This paper provides an overview of recent forest tenure reform in rural China and a summary of findings from a series of surveys and research papers. The research papers cover several broad themes, including the impacts of enhanced policy stability, expanded farmer household forestland holding, and longer contract periods as well as a richer bundle of tenure rights, on farmers willingness to invest in money terms and labor inputs in forestry activities.

Payments for environmental services (PES) programmes have been widely promoted over the last few decades in many developing countries. Improving the livelihoods of environmental services (ES) suppliers is not only seen as a side benefit but is often considered a prerequisite for the viability of PES. Yet, the ability to draw ‘overview lessons’ over the impacts of PES on livelihoods from literature review studies remains limited.

The recent Collective Forest Tenure Reform in China has started the process of devolving forest management rights from village collectives to households since 2003. In this paper, we study the impact of the reform on rural energy consumption. Devolving forest tenure improves farmers' access to forest products on their newly acquired forestland, and is therefore expected to increase farmers' fuelwood consumption. The reform also allows farmers to adopt some revenue-enhancing forest technologies which may lead to energy switching in farmer households.

The Country Environmental Analysis (CEA) of Ethiopia is a country-level diagnostic tool to support investment and policy dialogues. It highlights the key environment-related trajectories and challenges facing the country in the coming decade and beyond, and identifies pathways for simultaneously achieving economic, social, and environmental objectives in the context of Ethiopia’s Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) Strategy for 2025, and Second Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP II) for 2016-2020.

While much work has examined approaches to increase uptake of a variety of household environmental, health and energy technologies, researchers and policymakers alike have struggled to ensure long-term use. Drawing on a pilot-scale experiment conducted in rural Cambodia, this study evaluates whether economic incentives enhance continued use of—and fuel savings from—improved cookstoves (ICS).

International environmental agreements (IEAs) are considered an important way to increase the efficiency of emission abatement and climate change mitigation. This paper uses a game-theoretic model to investigate the effect of possible tipping events, which would bring catastrophic and irreversible damage to ecological systems and human societies, on individual countries’ emission decisions and on the scale of participation in IEAs that would maintain stability of the IEA.