The increasing scarcity of environmental resources and competition among forest, water, food and energy coupled with the ever-growing population and climate change pose a serious threat to natural ecosystems. In an effort to provide an integrated approach towards forest conservation as well as energy, water and food security within the broader context of climate change and variability, this study sought to undertake a literature and data review to provide a critical analysis and synthesis of the baseline and trends of the forest- water-food- energy security nexus in East Africa.

This paper studies the direct and spillover effects of the Three-North Shelter Forest Program (TNSFP) on rural income. Using a spatial Durbin model on a panel dataset from 101 counties in Inner Mongolia from 1993 to 2015, we show that the TNSFP had a significantly positive effect on rural income and that different afforestation methods and forest types affect rural income in different ways. The main channels include investment, income, health, and so on.

In Tanzania, and across much of Africa, the potential impact of public procurement on sustainable growth of the local timber industry is not well understood. This is due to limited awareness of the local timber industry by government agencies responsible for public procurement, and vice versa. As a result, this existing gap hinders the opportunity for timber-based Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to access the public procurement market to grow sustainably, meet their operational costs, develop effective business skills, or purchase new technology for improved productivity.

Water quality amelioration is one of the key ecosystem services provided by forests in the catchment areas of water supply systems. In this study, we applied random effect models and the least absolute shrinkage and selection regression method of machine learning to South African panel data to estimate the causal effect of natural forest cover on municipalities’ water treatment cost. We controlled for a range of confounding covariates including other land cover variables including wetlands, plantation forests, grassland, woodland etc.