Forest-Dependent Livelihood Strategies and Community Management

Forest-dependent livelihood strategies encompass the diverse ways in which people derive material and non-material benefits from forest ecosystems. Material benefits include timber, non-timber forest products (NTFPs) such as fruits, fuelwood and medicinal plants, while non-material contributions span cultural identity, spiritual values and social cohesion. Households combine harvesting, processing and marketing activities with agriculture, trade or wage labour to enhance resilience, often under conditions of poverty and limited infrastructure. Community management approaches, including community-based forest management (CBFM), participatory governance and customary tenure systems, seek to reconcile local needs with conservation goals. These approaches rely on collective decision-making, defined rights and responsibilities, and adaptive rules to regulate access, manage sustainable harvest levels and resolve conflicts. The socio-ecological system framing highlights feedbacks between forest health and human wellbeing, emphasising that sustainable outcomes require integrated policies on land tenure, market access, capacity building and equitable benefit sharing. Practical applications range from household-level value addition of NTFPs to landscape-scale restoration and payment for ecosystem services schemes. Globally, such strategies contribute to poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation, underscoring the importance of context-sensitive interventions that empower forest-dependent communities.

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Forest-Dependent Livelihood Strategies and Community Management publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in forest-dependent livelihood strategies and community management across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Non-timber forest products (NTFPs): Biological goods from forests excluding timber, such as fruits, nuts, fuelwood and medicinal plants, vital for subsistence and income generation.

Forest dependence: The extent to which households rely on forest resources and ecosystem services for their livelihoods, measured through income share, subsistence use and cultural significance.

Common-pool resources: Resources, such as communal forests, that are difficult to restrict and where individual use diminishes availability to others, requiring collective governance.

Community-based forest management (CBFM): A participatory approach in which local communities hold defined rights and responsibilities to manage forest resources sustainably.

Socio-ecological systems: Integrated frameworks recognising the dynamic interactions and feedbacks between human societies and ecological environments.

References

1. Hundreds of millions of people in the tropics need both wild harvests and other forms of economic development for their well-being. One Earth (2024).
2. Community, pastoralism, landscape: Eliciting values and human-nature connectedness of forest-related people. Landscape and Urban Planning (2023).
3. Nature’s contribution to poverty alleviation, human wellbeing and the SDGs. Scientific Data (2024).