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Carbon Financing and Community Forestry The Center for People and Forests (RECOFTC) September 20, 2009 The following is a text of a Call for Action issued after the First Regional Forum for People and Forests: Carbon Financing and Community Forestry. The three-day event brought together key people to analyze the risks, opportunities, and constraints that carbon financing presents for Asia-Pacific’s forest-dependent people. However, rural poverty, weak law enforcement, and escalating demand for food and fuel continue to drive forest destruction at an alarming rate – in the Asia-Pacific region alone, some 3.7 million hectares of natural forest are lost every year. This also threatens millions of already vulnerable rural livelihoods, often undermining traditional rights to vital forest resources. Carbon financing may provide promising new opportunities for maintaining and even improving the health of the world’s forests and, if designed well, to reduce rural poverty. But if schemes such as ‘REDD’ fail to deliver tangible benefits to Asia-Pacific’s 450 million forest-dependent people, then the social and economic impacts could be severe.
As forests in the Asia-Pacific region can potentially absorb a large proportion of global carbon dioxide emissions, the need for healthy and sustainable forest ecosystems cannot be understated nor undersold. But we must go beyond carbon to promote and ‘sell’ biodiversity, watershed conservation, and sustainable forest management as an essential holistic package. Local people hold the key to healthy forests in this region. They have the closest direct stake in forest resources and will affect the outcome of any forest management strategy, including those aimed at climate change mitigation. For carbon financing to succeed, it must learn from three decades of community forestry experience and actively engage and benefit local people. Lessons from payment for environmental service (PES) schemes reveal that carbon financing presents both risks and opportunities for local people, and also constraints to their effective participation. Maximizing the opportunities and addressing the risks and constraints requires early and active community involvement, especially in negotiating roles, responsibilities, and benefits.
Intermediary organizations that will build capacity and help broker carbon financing agreements have key roles to play in securing equity and local participation, and will require support in carrying out these important functions. However, until carbon ownership, benefit-sharing arrangements, financing methods and legal issues are clarified, carbon markets will remain a risky area of investment for both the private sector and local people. In considering the implications of carbon financing for local people, Forum participants called for: National Governments to:
The Forum reached consensus on the importance of engaging communities in any sustainable carbon financing initiatives, and explored ways to achieve this. Key Questions Included:
The full report is available by contacting RECOFTC Related Articles Companies benefit from reducing conflict with local people 
(07/08/2009) Mechanisms to mitigate disputes with local communities, can reduce risk for companies seeking to profit from forest use while at the same time helping protect rights of forest people, argues a new report published today by the The Forests Dialogue (TFD), an international group of forest experts from business, environmental, academic and human rights groups.
A New Idea to Save Tropical Forests Takes Flight 
(06/29/2009) Every year, tens of millions of acres of tropical forests are destroyed. This is the most destabilizing human land-use phenomenon on Earth. Tropical forests store more aboveground carbon than any other biome. They harbor more species than all other ecosystems combined. Tropical forests modulate global water, air, and nutrient cycles. They influence planetary energy flows and global weather patterns. Tropical forests provide livelihoods for many of the world’s poorest and marginalized people. Drugs for cancer, malaria, glaucoma, and leukemia are derived from rainforest compounds. Despite all these immense values, tropical forests are vanishing faster than any other natural system. No other threat to human welfare has been so clearly documented and simultaneously left unchecked. Since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (when more than 100 heads of State gathered to pledge a green future) 500 million acres of tropical forests have been cut or burned. For decades, tropical deforestation has been the No. 1 cause of species extinctions and the No. 2 cause of human greenhouse gas emissions, after the burning of fossil fuels. For decades, a few conservation heroes tried their best to plug holes in the dikes, but by and large the most diverse forests on Earth were in serious decline.
