Project
Strengthening Competitiveness, Agriculture, Livelihoods, and Environment – Natural Resource Management (SCALE-NRM)
Funder: USAID
Project Timeline: October 1, 2020 - September 30, 2025
Country: Solomon Islands
Program Areas: Agriculture, Resilience and Water and Forestry and Natural Resource Management
Contact: Dawne Deppe, Dawne.Deppe@winrock.org
Uncontrolled logging is decimating forests in the Solomon Islands, a small country in the South Pacific Ocean. Many factors contribute to this problem, including economic interests, land tenure rights, trust between communities and government, and the regulatory environment. As a result, solutions will require a comprehensive effort to address each factor. The Strengthening Competitiveness, Agriculture, Livelihoods, and Environment – Natural Resource Management (SCALE-NRM) project will address the dynamics that drive uncontrolled logging in Malaita, the most populous of the Solomon Islands, by building the mutually accountable partnerships needed to protect the island’s forest resources. SCALE-NRM will strengthen models of local conservation economies around sustainable livelihoods and development of conservation markets that provide communities with viable alternatives to logging and that incentivize conservation. Those models will serve as entry points for promoting community and government-led resource governance activities, including community-based NRM, building awareness of land tenure rights, and strengthening the regulatory environment for enforcement of land rights, logging regimes, and forest monitoring. It will also develop alliances with donor programs and community-based organizations in other provinces that will enable learning exchange and scale of successful resource governance models beyond Malaita.