Driven by various initiatives and international policy processes, the concept of Forest Landscape Restoration, is globally receiving renewed attention. It is seen internationally and in national contexts as a means for improving resilience of land and communities in the face of increasing environmental degradation through different forest activities. Ethiopia has made a strong voluntary commitment in the context of the Bonn Challenge-it seeks to implement Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) on 15 million ha. In the context of rural Ethiopia, forest establishment and restoration provide a promising approach to reverse the widespread land degradation, which is exacerbated by climate change and food insecurity. This paper presents an empirical case study of FLR opportunities in the Amhara National Regional State, Ethiopia's largest spans of degraded and barren lands. Following the Restoration Opportunity Assessment Methodology, the study categorizes the main types of landscapes requiring restoration, identifies and prioritizes respective FLR options, and details the costs and benefits associated with each of the five most significant opportunities: medium to large-scale afforestation and reforestation activities on deforested or degraded marginal land not suitable for agriculture, the introduction of participatory forest management, sustainable woodland management combined with value chain investments, restoration of afro-alpine and sub-afro-alpine areas and the establishment of woodlots.
Corporate actors are rapidly gaining ground as nontraditional forms of authority that shape sustainability governance efforts in global food supply chains. This paper highlights the critical, but underresearched role of traders—companies whose core business lies in the movement and exchange of agricultural commodities between producers and manufacturers—in linking corporate sustainability ambitions to on‐the‐ground impacts. Drawing on a systematic analysis of the major transnational corporations trading cocoa, coffee, and palm oil, we present advantages and potential pitfalls of relying on traders as implementers of sustainability governance and outline a future research agenda that focuses on producer‐level impacts, changes in supply chain organization and power dynamics, and traders' interactions with state and other nonstate actors. At the intersection of supply chain management, political economy, geography, and global governance, research on traders as key sustainability governance actors also provides novel opportunities for interdisciplinary work and stakeholder engagement.
In March 2017, twelve of the world's leading cocoa and chocolate companies made a collective commitment to end the deforestation associated with the global cocoa supply chain. This marks one of the latest forms of transnational business governance, whereby state actors share the regulation of environmental and social externalities with private authority. This paper responds to the call for more contextual research into the complex policy ecosystems in which zero deforestation commitments are implemented and how transnational private authority is interacting with, and possibly being reconfigured by, domestic governance and territory. Combining policy analysis, field work on cocoa farms, focus groups, and over 45 interviews, this paper provides empirical evidence to explain how business commitments to zero deforestation cocoa interact with domestic political processes to reduce deforestation in key cocoaproducing countries. The focus is on three top cocoa producer countries in West Africa, where smallholder cocoa farming causes environmental degradation due to deforestation, and socioeconomic progress for smallholders is difficult to achieve. In these countries, the private sector's commitment to reduce deforestation is situated in government-led programs to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. The findings show that a codependent relationship is evolving between corporate and state-led efforts to reduce deforestation, where the success of zero deforestation cocoa relies on synergistic public-private interaction. Cocoa intensification without expansion, supply chain traceability, and jurisdictional commodity sourcing are the three main areas of future collaboration identified.
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