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Sharing the Land: Restoring Degraded Ecosystems and Improving Livelihoods Through Agroforestry
The document argues that agroforestry provides a viable alternative to monoculture reforestation and intensified agriculture by creating multi-functional land-use systems. It highlights that 'land-sharing' through agroforestry can actually support 'land-sparing' by reducing the pressure to deforest for agricultural expansion. Using case studies from Sri Lanka and Vietnam, the brief demonstrates how home gardens and forest gardens increase tree cover and improve rural resilience. It also notes the success of nitrogen-fixing species in Africa and the use of rubber and cocoa agroforests in Indonesia and globally. The authors conclude that successful implementation requires secure land tenure, local context-specific choices, and inter-agency collaboration.
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Document type: Policy brief
Catalyzing water for sustainable Development and growth
The report argues that water must be framed not just as a sector but as a cross-cutting enabler of social development, economic growth, and environmental integrity. It proposes a 'cross-cluster framework' that integrates three perspectives: water as a sector, an enabler, and a supporter. The authors estimate that implementing water-related SDGs would require annual global investments between US$1.25 and 2.25 trillion over 20 years, representing 1.8% to 2.5% of global GDP. Key challenges identified include systemic corruption in the water sector, a critical lack of operation and maintenance funding, and the need for a paradigm shift from donor-led to multi-stakeholder governance.
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Document type: Report
Water Beyond Boundaries
The Water Beyond Boundaries (WBB) initiative by the Stockholm Environment Institute proposes a new approach to sustainable water planning based on three pillars: early ecosystem consideration, multi-interest/scale participatory approaches, and water (tele)connections. This framework is designed to address the increasing difficulty of water management caused by growing demand and a changing climate, emphasizing the need to move beyond watershed-based planning to include impacts across countries, regions, and generations, while centering poverty alleviation and social equity.
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Document type: Fact sheet
EL SECTOR FORESTAL EN COLOMBIA
The document argues that Colombia's forestry sector, despite its resilience to COVID-19, faces systemic challenges including high informality, lack of unified institutional vision, and inadequate financing. It highlights that 42% of produced timber is estimated to be illegal and that deforestation persisted during the pandemic, with over 75,000 hectares lost in the Colombian Amazon in early 2020. The brief recommends strengthening the Forest Monitoring and Carbon System (SMByC), creating a national forestry observatory, reforming the Forest Incentive Certificate (CIF), and promoting community forestry concessions to integrate small producers into the formal economy and meet 2030 GDP targets for the forestry economy.
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Document type: Policy brief
TRANSFORMA
The document outlines a strategy to minimize conflict in renewable energy deployment by identifying 'energy soils'—areas with high technical potential and low social or environmental sensitivity. It proposes a participatory process involving local energy planning, community engagement, and the establishment of energy communities to ensure social acceptance and shared benefits.
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Document type: Guide
Three Basins Summit Statement
The statement criticizes the Three Basins Summit for marginalizing civil society and ignoring the expansion of oil and gas blocks in the Amazon, Congo, and Southeast Asian basins. The signatories call for a just energy transition, a global moratorium on industrial activities in primary forests, and the legal recognition of Indigenous territories to ensure effective forest protection.
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Document type: Statement
Foundational Questions on Carbon Removal in the United States
The document argues that carbon removal is necessary to meet Paris Agreement temperature targets, as emissions reductions alone are insufficient. It advocates for a portfolio-based approach to carbon removal technologies to manage uncertainty and risks, emphasizing the need for effective governance and safeguards to prevent the displacement of food production or ecosystem loss.
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Document type: Research paper
Drylands, People, and Ecosystem Goods and Services
The report provides a global, map-based analysis of dryland ecosystems, examining their capacity to provide essential goods and services such as food, water, and carbon storage to support human livelihoods.
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Document type: Report
Revaluing Ecosystems: Pathways For Scaling up the Inclusion of Ecosystem Value in Decision Making
The document identifies six pathways to scale up the inclusion of ecosystem values in decision-making: mainstreaming values in national economic accounts, improving ecosystem assessments, investing in natural infrastructure, reducing risk in the food and beverage sector, using financial tools like bonds for agricultural landscapes, and using communication tools for community resilience. It argues that current efforts to value ecosystem services—such as pollination and climate regulation—are insufficient to stop ecosystem degradation because these assets are often managed for short-term gain.
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Document type: Briefing
Southern Forests for the Future
The report examines the ecological and economic importance of southern US forests, noting they provide 18% of global pulpwood despite covering only 2% of world forest area. It details a historical net decline of 40% in forest extent since European settlement and projects that suburban development will convert 19 million acres of forest between 2020 and 2040. The document highlights that 87% of these forests are privately owned, making the implementation of market-based incentives—such as carbon sequestration payments and conservation easements—critical for future sustainability, though current adoption of these measures remains mixed.
