The state of the world's forests 2022

Systematic reviews of land and forest property reforms have found generally positive or mixed impacts on agricultural productivity, income consumption and capital.⁴⁴⁵ Interventions that devolve more limited rights (e.g. only access or withdrawal but not management or alienation rights) are less likely to alleviate poverty than the devolution of more extensive rights.⁴⁴⁶ Moreover, there is substantial social differentiation in the impacts of tenure reform (e.g. by ethnicity and gender).⁴⁴⁷

Tenure reform continues to face challenges in many countries, such as states adopting laws but not implementing them, or retaining control of high-value forests⁴⁴⁸ and decentralizing low-value degraded forestland in need of restoration;⁴⁴⁹ the persistent marginalization of women’s rights to resources;^450,451 and differential livelihood impacts on ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups. Nevertheless, tenure and property rights can act as levers of change⁴⁵² and, in some contexts, reforms can facilitate locally led recovery and the local development of value chains.

Many countries recognize customary rights in statutory laws or have devolved new rights on public lands. This has been done by either formalizing customary tenure or through various collaborative, community and smallholder programmes on public lands. More than 90 percent of Africa’s rural people gain access to land through customary or formalized new-customary institutions. One-quarter of sub-Saharan Africa’s land area – 740 million ha – is made up of communal property such as forests, rangelands, swamps and deserts.⁴⁵³ Approximately 45 percent of intact forests in the Amazon are on the customary lands of Indigenous Peoples.⁴⁵⁴ The trend in devolving rights is partly in recognition of community-based forestry (all forms of forestry allowing people’s participation) and its potential to move towards sustainable forest management and improve local livelihoods, particularly where the centralized state management of forests has failed to control deforestation and degradation.⁴⁵⁵

States have been providing communities with more robust rights in recent decades, including by recognizing rights over ecologically intact forests rather than mainly degraded forests; allowing fuller governance roles rather than only some responsibilities such as monitoring and patrolling; and granting commercial rights to wood products and NWFPs rather than the subsistence use of NWFPs only.^q Since 2012, international endorsement of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security has provided significant additional validation and support for the strengthening of customary tenure globally.⁴⁵⁶

These significant shifts in national policies have increased the ability of smallholders, local communities and Indigenous Peoples to sustainably harvest high-value forest resources and derive income from PES, REDD+ and carbon credits, thereby giving them both sustained benefits and incentives for better forest governance and management. Progress has not been uniform, however: not all states recognize customary rights or provide forest rights to communities; some have adopted laws but not implemented them; and some have recognized local stakeholder rights but subsequently retracted them.⁴⁵⁷

Accelerating the formalization of customary and collective rights is crucial for protecting forests and mobilizing resources for recovery and development

National-level policymakers can use rapid and low-cost means to provide robust and secure tenure for millions of rural households without the need for major legal reforms. In a number of countries, customary forest rights are already recognized in statutory laws but have not yet been formalized.

Approaches exist to rapidly formalize rights where statutory laws already recognize them. Countries can develop regulations giving recognition to customary lands without the need for titling while also encouraging the registration of such lands through simplified processes to prevent encroachment. Ghana, Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe allow the recognition of customary rights without requiring titling. Mozambique, Timor-Leste and the United Republic of Tanzania recognize rights but encourage registration.⁴⁵⁸

India recognizes customary collective tenure to forests in its Forest Rights Act, 2016; under this Act, customary governance (community forest rights) can be formalized on an estimated 34.6 million ha – close to half the national forest area – but only 10.4 percent (3.6 million ha) has been so formalized, mainly through support from non-governmental organizations.⁴⁵⁹

Governments can simplify land registration processes by reducing the number of steps required, and there are many ways in which this can be done. For example, governments can eliminate requirements for official or historical records and instead recognize oral testimonies validated by neighbouring communities and local leaders as proof of land claims; help negotiate overlapping claims; allow communities to submit simple land-use or community development plans rather than the complex forest management plans required of industries; recognize indigenous and local communities as legal entities rather than requiring them to incorporate themselves as associations; and, where rights registration systems are lacking, provide local registries in place of regional and national land offices. For example, Madagascar’s Land Law allows local claimants to register lands through community land commissions.⁴⁶⁰

To speed up formalization, some governments use a “tenurial shell” approach, which recognizes the outer boundaries of multiple adjacent communities and allows them to manage land and resources for diverse purposes within these boundaries.⁴⁶¹ This approach can help prevent encroachment by outsiders and facilitate the recognition of seasonal and secondary resource rights, particularly those of women, transhumance communities and other vulnerable groups. It can work well where intra- and inter-community conflicts are few, traditional institutions are strong, traditional authorities are able to secure tenure for its members and resolve internal conflicts, and national governments can enforce such rights; Ecuador and Colombia have used this approach to recognize the authority of Indigenous Peoples to manage forest reserves on their lands.⁴⁹⁹ Governments may require resource management plans and evidence that resources are being managed.

