Forest landscape restoration: what challenges for Madagascar? (new paper)

By Manoa Rajaonarivelo

Many countries have adopted the Bonn Challenge for restoring forest landscapes in order to provide important ecosystem

services and reduce poverty. Madagascar also took up this challenge through the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) to restore a total of 4 million ha of degraded forest landscapes by 2030. However, the achievement of such targets ifaces many challenges partly because of inconsistencies in relevant legal texts. This is according to the review and analysis paper led by our researcher H. Manoa Rajaonarivelo and published recently in Madagascar Conservation and Development (and including many others from our team as coauthors). The paper is called “Revue des textes fonciers et forestiers pour la mise en œuvre de la restauration des paysages forestiers à Madagascar”and could be read here.

Problems of delimitation, occupation and difficulty in securing restoration areas have been highlighted as barriers to effective restoration in Madagascar. The lack of legal clarification on forest definition, the lack of coherence and inter-ministerial synergy regarding forests, the lack of involvement, benefit and recognition of local communities in this process may also severely limit the implementation of FLR in Madagascar. These issues should be addressed in order to avoid the prior failure of restoration and will be vital to allow scaling up of FLR in Madagascar. Specifically, we recommend the need for reconsideration of community rights, the existence of more concrete benefits, and the establishment of more inclusive and coherent governance of forest landscapes among the various state entities.

Please see the non technical summary to get an overview about the paper.

 

 

Publication date: 6 January 2022