Indigenous people, forest communities in Africa control less than 2% of forest land (05/28/2009) Less than 2 percent of Africa’s tropical forests are under community control, hindering efforts to slow deforestation and alleviate rural poverty, reports a new assessment from the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) and the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a global coalition of non-governmental and community organizations. Indigenous people serve as guardians of forest carbon, must be involved in climate solutions (04/22/2009) Efforts to create an international climate framework — including a carbon financing mechanism for forest conservation — must involve forest people, said indigenous leaders attending the Indigenous Peoples Global Summit on Climate Change meeting this week in Anchorage, Alaska. Guidelines on how to establish an avoided deforestation project (01/22/2009) Deforestation presently accounts for nearly 20 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions — a share larger than that from the global transportation sector. Given this contribution, reducing deforestation is widely seen as a key component in plans to slow climate change and a number of proposals to include forestry in a post-Kyoto climate agreement are presently on the table. Anticipating the emergence of a market for forest carbon as a result of this framework, 'avoided deforestation' projects are already sprouting up in tropical countries around the world. Supporters say these initiatives offer the potential to protect forests and biodiversity while simultaneously delivering benefits to rural communities that have so far been lost out while their natural resources have been plundered by developers. While avoided deforestation seems to offers great promise, developing a project that meets still emerging standards is a complex and costly endeavor. A new book, published in five languages, seeks to untangle the forest carbon market and thereby facilitate new avoided deforestation projects. REDD may harm forest people, alleges report (12/02/2008) A new report finds that the World Bank is not doing enough to protect indigenous rights under its mechanism to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). Carbon conservation schemes will fail without forest people (10/16/2008) Mechanisms that use forest conservation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are doomed to fail unless they are "based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples and forest communities," warn environmentalists and indigenous rights groups meeting in Oslo this week. Indigenous groups fear they are being excluded from discussions on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), a proposed financial mechanism that would compensate tropical countries for reducing emissions caused by deforestation and land use. Such emissions account for a fifth of the global total, or more than the total emissions from transportation. In particular, indigenous groups and forest communities are concerned they will not see benefits from REDD. Worse, some believe the mechanism could trigger a new wave of land grabs and evictions by parties seeking to capitalize on carbon payments. Indigenous groups and forest communities have long struggled against development interests seeking to exploit their traditional lands and resources. But supporters of so-called "avoided deforestation" schemes say that properly-designed policy offers unprecedented opportunities to create sustainable livelihoods for forest people while safeguarding biodiversity and services provided by healthy forest ecosystems. Forest conservation can fight climate change and poverty (10/08/2008) The Forests Dialogue — a coalition consisting of more than 250 representatives of governments, forestry companies, trade unions, environmental and social groups, international organizations, forest owners, indigenous peoples and forest-community groups — has issued guiding principles for including forests in climate change negotiations. Indigenous people demand greater say in using forests to fight global warming (10/08/2008) Indigenous leaders renewed their call for greater say in how tropical forests are managed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to AFP. Cutting deforestation can fight climate change, reduce poverty and conflict (09/24/2008) Forest conservation can play a critical role in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and alleviate poverty, said a prominent group of politicians, development experts, and environmental NGOs meeting in New York City to discuss U.S. climate policy. Organized by Avoided Deforestation Partners, an international policy group, the meeting sought to establish a strategy to highlight the global impact of deforestation and push for the inclusion of tropical forests in domestic climate policy. Attendees included leaders of WWF, the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, World Vision, Oxfam, Mercy Corps, Care International, and the Union of Concerned Scientists; former Vice President Al Gore; Wangari Maathai, a Nobel Prize-winning activist from Kenya; Bharrat Jagdeo, president of the South American country of Guyana; and executives from a number of carbon-trading and financial firms. The event was hosted by veteran journalist Dan Rather. Communities must benefit for forest carbon schemes to be effective (12/13/2007) Much has been promised by what avoided deforestation carbon credits can do to support forest protection, increase tax revenues, and develop sustainable rural economies in our Zamrud Khatulistiwa or Emerald on the Equator.
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