“Five years after we reforested we were cutting acacia to make charcoal. The women in the association are using this business to get out of poverty.” In this new video, Mme Bogler from the MALEBI women’s association in Côte d’Ivoire discusses the benefits of an ITTO project to restore degraded forest.

A new report by ITTO and Independent Market Monitoring provides insights into Europe’s furniture sector, as revealed by major market players. The report, based on interviews with nearly 50 companies, explores the role of verified legality in improving access to European Union furniture markets for tropical wood and provides a baseline for monitoring the impacts of FLEGT timber licensing.

In Côte d’Ivoire, an ITTO project has helped locally organized women develop new skills in sustainable forest management, charcoal production and marketing, earn income to support their families, and become leaders in promoting women in the country’s forest sector. They tell their stories in a series of new videos—watch the first one here.

Forests are complex ecosystems, and they change over time. Contemporary sustainable forest management (SFM) requires the collection and analysis of timely, accurate, meaningful data to assist in understanding these systems, monitoring changes, and tracking their harvested products. This edition of the TFU takes a look at some of ITTO’s efforts to help forest managers address this information...

In a new 1-minute video, local woman Yolanda E. Rodriguez describes how an ITTO-funded project has built capacity and empowered women in the municipality of Sinibal, San Marcos, Guatemala, to produce flowers and vegetables for sale in local markets, thereby improving their livelihoods and raising awareness of the need for sustainable forest management and reforestation.

The introduction of small-scale commercial trout farming has helped communities living near the Tacana volcano in Guatemala and Mexico improve their livelihoods and forest management. In a new 1-minute video, local man Noé Escalante describes how an ITTO-funded project has boosted incomes through aquaculture and forest conservation.