The endemic Uapaca bojeri tree forms patchy savanna woodlands in widely dispersed parts of Madagascar’s central highlands. As a rare wooded landscape in a grassland region in a country otherwise famous for tree loss, tapia has attracted a fair bit of fetishised attention (it also helps that two tapia regions are easy to get to from the capital).
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Conservation, Environmental History, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Madagascar, Research | Tagged: deforestation, environment, fire, invasive species, Madagascar, pine, tree planting, Uapaca bojeri | 
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Posted by christiankull
Why is resource tenure important for forest restoration and tree planting? Tenure security has been correlated with successful restoration. But what does this mean, how does one analyse it, and how does it play out in different contexts? How do questions around resource tenure impact global, national and sub-national restoration initiatives? The Interdisciplinary Expert Panel of our Velux-Stiftung funded project on the governance of tree planting and forest restoration has prepared a Policy Brief to answer these questions.
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Leave a Comment » | Conservation, Development, Research, Sustainability | Tagged: FLR, forest restoration, tenure, tree planting | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
Madagascar’s environmental past is more complex and regionally diverse than the tired narrative of a once-forested island devastated by people would have us believe. In a just-published opinion piece led by one of my academic heroines, Alison Richard, we unpack this oversimplified story, showing how diverse landscapes—from ancient grasslands to dynamic forest mosaics—shifted over millennia, shaped by both natural forces and human action. Yet traces of that older narrative linger stubbornly in scientific debates and conservation strategies. Escaping this narrative trap requires paying closer attention to the deep-time environmental record and to the heterogeneity of human histories across the island.
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Leave a Comment » | Conservation, Environmental History, Interdisciplinarity, Madagascar, Research | Tagged: archaeology, historical geography, Madagascar, paleoecology | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
All too often, efforts to restore forests and ecosystems treat the human dimensions as an afterthought. Biodiversity, or carbon offset payments, tend to come first. Yet ultimately, it is people who shape the need for, take decisions on, carry out, and are impacted by restoration. In a pair of short policy perspective articles led by my colleague Stephanie Mansourian, we outline the importance and relevance of human dimensions. The first one presents a five-pillar framework – stretching across scales from local to global – to help policymakers and practitioners think through the diverse places where a human focus is crucial. The second one uses the forest transition curve to illustrate how people are relevant at every stage of forest loss and potential recovery.
Leave a Comment » | Conservation, Development, Sustainability | Tagged: ecosystem restoration, forest landscape restoration | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
The FT Viet project’s new paper in the journal Land Use Policy is a major contribution both to studies of “forest transitions” (the idea that as places develop over time, forest loss switches to forest regrowth) and to the specific history of forest dynamics in central Vietnam’s Thừa Thiên-Huế province. Led by Roland Cochard, with remote sensing whizzery contributed by Mathieu Gravey and colleagues, this paper is a very rich and careful historical analysis of fifty years of forest change based on remote sensing and documentary sources.
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Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Conservation, Development, Environmental History, Research, Sustainability, Vietnam | Tagged: forestry, sustainability, Vietnam | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
The “FTViet” project, which investigated the nature of forest transitions in central Vietnam through research, capacity building, and policy making is in its last year. Here’s a relaxing 15 minute video produced by our wonderful partners at the NGO Corenarm summarising the project. It gives a nice sense of the landscapes and people involved (Subtitles in English).
Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Conservation, Development, Vietnam | Tagged: forest transition, Vietnam | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
Our FT Viet project recently held a science-policy workshop on forest change and sustainability. After over five years of project activities, it was a chance to report on project outcomes and bring together key actors to reflect on the trends, direction, and sustainability of forest management in Vietnam. The 40+ people assembled in a hotel conference room in Hue on June 9 included people working at the national level in Hanoi, others from Thua Thien Hue and nearby provinces in the north Central region, and local stakeholders. There were university researchers and leaders, officials from the national payments for ecosystem services program, conservationists, leaders of forest certification programs, NGOs, and, of course, state foresters in their green uniforms.
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1 Comment | Acacia, conference, Conservation, Development, Doctoral students, Research, Vietnam | Tagged: Acacia, forest transition, Vietnam | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
Wanting to preserve biodiversity in tropical forest areas without involving the local and indigenous communities that live there is neither fair nor effective, say ecologist Jacques Tassin and geographer Christian Kull. This was the tag line for our recent opinion piece published in the French newspaper Le Monde. Thanks so much to my friend and collaborator Jacques Tassin for involving me in this project. Below, I’ve made an English translation of the article, and also inserted some of the references that inspired us.
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Leave a Comment » | Conservation, Development, Political ecology, Sustainability | Tagged: community land rights, deforestation, indigenous people | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
Power (to decide, implement, resist, inform, convince, …) is needed for good environmental management and nature conservation. It is often contested. Power is also sometimes hard to grasp – it can be held by certain people, by rules, by institutions, by ideas, or even by discourses. This new paper, fruit of a workshop organised by Ross Shackleton here at the University of Lausanne and fruitful exchanges between the co-authors, tries to clarify questions of power and proposes six guiding principles approaching power in conservation research and practice.
Leave a Comment » | Conservation, Political ecology, Uncategorized | Tagged: nature conservation, political ecology, power | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
I am happy to announce that we have received funding from SNIS (Swiss Network for International Studies) for a new project. Principal member of the project is fire ecologist and remote sensing specialist Víctor Fernández-García (see also Victor’s blog site), with collaborators at the universities of Antananarivo, Eduardo Mondlane, Swansea, Lausanne, and Léon, and at FAO and SANParks.
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1 Comment | Conservation, Fire, Madagascar, Research | Tagged: fire regime, Kruger National Park, Madagascar grasslands, remote sensing | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
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