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Document type: Report
Building an Inclusive Green Economy for All
The report argues that an inclusive green economy can deliver a 'triple bottom line' of economic growth, environmental protection, and social inclusion, provided that policies are carefully designed to benefit low and middle-income countries. It emphasizes that ecosystem services account for up to 89 percent of the 'GDP of the poor' and that securing rights over environmental assets is critical for the poor. The document warns against 'green protectionism' and aid conditionality, calling for governance reforms and strategic investments to prevent climate change and ecosystem degradation from reversing development gains.
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Document type: Report
Enhancing Climate Finance Access for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities: Insights From Payments for Ecosystem Services
The report reviews 129 PES programs across 36 countries to assess how Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs) benefit from and are excluded from these mechanisms. While PES can help preserve ecosystems and strengthen land rights, many IPs and LCs face systemic barriers, including lack of formal land tenure and top-down governance. The report argues that direct payments often fail to compensate efforts fairly, with some payments as low as US$0.33 per household annually. It proposes a multi-tiered strategy involving rights recognition, co-creation in program design, and long-term legal reforms to improve financial flows and leadership for IPs and LCs.
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Document type: Report
Business and Ecosystems Issue Brief
The document identifies six critical ecosystem challenges—water scarcity, climate change, habitat change, biodiversity loss and invasive species, overexploitation of oceans, and nutrient overloading—that threaten the integrity of ecosystems and the services they provide to businesses. It references the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), which found that human activity has altered ecosystems faster and more extensively than ever before in the last 50 years and that the majority of the 24 assessed ecosystem services are degraded. The MA categorizes these services into provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting services.
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Document type: Briefing
Pilot analysis of global ecosystems: Coastal ecosystems
The Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems (PAGE) finds that human activities have extensively altered coastal ecosystems worldwide, with nearly 30% of land area destroyed or modified. Growing coastal populations and increased nutrient pollution from fertilizers, sewage, and aquaculture are degrading these systems, while overfishing has depleted major fish stocks. The report warns that global climate change will likely exacerbate these pressures through rising sea levels and warmer ocean temperatures.
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Document type: Report
Coastal Capital: Jamaica
The document argues that Jamaica's coral reefs provide critical economic benefits through tourism, fisheries, and shoreline protection, but these services are threatened by local pollution, overfishing, and global climate change. It advocates for the use of economic valuation to inform policy and emphasizes the need for sustainable fishing and coastal management to prevent economic losses from reef degradation.
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Document type: Executive summary
Enabling Adaptation
The policy brief emphasizes that for the rural poor, lack of resource rights and market access are often greater drivers of vulnerability than climate change itself. It advocates for a shift in adaptation funding toward creating an enabling environment through national-level tenure and regulatory reforms, the strengthening of local governance institutions, and the establishment of governance metrics.
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Document type: Policy brief
Ethiopia’s Path to Net Zero and Climate-Resilient Development: Policies, Costs, and Co-benefits
The analysis finds that pursuing a net zero emissions pathway by 2050 in Ethiopia would increase the average real annual GDP growth rate by 1.4 percent relative to a business-as-usual scenario. While the NZE pathway requires an additional US$66.98 billion in cumulative investment costs by 2050, it is projected to generate $111 billion in cumulative co-benefits through increased real GDP and avoid $89 billion in costs, primarily in energy. Social co-benefits include an average of 672,000 additional green jobs and significant increases in disposable incomes (10.5 percent by 2030 and 53.1 percent by 2050). The benefit-cost ratio for investments in mitigation and adaptation is estimated to rise from 1.04 in 2030 to 2.99 by 2050.
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Document type: Research paper
The Economic Costs and Benefits of Securing Community Forest Tenure
The paper finds that securing community forest tenure in Brazil and Guatemala is a low-cost, high-benefit investment where economic benefits outweigh the costs, making it a cost-effective measure for climate-change mitigation compared to other options.
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Document type: Research paper
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: Living Beyond Our Means
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Board identifies ten critical conclusions regarding the human impact on nature. It argues that while humans have altered ecosystems to meet demands for food, water, and energy, these changes have weakened essential services like air and water purification and disaster protection. The document highlights the vulnerability of 2 billion people in dry regions, the threat of species extinction, and the role of ecosystem loss as a barrier to achieving Millennium Development Goals. It concludes that reducing human impact requires changing the perception of ecosystem services as free and limitless, alongside coordinated policy efforts across governments and businesses.
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Document type: Statement
Belize's Coastal Capital
The study estimates the economic value of three specific services provided by Belize's coastal ecosystems, finding that tourism, fisheries, and shoreline protection contribute significantly to the national economy, though these resources face threats from development, overfishing, and climate change.
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Document type: Research paper