Sustainable Forest Management, Biodiversity and Livelihoods: a good Practice Guide

GOOD PRACTICES

• >> Non-timber forest products (NTFPs)

• Biodiversity in forest management

• The Novella Africa Initiative (East, Central and West Africa) 

• CASE STUDY

• Sources: IUCN 2008, UNDP n.d.
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• GOOD PRACTICES

•  The Novella Africa Initiative is a public-private partnership formed in 2002 by Unilever, a number of internataional NGOs , and governmental organizations and NGOs in Africa.
• The initiative is undertaking commercial scale collection and extraction of oil from seeds of the Allanblackia (AB) tree, which is native to tropical forests of West, Central and East Africa. This oil is used by Unilever to make food products, such as spreads, and detergents.
• In Ghana and Tanzania, the planting of AB trees is increasing from several thousand to about 100,000 trees a year and is being incorporated into forest landscape restoration projects.
• The project is expected to grow to include 150,000 farmers in Ghana, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Liberia over the next decade, generating US$100 million in returns.

• The omission of NFTPs from government development strategies and policies makes them more susceptible to unsustainable, unregulated and unauthorized harvesting, as in the case of bushmeat hunting.
• Bushmeat hunting is the extraction from the wild of any non-domesticated terrestrial mammal, bird, reptile, and amphibian.
• Hunting for food in tropical forests is an issue of concern as the scale of hunting occurring in these regions threatens many tropical forest species; it is also linked to the food security and livelihood of numerous tropical forest-region inhabitants, who have few alternative sources of protein and income.
• Greater attention must therefore be given to governance issues (e.g. policy and legislation, links to development assistance) and treating the high-value bushmeat trade as an aspect of the national economy. 
• Local empowerment of resource users is a potential key strategy to achieve long-term sustainability.

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