The research team, led by Geremew Motuma Jebessa of Jimma University together with Adugna Eneyew Bekele and Teferi Tolera, anchored their work in the Social-Ecological Systems framework pioneered by Elinor Ostrom, which treats forests and the communities that depend on them as an inseparable whole. To measure governance, they adopted the widely used assessment framework developed by the Program on Forests and the Food and Agriculture Organization, which evaluates six principles: participation, transparency, accountability, effectiveness, equity, and efficiency. Each principle was scored through dozens of indicators rated by residents on five-point scales, and the resulting data were distilled using a weighted average index before being fed into a Structural Equation Model, a statistical technique that can simultaneously test how multiple hidden factors influence one another along hypothesized causal pathways.

The headline result is stark. Overall forest governance in the Belete-Gera landscape scored a weighted average of 2.84 on a five-point scale, a rating the authors describe as moderate at best. Transparency fared relatively well at 3.22, and participation at 3.13, but accountability sank to 2.57 and efficiency to 2.45, the two weakest links in the governance chain. Residents reported that while they attend invited meetings and plant trees, the day-to-day monitoring and evaluation of the forest is monopolized by committees and experts, with youth and women almost entirely excluded. One key informant told the researchers that community members understand the importance of conservation and their own roles, but complain of a lack of transparency about forest benefits, weak rule enforcement, and persistent corruption.

The gender gap in these perceptions is one of the study’s most striking discoveries. Male household heads rated overall governance at 3.1, while female household heads rated it at only 2.64, a chasm that reflects women’s marginalization from forest decision-making despite their deep daily reliance on forest products. Women scored particularly low on perceptions of transparency in decisions about forest use and on the fairness of access to forest benefits. Given that rural women across the region gather firewood, wild coffee, honey, and spices that sustain their families, their exclusion from governance is not merely a matter of representation; the authors argue it undermines the very conservation commitments that the forest’s future depends on.

When the researchers ran the Structural Equation Model, the statistical architecture of community conservation came into focus. Perceived forest governance effectiveness had no significant direct effect on conservation behavior, an unexpected result the authors attribute to poor accountability among forest officers and the illegal leasing of demarcated forest land to private coffee investors, which has severely discouraged collective action. But governance effectiveness did something arguably more important: it strongly predicted community satisfaction with forest management, with a path coefficient of 0.232. That satisfaction, in turn, fed directly into conservation behavior. The indirect pathway, in which good governance builds satisfaction that then drives conservation, was significant with a coefficient of 0.33, the strongest indirect effect in the model.

The other major driver proved to be forest resource use itself, which predicted conservation behavior with a path coefficient of 0.29, the largest direct effect in the entire model. This finding challenges a persistent assumption that people protect forests best when kept away from them. In Belete-Gera, the opposite appears true: households that collect wild coffee, honey, spices, and firewood, and that sell forest products to meet basic needs, are the ones most motivated to patrol, prevent illegal logging, replant, and share knowledge. The community’s motivation for conservation scored a remarkable 4.08 out of 5, among the highest values recorded in the study. Dependence, in this landscape, breeds stewardship rather than destruction.

The model’s fit statistics lend the findings credibility. The comparative fit index reached 0.935 and the Tucker-Lewis index 0.915, both above conventional thresholds, while the root mean square error of approximation stood at 0.071 and the standardized root mean square residual at 0.05. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed that all latent variable indicators loaded significantly above 0.5, and reliability checks through Cronbach’s alpha and composite reliability exceeded accepted benchmarks. In plain terms, the statistical machinery linking governance perceptions, satisfaction, and behavior is robust, not a statistical accident.

Beneath the numbers lies a story of land and livelihood under pressure. The Belete-Gera Forest is a recognized biodiversity hotspot and the birthplace of Arabica coffee, yet it faces rapid degradation from coffee plantation investments, resettlement, grazing, and logging. Key informants described how land transfers from the forest to private coffee companies do not serve the interests of forest-dependent communities, and that the jobs created by commercial investors fall far short of replacing the economic benefits families once drew from the wild forest. When access to wild coffee, honey, and traditional spices is cut off, the authors warn, residents may be pushed toward over-extracting what remains, a feedback loop in which inequitable governance actively accelerates deforestation.

