The 2023 FLARE Annual Meeting will be held October 12-16 in Nairobi, Kenya in partnership with CIFOR-ICRAF.
October 12th will be the opening reception and October 16th will be the optional workshop day.
The event will be held at the beautiful CIFOR-ICRAF campus in Nairobi and represents the first FLARE annual meeting to take place in the Global South.
2023 Annual Meeting Theme
Linking Research and Action for Thriving Forests, Trees, and People
Research can play a key role in advocacy and action to address climate change, reduce vulnerability, conserve forests, and foster human development. For example, evidence accumulated over decades has demonstrated the critical role of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in protecting and sustainably managing forests and, in turn, helped lead to government recognition of community land rights and new funding flows. More generally, impact assessments of different forest-related interventions have helped improve policy design.
Yet too often research has been ineffective in fostering change – or reforms benefitting communities and forests inspired and honed by research have been clawed back by forest services and other interested parties. Too often, even when research reveals options and abuses, key findings are hidden behind a paywall, suppressed by threatened parties, or are couched in specialist language that obscures their practical relevance, among other barriers. The result is that knowledge relevant to tackling the urgent challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and other social ills often remains unused. What can we do to confront such obstacles? How can research—and researchers—make a difference?
FLARE 2023 will explore these questions and seeks to make concrete progress toward better harnessing research for action. Doing so will require dialogue and collaboration among scientists, government officials, concerned citizens, activists and advocates, business leaders, journalists, and others.
Therefore, proposals for FLARE 2023 are particularly welcome that:
- Include collaboration between researchers and other actors mentioned above,
- Involve early career scholars and practitioners, including in intergenerational partnerships,
- Are led by scholars from low- and middle- income countries/the Global South.
And that:
- Address barriers to effective use of research in policy and practice and means to overcome them,
- Document and explain the exclusions of research from arenas where it could result in better forest management or improve lives and livelihoods,
- Present cases of positive policy change that reflect good practice in research uptake,
- Demonstrate collaborative approaches that have worked to bridge divides and/or show promise to do so,
- Provide examples of collective action for systemic change that favors thriving human communities and forest landscapes, and/or
- Highlight the voices, challenges, and successes of those who suffer most from forest loss and degradation, climate and environmental change, and restrictive policies.