FLARE 2024 - Rome

Organizer: Emily Gallagher, CIFOR-ICRAF (virtual) Co-Facilitators: James Reed and Malaika Yanou

Recent years have seen a welcome increase in demand from donors to go beyond gender mainstreaming and gender inclusion in forest resource management and landscape restoration projects, promoting gender transformative approaches (GTAs) as a panacea for social inequalities which are often surfaced during project implementation. A new generation of GTA tools and toolkits have emerged to meet this demand as gender scientists caution that no silver bullets exist for resolving social exclusion and deeply embedded social inequities within short project cycles. Nonetheless, communities of practice have formed around different tools, methodologies and approaches for better engaging women and other marginalized groups within forestry and agroforestry interventions, responding to their gender-specific and intersectional constraints to meaningful participation, and endeavoring to secure more equitable and sustained benefit sharing.

This workshop introduces a set of tools developed or adapted for forests, trees and agroforestry projects by CIFOR-ICRAF and partners, and welcomes participation from aligned research and development institutions to contribute the same. We propose a format which includes presentation of current conceptual frameworks, especially drawing an arc from gender responsive to gender transformative approaches within forest livelihoods and forest landscape restoration research (30mins), as well as practical and hands-on presentations/or demonstrations of tools.
Example tools (to be confirmed) might include: Gendered opportunity mapping and co-creation workshops; Gendered needs and preferences assessments for forestry, tree crop and agroforestry projects; Gendered value chain mapping; Gendered labor mapping; Co-designing gender-specific technical trainings; Women’s FBO leadership and skills trainings, etc. Following an introduction of tools, 3-4 tools will be selected for deeper dives or hands-on trainings.
This workshop is expected to facilitate a valuable learning exchange between researchers and practitioners to share specific applications of gender responsive and gender transformative approaches to their work in forest and agroforest systems.

Moderators: GAIN/FAO Team

The Workshop serves as a collaborative session for framing next steps for enhancing the forest-related metrics from the FAO report on metrics for adaptation. It builds from the discussions in the Innovation Session (October 6) regarding the needs and feasibility of additional social and ecological metrics for outcomes and intermediate outcomes. Two broad activities will support seeding the development of the additional forest metrics:

1. Overview of existing adaptation frameworks and metrics 
2. Using case examples of different forest-dependent communities to identify key livelihood and adaptation pathways
   • Mapping generalized themes for adaptive capacity metrics supporting pathway measurement (leverage points, intermediate measurement)
   • Next steps for metric development and supporting data collection structures 
3. Use case examples for different global regions to identify pathways for strengthening resilience of forests 
   • Mapping generalized ecological metrics supporting pathway measurement
   • Identifying existing and potential data sources (e.g., ICRAF).

Outputs: Workshop report summarizing insights, potential new metrics, framework for reliable data and updates, and recommendations for next steps. Two other expected outputs are the outline of a prospective paper co-authored among workshop participants and a draft funding proposal.

Moderators: Ashwini Chhatre, IFRI/Indian School of Business and Apurva Duddu, Yale University

CommFor builds on the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research program and is developed for understanding community forest governance more effectively in different parts of the world. The IFRI research program was founded in 1992 by Elinor Ostrom and the research produced using the data pushed the envelope on our understanding of forest commons. With FLARE as the foundation of the platform, CommFor is an initiative for robust data collection, analysis, and data sharing with researchers, practitioners, and local communities around the world.

The questions in CommFor are a summary of information on over 1500 variables (collected using IFRI instruments) into a much smaller set of key variables. It leverages digital technology customized as smartphone and desktop-based applications to capture data at high and varying frequencies, reduce the burden of capturing data, and generate real-time insights for use by local communities in forest governance. 

Some of the functionalities of CommFor are (1) Baseline module on forest details (ownership and property rights, forest and land use), socio-economic attributes (remoteness, demography, socio-culture, market penetration, well-being, collective action, wealth, resources, infrastructure, energy and governance), and forest management (rules, activities, and participation),  (2) Digital boundary mapping to enable integration with satellite data, (3) Inventory mapping to estimate distribution and abundance of valuable forest products, (4) Carbon stock assessment to evaluate sequestration potential, and (5) Management planning to achieve community objectives. 

The workshop will be administered in three segments. We will begin with a brief overview of the questions in the CommFor instrument and a demo of the tool. Participants can interact with past IFRI data on a visualization portal, with guidance from the organizers and IFRI experts. The second segment of the workshop is a site visit for collecting data using the CommFor tool. Participants will collect information on select modules. At the end of this session, we will visualize the collective data. The last segment is a brainstorming and Q&A session on the initiative, indicators, and data collection platform.  

CommFor presents multiple advantages to support community-based forest governance. In a direct way, insights from data will become available in near real time and directly usable by local communities and their federations in making decisions. Second, data can be shared with (a) external actors and agencies to build trust in community institutions for forest governance, (b) practitioners to support communities in forest management, and (c) researchers to advance knowledge on forest commons. Finally, CommFor will enable visibility of landscape-level outcomes for recognition of community contributions to global challenges, such as forest landscape restoration, biodiversity conservation, and climate mitigation.

Moderator: Rachel Carmenta, University of East Anglia

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together scholars, practitioners, policy-makers and students interested in questions related to the human dimensions and lived experience of fire and flammability in tropical forest landscapes. Our first workshop will give a particular emphasis on mapping the connections between fire, flammability and the various direct and indirect linkages connecting fire to impacts on human wellbeing. In this workshop we will approach wellbeing from multiple lenses and scales. For example, we can consider health as nutritional diversity itself connected to the availability of wild foods which are impacted by fire, a multi-dimensional well being perspective which connects the contributions of forests across the relational, subjective and material constituents of wellbeing - all of which can be impacted through fire, and respiratory health and smoke exposure. We will map out the connections between forests, fire and wellbeing, considering key questions for a research agenda that enhances the visibility of the lived experience of forest fires, and extends the prevalent discourses of fire as carbon and climate issue, to fire as a justice and socio-ecological issue with questions of justice firmly at the centre. We invite colleagues with multiple disciplinary lenses, tools, scales and frameworks of analysis so that we may achieve a truly integrated appraisal of the various links between forests, fire and human wellbeing. We will identify case studies and experiences where possible to create a global portrait of living in flammability.