Ethiopia has not lacked for policy ambition. The country has rolled out the Ethiopian Forestry Action Plan, successive forest policies in 1997 and 2007, Participatory Forest Management, the Climate Resilient Green Economy strategy, and the mass-tree-planting Green Legacy initiative. Yet the study confirms what earlier research has suggested: a persistent gap between policy design and local implementation, marked by inequitable benefit sharing, elite capture of decision-making, weak institutional capacity, and chronic underfunding of monitoring. Local forest committees exist and even track illegal activity, but financial constraints and poor coordination among actors hobble their effectiveness. Previous assessments of Ethiopian forest governance relied heavily on the views of forestry experts and committee members, people with an incentive to present favorable pictures; this study’s insistence on hearing directly from ordinary forest dwellers, and from women in particular, is what exposes the gap.

The implications reach far beyond one Ethiopian landscape. If satisfaction, born of fair and transparent governance, is the bridge between institutions and conservation action, then the cheapest and most effective conservation investment may not be fences or fines but inclusive decision-making, honest benefit-sharing mechanisms, and genuine power for women and youth. The authors recommend that stakeholders strengthen local governance, promote sustainable resource use, track forest revenues transparently, and design livelihood strategies that keep communities invested in the forest’s survival. In the birthplace of coffee, the message is as simple as it is urgent: people will fight for a forest that they believe belongs, in every sense, to them.

Subject of Research: Community perceptions of forest governance effectiveness and their influence on conservation behavior in southwest Ethiopia

Article Title: Community Perspectives on Effectiveness of Forest Governance and Conservation Behavior in Southwest Ethiopia: A Structural Equation Modelling and Qualitative Insights Approach

Article References: Jebessa, G. M., Bekele, A. E., & Tolera, T. (2026). Community Perspectives on Effectiveness of Forest Governance and Conservation Behavior in Southwest Ethiopia: A Structural Equation Modelling and Qualitative Insights Approach. Environmental Management, 76(9), Article 297. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02611-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02611-0

Keywords: forest governance, Ethiopia, Belete-Gera Forest, conservation behavior, structural equation modeling, community satisfaction, participatory forest management, gender gap, Arabica coffee, deforestation, social-ecological systems, non-timber forest products

The research, led by Firew Bekele Abebe of Addis Ababa University and Haramaya University together with colleagues at Stockholm University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, focused on the Gomma and Gera districts in the Jimma zone, a landscape of forest fragments, crop fields, grazing lands and coffee farms. Traditionally, Arabica coffee in its native range has been cultivated only between roughly 1,200 and 2,000 meters above sea level, a narrow band dictated by the plant’s acute sensitivity to temperature. Above that line, the highlands were considered unsuitable. Yet when the researchers surveyed sites between 2,007 and 2,358 meters, they found thriving young coffee agroforests established by smallholder farmers who had made a calculated bet on a warming world.

To understand why farmers were moving uphill, the team conducted semi-structured interviews with thirty farmers who had recently established coffee agroforestry in this novel elevational range, paired with thirty neighboring farmers who had not yet made the switch. The results were striking in their consistency. Every single interviewed farmer cited climate change as a major reason for establishing coffee at these previously inhospitable heights, and 93 percent specifically pointed to rising temperatures. Two farmers added that rainfall, once too abundant for coffee, had declined enough to make cultivation viable. Crucially, this was not a story of government mandates or external pressure; it was farmers responding accurately to meteorologically real changes they had observed on their own land.

Climate was not the only driver. Just over half of the farmers said they wanted a higher and more stable income, since coffee is a perennial cash crop whose global prices are currently high. Nearly a third reported another, more surprising motivation: crop raiding. Baboons, monkeys and wild pigs were devastating their maize, teff and sorghum fields, and converting annual cropland into shaded coffee agroforests offered both a new revenue stream and a partial escape from wildlife losses. The idea itself spread through social networks, with 40 percent of farmers crediting neighbors as the source of the idea and nearly half naming neighbors as their primary source of knowledge about how to grow coffee, a pattern that hints at powerful social contagion in land-use change.

The consequences of this upward shift for biodiversity were a central question of the study, because agroforestry can cut two very different ways for conservation. When coffee is established inside existing forests, management typically thins the canopy and reduces the structural complexity that forest-associated species depend on. When it is established on open land, however, it functions as a form of ecological restoration, adding tree cover, shade, carbon storage, soil fertility and erosion control to landscapes that previously had none. The fate of the novel coffee zone therefore hinged on a deceptively simple question: were the new agroforests carved out of remaining forest, or planted on open land?

