REDD, Forest Governance and Rural Livelihoods

REDD, Forest Governance and Rural Livelihoods
Author: Oliver Springate-Baginski
Publisher: CIFOR
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Forest management
ISBN: 6028693154

Experiences from incentive-based forest management are examined for their effects on the livelihoods of local communities. In the second section, country case studies provide a snapshot of REDD developments to date and identify design features for REDD that would support benefits for forest communities.

Sustainable Forest Governance in a Changing Climate

Sustainable Forest Governance in a Changing Climate
Author: Shaligram Neupane
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN:

Sustainable forest governance is critical to a debate over how multi-faceted impacts of climate change can be addressed at the local community level. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) is a financial incentive-based carbon emission reduction program of the United Nations (UN) which will likely change the ways community forests in many developing countries are accessed and used. In particular, the REDD program may reduce the access and use of forest products to poor communities who are heavily dependent on forests for their livelihoods. This paper aims to investigate whether and how the REDD program affects community forestry program in Nepal, particularly in relation to the livelihoods of forest dependent poor communities. It examines conceptual and policy aspects of REDD program in respect to Nepalese community forestry policy through the literature review, and also draws upon the current research in three community forestry cases. It then focuses on the analysis of impacts of the REDD program, viz.- a) access and use of community forests for poor communities, b) benefit and costs of REDD program to poor communities, and c) benefits (or costs) sharing mechanism (i.e. who gets what, when and how?). The paper identifies issues of REDD program in relation to community forestry and local livelihoods, particularly the livelihoods of the poorer groups. The paper provides a critique of the market driven, financial incentive-based REDD program to be not sympathetic to the decentralized forest governance. Despite community forestry has proven to be more equitable than the top-down centralized approach to forest governance, we argue that REDD seems to encourage the top-down approach, and therefore it seems to be anti-community forestry. Further, it does not really safeguard the interest and need of poor and disadvantaged communities who are directly dependent on forests. The paper concludes by underpinning the need to rethink forest governance in a changing climate with due consideration of persisting poverty in many developing countries.

REDD+ on the ground

REDD+ on the ground
Author: Erin O Sills
Publisher: CIFOR
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2014-12-24
Genre:
ISBN: 6021504550

REDD+ is one of the leading near-term options for global climate change mitigation. More than 300 subnational REDD+ initiatives have been launched across the tropics, responding to both the call for demonstration activities in the Bali Action Plan and the market for voluntary carbon offset credits.

Realising REDD+

Realising REDD+
Author: Arild Angelsen
Publisher: CIFOR
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Climatic changes
ISBN: 6028693030

REDD+ must be transformational. REDD+ requires broad institutional and governance reforms, such as tenure, decentralisation, and corruption control. These reforms will enable departures from business as usual, and involve communities and forest users in making and implementing policies that a ect them. Policies must go beyond forestry. REDD+ strategies must include policies outside the forestry sector narrowly de ned, such as agriculture and energy, and better coordinate across sectors to deal with non-forest drivers of deforestation and degradation. Performance-based payments are key, yet limited. Payments based on performance directly incentivise and compensate forest owners and users. But schemes such as payments for environmental services (PES) depend on conditions, such as secure tenure, solid carbon data and transparent governance, that are often lacking and take time to change. This constraint reinforces the need for broad institutional and policy reforms. We must learn from the past. Many approaches to REDD+ now being considered are similar to previous e orts to conserve and better manage forests, often with limited success. Taking on board lessons learned from past experience will improve the prospects of REDD+ e ectiveness. National circumstances and uncertainty must be factored in. Di erent country contexts will create a variety of REDD+ models with di erent institutional and policy mixes. Uncertainties about the shape of the future global REDD+ system, national readiness and political consensus require  exibility and a phased approach to REDD+ implementation.