Countries recognize rights through diverse other approaches suited to varied ecological contexts and local needs. For example, Brazil recognizes perpetual territorial use rights in some areas, and it has designated some other areas as extractive reserves for the commercial use of specific NWFPs. India recognizes the customary rights of settled communities and smallholders as well as appropriate rights for pastoralist groups, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers and those practising shifting cultivation, including in wildlife sanctuaries and national parks.⁴⁶²

In some cases, processes to formalize rights have been targeted at areas where forests are under particularly high pressure and where tenure formalization can yield important benefits. For example, titling carried out in the Peruvian Amazon involving more than 1 200 communities of Indigenous Peoples led to a significant reduction in illegal logging and improvements in forest conservation within two years.⁴⁶³

A range of new, low-cost technologies are being used to help secure community tenure in remote areas through participatory approaches. Drones, global-positioning-system-enabled smart phones and tablets, mobile apps, open-source software and crowd-sourced data-collection methods can significantly reduce the cost of surveying and associated mapping exercises.^464,465 Finally, respecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to free, prior and informed consent, as per the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and consultation throughout the process, can help ensure that the approaches identified are appropriate to the local context.

Nearly all countries have some form of community or collaborative forestry regime.⁴⁶⁶ A recent assessment of 23 countries showed, however, that legal provisions and implementation were weak in most or implemented in only a small proportion of national forests.⁴⁶⁷ Nineteen of the 23 countries provided indigenous and local communities with few or no legal protections against the reduction or elimination of land and forest rights. Twenty-two had regulatory frameworks that hindered the capacity of communities to benefit from their recognized rights, and only one (China) supported the development of community-forest-based economies.⁴⁶⁸

Regardless of the status quo, governments can improve forest governance and restoration efforts by prioritizing the devolution of forestry programmes such as those involving FLR and REDD+. Formal community-based forestry initiatives can:

• ▸ build on customary rights and local tenure arrangements to avoid conflicts between and among multiple primary, seasonal and secondary forest users;

• ▸ devolve rights by law and in practice to land controlled by communities, including those with good-quality forests;

• ▸ ensure that rights go beyond subsistence needs to the use and management of high-value resources;

• ▸ enable the generation of forest-based income and thereby recovery, which can help prevent out-migration;

• ▸ simplify regulations and remove regulatory barriers (such as restrictions on harvesting that complies with management plans) to facilitate the use of resources, processing and value-adding;

• ▸ invest in alternatives to large private sector concessions, such as community-owned forests and community-plantation-based concessions (e.g. for timber, fuelwood, charcoal and high-value resources) and community licences for timber and biomass energy;⁴⁶⁹

• ▸ ensure that rights are not eliminated or reduced arbitrarily (which is a disincentive for good forest management); and

• ▸ where the effectiveness of community-based forestry is uncertain, grant longer-term rights based on performance, as practised in the Gambia.⁴⁷⁰

Strengthening smallholder tree rights and reducing regulatory barriers can encourage smallholder adoption of restoration and agroforestry

Gains in tree cover (in countries as diverse as China, Sweden, the United Republic of Tanzania and Viet Nam) are often driven by private smallholders for commercial purposes, but smallholder land rights are uncertain in many countries. For most smallholders, tree (and carbon) rights are even more uncertain than land rights. For example, many African states retain ownership rights over trees on farms, even those planted by farmers.⁴⁷¹ Although this is changing gradually, most countries that give farmers tree rights also heavily regulate tree use and management on private lands, especially for naturally regenerated trees. Governments also provide farmers with large subsidies to cultivate staple crops, leading to forest loss⁴⁷² and incentivizing rural households to shift away from agroforestry towards annual crops. Bottlenecks in wood product supply chains may discourage farmers from engaging in agroforestry. In India, for example, most states allow farmers to plant and harvest trees on their farms, but many farmers with forest areas and approved management plans still choose to plant crops rather than trees because of the bureaucracy involved in treefelling and transport.⁴⁷³

Forestry programmes might recognize these limitations that undermine landscape restoration but address them inadequately. For example, the Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (see Box 11) provides countries with guidance on assessing tenure and land governance in forestland tenure planning processes, but an assessment found that reports from countries in which the methodology has been implemented do not include systematic assessments of rights to trees, forests or land in statutory or customary laws.⁴⁷⁴ Governments can promote restoration and agroforestry initiatives through a range of measures. For example, they could provide smallholders with secure rights to land, trees and carbon; they could also use forestland allocation mechanisms or conditional leases in which farmers (particularly the landless and tenant farmers) are offered long-term, secure rights to trees and tree products in exchange for adopting good natural resource management practices, including sustainable agroforestry.⁴⁷⁵ Where farms are small and fragmented, they could also provide land consolidation measures or regulations that allow landholders to combine lands into joint holdings, incentivized by special rules and taxes,⁴⁷⁶ and they could remove regulatory constraints to sustainably use and manage trees on private lands (Box 29). In China and Viet Nam, governments provided comprehensive support to small-scale forest enterprises over long periods, with huge positive economic and environmental impacts (Box 30).