The answer was overwhelmingly the latter. Seventy-three percent of the surveyed farmers had established their coffee agroforests on open land such as former cropland or grazing areas, a pattern the researchers attribute to the scarcity of forest in the novel range and to state ownership of most remaining forest, which limits farmers’ ability to convert it. Even more encouraging were the vegetation surveys. In 30-by-30-meter plots at each site, the team counted, identified and measured every tree and shrub with a trunk diameter of at least five centimeters, along with saplings. Forest-derived and open-land-derived agroforests showed statistically indistinguishable species richness, Shannon diversity and abundance for both adult woody plants and saplings, a finding that contradicts the common assumption that agroforests established on open land are biodiversity-poor imitations of the real thing.

There were differences, to be sure. Trees in forest-derived agroforests were thicker at breast height, reflecting the presence of old, mature individuals, and community composition differed subtly between the two types, with species such as Croton macrostachyus, Ficus sur and Millettia ferruginea more abundant in forest-derived plots and Vernonia amygdalina more common in open-land plots. But the most notable feature was the extensive overlap in composition. Unlike open-land agroforests elsewhere in the tropics, which are often dominated by a handful of non-native shade trees, the Ethiopian agroforests in the novel range were built from a diverse set of native species, either planted from seeds and saplings gathered in nearby forest or regenerated naturally from seed banks and adjacent woodland. Management choices, whether trees were planted, allowed to regenerate naturally, or both, left little imprint on the resulting communities, suggesting that native tree recruitment in this landscape is remarkably resilient.

The forward-looking part of the study may prove the most consequential. When the researchers asked the thirty neighboring farmers without coffee whether they planned to establish it, 87 percent said yes, and all but one of those planned to plant on open land rather than in forest. Every one of these prospective adopters expected a better income, and half anticipated no challenges at all beyond the well-known burden of high initial investment costs, which was also the only disadvantage cited by established farmers. The researchers identify two positive feedback mechanisms that should accelerate adoption. First, farmers imitate successful neighbors, so each new agroforest becomes a visible advertisement for the next. Second, a crop-raiding spiral may take hold: as more of the landscape converts to woody agroforestry, wild animals gain more shelter and raiding pressure on remaining annual crop fields intensifies, pushing still more farmers toward coffee.

The implications ripple outward from the Jimma highlands. Modeling studies have warned that 39 to 59 percent of the land currently suitable for Arabica coffee in Ethiopia could become unsuitable by the end of the century, threatening the livelihoods of millions of smallholders and the genetic reservoir of the crop itself. An upward migration of coffee farming has long been proposed as an adaptation pathway, and this study provides the first detailed empirical evidence that the migration is already underway, driven not by top-down policy but by farmers’ own accurate perceptions of a changing climate. Because the new agroforests are overwhelmingly established on open land and are rich in native woody species, the shift is expected to increase tree cover, biodiversity and ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, shade, soil water regulation and erosion control, at higher elevations of the Afromontane landscape, an area that has historically suffered some of the region’s highest deforestation rates precisely because coffee agroforestry was absent there.

The authors are careful to note the caveats. The full landscape-scale consequences for forestation will require quantifying natural forest cover, mapping tenure rights and assessing how regulations are observed in practice, and complementary studies at the lower edge of the coffee range are needed to understand the complete regional picture. Hidden social costs, including increased household labor burdens and effects on children’s schooling documented in earlier work, also deserve attention. Yet the core finding stands as a rare piece of good news at the intersection of climate change, agriculture and conservation: in the birthplace of Arabica coffee, a warming world is nudging an entire farming system upslope, and the farms it leaves behind on the open hillsides are filling with native trees. What looks like retreat may, in this corner of Ethiopia, be a quiet expansion of the forest itself.

Subject of Research: Climate-driven upward shift of Arabica coffee agroforestry and its reforestation consequences in southwestern Ethiopia

Article Title: Climate-mediated upward shift of coffee agroforestry and associated reforestation in Arabica coffee’s native range

Article References: Abebe, F. B., Hylander, K., Nemomissa, S., Bekele, T., Zewdie, B., & Tack, A. J. M. (2026). Climate-mediated upward shift of coffee agroforestry and associated reforestation in Arabica coffee’s native range. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02470-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02470-3

Keywords: climate change, coffee agroforestry, Arabica coffee, Ethiopia, Afromontane forests, reforestation, biodiversity, ecosystem services, smallholder farmers, elevational shift, crop raiding, tree cover