the poor.
  Focus: Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Zimbabwe.
• Forest Trade, Law Enforcement and Social Justice: Inappropriate laws and inconsistent enforcement significantly reduce forest benefits and especially harm the poor. CIFOR will conduct research on the driving forces and dynamics of illegal logging and trade, and their implications for forests and forest livelihoods. Focus: West Central Africa.
• Improving well-being through forests: CIFOR’s research looks at enterprise development and national and regional strategies and policies. Research on enterprise development examines how to improve resource management and product processing, encourage diversification and enhance market access. National and regional strategies will aim at getting poverty alleviation strategies and other regional and national programmes and policies to take into account forests and forestry in a way that promotes rural livelihoods.
• Managing Landscapes for Sustainable Livelihoods: The main concern here is how to reconcile the competing demands between development and sustainable forest management. Research by CIFOR focuses on developing knowledge and tools to analyse and reconcile the impact of land-use changes on the lives of local people in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, South Africa and Zambia. Where appropriate, this work will be closely linked to ACM research.
• Biodiversity and Sustainable Forest Management: This research focuses on the humid tropics. Its main aim is to improve the capacity for sustainable forest management and to develop and disseminate techniques to conserve biodiversity, both for its intrinsic value and as a way of helping the rural poor.
• Climate Change, Water and Forest Fires: Pilot studies are being set up by CIFOR to investigate the adaptation of forests to climate change, fire and drought in Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana. This research will explore how environmental services such as carbon sequestration might generate livelihood benefits for local people.