Nepal's Community Forestry Programme — Devolved Forest Management by Community Forest User Groups

Nepal's 1993 Forestry Act devolved management of national forest land to local Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs), granting communities defined-term rights to manage, protect and harvest forest products in exchange for conservation and equitable benefit-sharing obligations.

The programme has become one of the world's largest and longest-running examples of community-based natural resource management: government figures put the number of registered CFUGs above 22,000, covering roughly 2.3 million hectares (about a third of Nepal's total forest area) and involving some 3 million households.

NASA-funded Landsat-based remote sensing analysis found that national forest cover rose from about 26% in 1992 to 45% in 2016 — a near-doubling — with the largest gains concentrated in districts with the highest density of community forests; one studied community forest in Kabhrepalanchok district grew from 12% cover in 1988 to 92% by 2016. A separate quasi-experimental study (620 matched forest plots across 42 districts, controlling for 16 confounders, published in Global Environmental Change) found aboveground carbon gains were significant and robust on lower slopes and in open-canopy forests (+25–26 Mg C/ha), while the same study found carbon losses at higher altitudes and on steeper slopes.

Independent researchers note the programme's benefits are not uniform: gains concentrate in accessible, lower-elevation forests, and studies documenting positive outcomes still flag unresolved questions around potential leakage (deforestation displaced to non-community forest) and elite capture within some user groups. The programme nonetheless remains one of the most rigorously studied forest-tenure interventions globally, sustained continuously for more than three decades under a stable legal framework.