• Food security: Forests are natural supermarkets for 1 billion of the world's poorest people. They provide nuts, berries, roots, meat and cooking fuel, complementing agricultural crops and providing essential nutrients that would otherwise be unavailable. 1 In rural areas of the Congo Basin, five to six million tonnes of bush meat are harvested each year and account for up to 80 percent of the fats and proteins consumed by local communities.2 In areas where fish are an important source of protein, forests-especially mangroves-support the healthy aquatic ecosystems necessary to maintain fish stocks.

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The purpose of this projectForest management certification is a non-governmental, voluntary, market-based mechanism designed to promote sustainable use of forest resources. It recognizes responsible management through independently verified compliance with agreed-upon principles, criteria and indicators that describe the acceptable ecological, social, economic and policy outcomes of forest management. The hoped-for outcomes of certification include maintenance of forest values (e.g., biodiversity, ecosystem service provision), enhancement of the social welfare of forest owners, workers and local people (e.g., health and education, access to credit, increased assets), and improved financial and legal status of certified FMUs (forest management units) of concessions, private landowners and communities.This project represents the first field-based evaluation of forest certification carried out by independent researchers with the goal of critically assessing when, where, how, to what extent, why, at what cost to whom and for how long certification has changed the ways forests are managed. Included in this broad assessment is the question of whether, in response to certification, forest cover is maintained and whether and how local people benefit. These questions will be addressed as part of a theory-based empirical impact evaluation, employing both quasi-experimental qualitative and Core research team

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