Message from the Director General

This year was marked by one giant milestone after another for CIFOR

In February, we launched the CIFOR Strategy 2016–2025 – Stepping up to the new climate and development agenda, with thematic work areas explicitly linked to all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and designed to achieve real change through our three pillars of research to impact, capacity building, and outreach with engagement. Aligning CIFOR’s work with the SDG framework means that we can now define “forestry” as “all contributions to sustainable development made possible through forests and trees”.

At the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) in Marrakesh in November, the German government committed to host and sponsor the Forum over the next five years, expanding its platform to connect a billion people by 2020 through the lens of the landscapes approach, the climate agenda and the SDGs. So many of the solutions we need must be found in the world’s landscapes and by the people that depend on them. We look forward to multiplying the GLF effort to this end.

Throughout 2016, renewed funding commitments to the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA), the Global Comparative Study on REDD+ and other key projects fueled our ambition to elevate the ways forestry can contribute to greater and more equitable livelihoods, economic services and rural prosperity for all – especially the world’s poor and marginalized.

This year’s report highlights how CIFOR scientists are delving deeper into the issues surrounding bushmeat and forest livelihoods, landscape restoration, sustainable timber and oil palm, and water monitoring in countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Using action research, citizen science, and innovative games and tools, researchers identified the importance of gender roles, land tenure and local context in shaping outcomes for forest-dependent communities. They presented their findings at events from Brunei to Morocco to Beijing, engaging peers in an ongoing discussion that aims to shift the world’s view of forests from a problem to an opportunity.

As 2016 closed, CIFOR was fully aligned with the new global agenda defined by the SDGs and the Paris Agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with the firm perspective that global agendas are only as successful as the real and positive changes for people on the ground that we can help advance.

Peter Holmgren

Director General

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Top banner photo by N. Sujana/CIFOR, and Director General photo by A. Sanjaya/CIFOR.