Oil palm agriculture is promoted as a way to improve living standards in tropical countries, but has led to mixed outcomes for local communities. We evaluated impacts across Indonesia, and asked whether poverty had been improved via the leading sustainability certfication scheme. As the World’s most commonly produced vegetable oil, palm oil has attracted its…

Participatory approaches to forest management have been promoted as a means of returning resource use rights to communities and enabling sustainable use and equitable management of forests. Community-based forest management (CFM) is a participatory approach often heralded in the literature as achieving win-win social and ecological outcomes. However, even participatory approaches may not always result…

Climate change is threatening tropical coral reef ecosystems. While conventional management systems are essential, new interventions are required to sustain coral reefs. Our paper published in PLOS ONE proposes that proactive research and development to expand the reef management toolbox fast but safely is now urgently needed. We argue that such toolbox presents at least…

The increasing extent and frequency of fires globally requires nuanced understanding of the drivers. These are often poorly understood in spatially expansive and temporally dynamic landscapes.  Our study developed a spatially- and temporally-explicit typology of fire occurrences in Kalimantan (531,000 km2), Indonesia, between 2002 and 2017. We examined how the occurrence of fire varies across climate,…

Community-based forest management (CFM) tends to evoke images of grassroots efforts and broad local capacity to manage forests. The picture however is much more complex. Organisations outside of local communities play important roles in achieving multiple social and ecological objectives. To better understand complex interactions between local communities and external organisations we applied social network…

Attempts to better understand the social context of environmental decisions has led to increased interest in human social networks and network analysis. Research on social networks can be incredibly valuable for conservation. It can assist with identifying stakeholders affected by conservation decisions or social networks crucial for resource mobilisation or knowledge generation and distribution. It…

Many tropical countries devolve forest management to forest‐dwelling communities based on assumption that local knowledge of forests and community engagement will attain multiple social and environmental co-benefits. The practice-based review published in Conservation Science and Practice examines the implementation of Indonesian policies on community forest management and recent studies on the impact of such management.…

Deforestation on private land in Australia is at some of the highest rates in the world, despite ongoing conservation policies to prevent the practice that is devastating for biodiversity. Researchers from the Wilson Lab have conducted the first robust analysis of a policy’s ability to reduce deforestation of remnant trees in Queensland, amidst ongoing debate…

Amidst fiery debate regarding new land clearing laws in Queensland earlier this year, researchers in the Wilson Lab have just published a paper looking at the drivers of net forest cover change and remnant forest loss in Queensland’s recent history, with a special focus on the broad-scale clearing ban of 2007 and the perverse effects…

The need to restore the world’s ecosystems and landscapes to protect biodiversity and vital ecosystem services has resulted in significant international commitments over the last decade, and governments and non-government organisations are now looking at ways to scale up restoration efforts. Restoring native vegetation has a wide variety of outcomes from successes to failures and…