Tools for Integrating Conservation and Development
The main objective of CIFOR’s work on enhancing conservation and development outcomes is to help agencies to design and implement better landscape-level conservation and development projects by learning from the successes and failures of past initiatives and understanding the trade-offs and synergies between livelihoods and conservation. This research focus is managed within the project “Managing landscape mosaics for sustainable livelihoods” within the Forests and Livelihoods Program (LIV). The tools and approaches used by CIFOR focus on a landscape assessment virtual toolbox which includes participatory modelling techniques and tracking outcomes at the landscape level. Geographically our research is focussed in the Malinau District, Kalimantan, the Tri-National de la Sangha in the Congo Basin and the Lower Mekong region. A new website highlighting the conservation and development-related work of CIFOR with examples of the research being undertaken has recently been developed. The site also contains a discussion forum in which issues relating to conservation and development can be shared with partners.

Payments for environmental services (PES) 
is an innovative tool to address common trade-offs between conservation and development. It is employed to directly and conditionally compensate landowners who on their lands produce an "externality", i.e. an environmental service that other people (e.g. downstream water users or foreign ecotourists) benefit from, and that at the same time is threatened by current trends in land and resource use. This contractual approach to conservation has the potential to become an efficient conservation tool, which at the same time arguably is more equitable than other tools vis-a-vis rural smallholders who are made better off. In cooperation with the ES programme, LIV researchers are investigating what it takes in terms of necessary preconditions and customized PES design to fulfil this potential.

Dry Forest project
CIFOR work in regions with dry forests (savannas and woodlands) is focusing in West Africa (Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea), Eastern Africa (largely Ethiopia and Tanzania), and Southern Africa (Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi). The project, entitled "Stimulating policy dialogue on sustainable management of Africa’s dry forests" covers issues from all of CIFOR's programs. 

Click here to see the Dry Forest website

Linking income generation to influence among forest communities
This project, conducted in Nepal, China and India, evaluates the effectiveness of different income-generation interventions for the poor in forest areas, and looks for leverage points for poor people to increase their influence over income and asset opportunities. It focuses on loan projects of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

Malinau Research Forest (Completed)
One of CIFOR's major activities in Indonesia is based in Malinau District Kalimantan. Malinau has activities covering all of CIFOR's programs. It is essentially a site where the priciples of integrated natural resource management are being implemented.

Poverty Environment Network (PEN)
PEN is a collaborative effort of CIFOR, universities, and regional and international institutions from various countries and is aimed at obtaining high quality data on forest-poverty links.

Getting forestry into the poverty agenda and getting poverty onto the forestry agenda
CIFOR has participated in a number of projects and forums where we have attempted to better embed forestry in the poverty agenda and visa versa. In addition a number of synthesis papers have been published (e.g. Wunder, 2001; Angelsen and Wunder, 2003; FAO, 2003).

Click here to see the Miombo Woodland website

Non-Timber Forest Products
CIFOR has been conducting research on Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) for more than a decade. This site contains several of CIFOR’s key NTFP-related publications.

Forests and Human Health Initiative
Researchers at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) are investigating the role of forest ecosystems in human health. This includes exploring the relationships between environmental change, biodiversity degradation and human diseases, as well as working with human communities to improve their health conditions. Participants include scientists from CIFOR's three programs: Livelihoods (LIV), Environmental Services (ENV), and Governance (GOV) as well as invited participants representing the fields of ethnobotany, public health, medical anthropology, ecology, and economics. Besides contributing to our understanding of human health and forestry interconnections, the group is seeking to bridge the divide between the forestry and health sectors, and to make visible the contributions of forests to human health.