Concept Note
Tropical forests are an important regulator of global climate, a natural carbon sink, and a repository of terrestrial biomass and diversity. Tropical forests are also home and provide livelihoods to millions of people living within or around them. Despite their tremendous social, economic, and ecological value, tropical forests remain under threat. From 1990 to 2020, 90% of the 420 million hectares of deforested land was in tropical regions.
The major causes of deforestation have shifted over time. Increasing local populations and small-scale agriculture drove forest loss in the 1980s and 1990s, whereas large-scale agriculture, plantations, and ranching are now the primary drivers of deforestation. The remaining tracts and fragments of forest are increasingly vulnerable to other factors, including further development and road construction, wildfires, poachers, illegal logging and mining, climate change, as well as new pathogens and invasive species. Many of these factors act synergistically to further degrade forest structure and function.
Due to the critical role of tropical forests in global socio-economic-ecological systems and the threats they are facing across the world, two of the most important international negotiations are taking place in the tropics in the 2024-2025 biennial: the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16) in Cali, Colombia, and the UN Conference on Climate Change (COP30) in Belém, Brazil. While these negotiations are driving developments in environmental governance at the global scale, emerging movements in landscape and jurisdictional approaches and rights-based approaches to land management are reshaping forest governance at subnational scales.
For more than 30 years, the Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters (ISTF) Conference has promoted a space for exchange amongst world-class scientists, policy makers, and other practitioners. The ISTF 2025 Conference seeks to explore how research and policy discourses on forest governance at multiple geographic scales are treating and impacting tropical forests. ISTF 2025 will focus on five main areas of discussion related to the governance of tropical forests, which will be explored in keynote addresses, technical panels, discussion sessions, poster presentations, and informal conversations. We invite researchers and practitioners across diverse disciplines to explore the following questions:
- What are the best practices for integrating scientific research and traditional ecological knowledge in the governance of tropical forests to ensure their long-term resilience?
- How has land tenure (or the lack of it), including collective management by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), influenced the efficacy of current forest governance models?
- Have economic incentives, such as payments for ecosystem services, sustainable timber certification and carbon credit markets, promoted the resilience and sustainable governance of tropical forest systems?
- How do governmental and nongovernmental actors at international and subnational scales interact in governing resilient tropical forest systems? Are there certain models of stakeholder collaboration at different geographic scales that have succeeded or failed on the ground?
The ISTF 2025 Conference will be offered in a hybrid format, with options to attend sessions in person in New Haven, CT, or online via Zoom. We encourage in-person participation in the conference. We hope this flexible format will allow wider access and flexibility for attendees around the world, especially for participants and speakers that have historically faced difficulties with travel to the United States.
