Annual Report 2018 - Making knowledge work for forests and people

Tropenbos International and our partners continued to demonstrate this potential in 2018 across an expanding number of countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas. We developed and piloted sustainable public and private policies and practices, focussing on forest communities, smallholders, and small and medium-sized forest enterprises who are the key beneficiaries of our programmes.

This annual report presents a few highlights from the wide variety of our achievements over the past year as we moved along the continuum from improving our understanding of the issues to piloting solutions. As a partner in the Green livelihood Alliance, for example, a strategic partnership with IUCN NL, Friends of the Earth NL and the Government of the Netherlands, we helped to establish joint management of an orangutan corridor in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. In addition, local stakeholder capacity was developed in the palm oil value chain in Uganda, and support was provided to Viet Nam’s land use evaluation and the reallocation of forests to local communities.

With other partners in the framework of CGIAR’s Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, we also conducted analyses of financial flows at a landscape level to better understand their impacts on different land uses and the sustainability of productive activities that are often interrelated. And as a final example, Tropenbos International and partners further strengthened the roles of non-state actors as independent forest monitors in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Liberia, supported by the EU, as a key component of inclusive forest governance.

Beside these concrete successes, this report also explains our progress in operating as a network organization, with a secretariat in the Netherlands and six members on three continents. In the coming years, Tropenbos International’s goal is to further strengthen and expand this network towards our collective mission, to improve the governance and management of forests and trees in climate resilient landscapes for the benefit of people, biodiversity and sustainable development.

I hope that you will enjoy reading about some of the many impacts of our work in 2018. But these accomplishments would not have been possible without the commitments and professionalism of our many partners. We thank you sincerely, and wish that our joint dedication continues long into the future.

Tini Hooymans & Rene Boot