Contact
Alain Billand
Head of Unit
Montpellier, France
E-mail
Tropical Forest Goods and Ecosystem Services: Facing Global Change
The emergence of global natural resource management instruments will be a determining factor in the future of tropical forests: ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation and management, biomass use for energy production, and also increased demand for land, and so on. By generating new activities, such policies can improve the capacity of rural societies to adapt. However, they can also reduce that capacity, notably by restricting access to natural resources.
The aim of the unit is to boost the efficacy of public action in terms of maintaining tropical forest ecosystems, while respecting the principles of equity and of reducing inequality. Its work centres on three components: areas primarily covered by natural or planted tropical and subtropical forests; the societies that make a living from and depend directly on forests, and transform them; and public policies and instruments that apply to forests.