ABSTRACT
People's engagement in forestry has been a key strategy to sustainably manage forests. While such approaches have proven effective in protecting and restoring forests, emerging evidence shows that they go much further in enhancing the resilience of local communities against shocks and stresses, ultimately sustaining forest resources. Sporadic evidence reports community forestry's (CF) support to local communities in dealing with climate impacts as well as disasters. This article reviews the multiple roles of CF in different contexts, through case studies done in Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal, and Viet Nam in tackling climate impacts and COVID-19 restrictions. The article provides an illustration of key contributions from CF in addressing sources of vulnerability of forest-dependent communities and points out potential improvements in the CF programs. In doing so, it adapts Ostrom's Social-Ecological Sustainability framework. The article presents conclusive evidence that CF has the potential to help improve the resilience of social-ecological systems. However, the results are not optimal, and performance varies greatly across social, ecological, political, institutional, and livelihood contexts. We argue that with stronger integration to larger systems of multi-level and nested governance, the CF has potential to deliver more benefits to resilience building, climate adaptation, and disaster preparedness. This is complemented by integrating CF programs in climate adaptation and disaster-related policies and plans and providing capacity and resource support for on-the-ground actions under the leadership of local communities. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.