Eighteen months after ICRAF and CIFOR agreed at a workshop in Bogor in March 2006 to establish a 'biodiversity platform', the initiative is now beginning to make true its promise of building research partnerships around the world.

A major step forward in the platform's work arrived with the news in May 2007 of almost $800,000 support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. SDC has engaged the two centers to undertake a three year livelihood and biodiversity project covering five countries.

Known as “Integrating Livelihoods and Multiple Biodiversity Values in Landscape Mosaics”, the project’s first activity was a workshop in Nairobi last June. The event attracted a number of leading scientists and was a positive omen for the project’s future success.

A major output from Nairobi was the outline of a work approach capable of reflecting local conditions while also allowing for comparisons between different research sites. At each of these sites, CIFOR and ICRAF will partner other institutions already working in the region. The project will use its findings to advise and assist land use planning so that it benefits local communities and leads to improved biodiversity conservation.

An important feature of the project’s research is its collection and analysis of data from Asia and Africa. In Madagascar, where CIFOR will take the lead, the project will work with the new Koloala Manompana project, an initiative coordinated by the Association for Intercooperation in Madagascar (AIM) with assistance from InterCooperation in Switzerland. In Koloala Manompana, AIM will use CIFOR’s highly regarded adaptive collaborative management approach to help ensure a smooth transfer of forest management responsibilities to communities.

Complementing this focus on community forest management is the CIFOR-ICRAF Landscape Mosaics project itself. The aim of this particular partnership is to examine local livelihood and governance issues from a landscape-level perspective. This will help in identifying effective and coherent incentives for sustainable forest management in the forest corridor between the two protected areas.

In Jambi, Indonesia, Landscape Mosaics will be under the direction of ICRAF. Here the project will consider potential biodiversity issues realted to a government plan to convert one million hectares of forest land into oil palm plantation. Both CIFOR and ICRAF have extensive experience working in this area of Jambi. CIFOR has successful conducted partnership research on decentralization with communities and government. communities and district governments on questions of decentralization. JLP, CC