Gender and Actor Perspectives on Tree-Cover Changes in Tropical Forest Margins

Abstract:

GENDER SPECIFICITY in response to land-use options and agents offering new investment opportunities has received little attention to date. It may influence carbon emissions and ways to reduce those.

In this presentation, we implemented a land-use role-playing game (RPG) with women-only and men-only groups in forest margin areas in Jambi (Indonesia). In the study area, the rubber agroforests supporting high biodiversity value and carbon storage are giving way to new market opportunities for monoculture rubber and oil palm plantations. When women from the upland and lowland villages played the RPGs, land-use change was more dynamic and external investors proposing logging or oil palm conversion were more positively approached.

Consequently, in terms of achieving income targets, women outperformed men. Contrary to expectations and gender stereotypes, we may thus expect that the greater involvement of women in landscape level decision making will enhance emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in the area, posing further challenges to efforts to reduce such emissions.[]

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Grace Villamor, Febrina Desrianti, Ratna Akiefnawati, Sacha Amaruzaman, Meine van Noordwijk, “Gender and Actor Perspectives on Tree-Cover Changes in Tropical Forest Margins”, Paper presented at 2014 Global Land Project Open Science Meeting “Land Transformations: Between Global Challenges and Local Realities”, Berlin, Germany, March 19-21, 2014.

Program of the conference is available here.