Mirindra Rakotoarisoa

1 Introduction Fueled by a confluence of factors, including the accelerating impacts of climate change (Missirian and Schlenker 2017; Hoffmann et al. 2024), recent years have seen a surge in migration, especially to the forest frontier, significantly influencing land-use changes within smallholder farming systems (Salerno et al. 2024). The impacts of migration on forest change vary significantly across global contexts.

Abstract Accurate information on the location and density of people living at the forest frontier is vital for effective and equitable forest conservation. We compare the location of settlements and estimated population density from three global-scale, remote-sensed datasets (World Settlement Footprint 2015, Open Buildings, WorldPop) with a fine-scale, manually-derived dataset of 3,136 human settlements, of which 95% had fewer than 150 households.

Abstract Tropical countries are making ambitious commitments to Forest Landscape Restoration with the aim of locking up carbon, conserving biodiversity and benefiting local livelihoods. However, global and national analyses of restoration potential frequently ignore socio-legal complexities which impact both the effectiveness and equitability of restoration.