Small forest growers in tropical landscapes should be embraced as partners for Green-growth: Increase wood supply, restore land, reduce poverty, and mitigate climate change

•Small-scale plantation forestry is a critical contributor to wood supply in the tropics.•Several million households seek livelihood through this land use.•Small growers are making significant contributions to restoration of degraded forest-landscapes, rural economic development, and climate change mitigation, and can play a greater role in addressing global challenges.•Small growers face several constraints and impediments: they are often unaccounted, and poorly supported. This is a lost opportunity.•They should be brought to the forefront as coinvesting partners in global efforts for Green growth for environmental care and poverty alleviation. Our ideas and investments for landscape restoration should be broadened to include sustainably managed plantation forestry, especially those owned by small growers in forest-rural landscapes, as a part of the solution. Small growers play seminal roles in tropical forestry; for example, they provide about 90% and 60% of the industrial wood in India and Vietnam, respectively, and are central for countries such as Ethiopia and Uganda. They contribute to restoration of degraded landscapes in large areas. Wood production and use of wood products as a carbon positive, renewable, recyclable material should be a part of climate change mitigation actions. Forestry and wood-based business is providing livelihoods for millions of rural households and probably helping hundreds of thousands of families out of poverty. Tropical countries are facing widening wood supply- demand gaps. Substantial growth of wood production from small-scale plantations via both higher productivity per unit area and carefully managed land expansion, may be the only options for closing this gap. Nevertheless, there is no reliable inventory of the number of small-scale growers and households involved in any tropical country. Similarly, there is a serious lack of attention given to productivity in small -scale plantations, and exploring how sustainable management practices can improve productivity, product value, economic outcomes, and environmental benefits, at appropriate spatial and temporal scales. Many projects carried out in the name of small growers within country are fragmented, donor-driven, and uncoordinated. They will be more effective for providing benefits to small-growers if each recipient country developed a holistic and coherent strategy with priorities for advancing small- scale plantation forestry, within which, projects from internati