Tenure in REDD

Tenure in REDD
Author: Lorenzo Cotula
Publisher: IIED
Total Pages: 67
Release: 2009
Genre: Community-based conservation
ISBN: 184369736X

As new mechanisms for "reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation" (REDD) are being negotiated in international climate change talks, resource tenure must be given greater attention. Tenure over land and trees--the systems of rights, rules, institutions and processes regulating their access and use--will affect the extent to which REDD and related strategies will benefit, or marginalise, forest communities. This report aims to promote debate on the issue. Drawing on experience from seven rainforest countries (Brazil, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guyana, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea), the report develops a typology of tenure regimes across countries, explores tenure issues in each country, and identifies key challenges to be addressed if REDD is to have equitable and sustainable impact.

REDD+ at the crossroads

REDD+ at the crossroads
Author: Michael B. Dwyer
Publisher: CIFOR
Total Pages: 50
Release: 2015-04-06
Genre: Carbon dioxide mitigation
ISBN: 6021504828

To date, REDD+ projects in Laos have made relatively conservative choices on driver engagement, focusing on smallholder-related drivers like shifting cultivation and small-scale agricultural expansion, to the exclusion of drivers like agro-industrial concessions, mining concessions and energy and transportation infrastructure. While these choices have been based on calculated decisions made in the context of project areas, they have created a pair of challenges that REDD+ practitioners must currently confront. The first is lost opportunity. By not engaging industrial drivers of forest loss, REDD+ misses an important chance to engage with high level economic decision making. This has implications not only for climate change mitigation, but more importantly for efforts to make Laos’s current trajectory of natural resource-intensive development more socially, environmentally and economically sustainable. The second challenge is more immediate. Due to the political-economic circumstances under which forest loss occurs, there is a significant gap between loss that is planned and loss that can be accounted for under REDD’s “national circumstance” allowances for planned deforestation. This means that REDD’s positive impacts on mitigating forest loss, to the extent that they occur, may be swamped by planned but unaccountable forest loss, and thus difficult or impossible to verify. Thinking bigger on issues from driver engagement to spatial planning and concession regulation to land tenure and rural livelihood possibilities thus presents not only a series of opportunities, but a series of imperatives.

Redeeming REDD

Redeeming REDD
Author: Michael I. Brown
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2013-06-26
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1136340610

It is now well accepted that deforestation is a key source of greenhouse gas emissions and of climate change, with forests representing major sinks for carbon. As a result, public and private initiatives for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) have been widely endorsed by policy-makers. A key issue is the feasibility of carbon trading or other incentives to encourage land-owners and indigenous people, particularly in developing tropical countries, to conserve forests, rather than to cut them down for agricultural or other development purposes. This book presents a major critique of the aims and policies of REDD as currently structured, particularly in terms of their social feasibility. It is shown how the claims to be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as enhance people's livelihoods and biodiversity conservation are unrealistic. There is a naive assumption that technical or economic fixes are sufficient for success. However, the social and governance aspects of REDD, and its enhanced version known as REDD+, are shown to be implausible. Instead to enhance REDD's prospects, the author provides a roadmap for developing a new social contract that puts people first.

Forests and People

Forests and People
Author: Johannes Stahl
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2011
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1849712808

As the editors note in their introduction, the attention to rights in forestry differs from 'rights-based approaches' in international development and other natural resource fields in three critical ways. First, redistribution is a central demand of activists in forestry but not in other fields. Many forest rights activists call for not only the redirection of forest benefits but also the redistribution of forest tenure to redress historical inequalities. Second, the rights agenda in forestry emerges from numerous grassroots initiatives, setting forest-related human rights apart from approaches that derive legitimacy from transnational human rights norms and are driven by international and national organizations. Third, forest rights activists attend to individual as well as peoples' collective rights whereas approaches in other fields tend to emphasize one or the other set of rights.

Forest Preservation in a Changing Climate

Forest Preservation in a Changing Climate
Author: Sébastien Jodoin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2017-10-05
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108101356

This book provides a comprehensive socio-legal examination of how global efforts to fight climate change by reducing carbon emissions in the forestry sector (known as REDD+) have affected the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities in developing countries. Grounded in extensive qualitative empirical research conducted globally, the book shows that the transnational legal process for REDD+ has created both serious challenges and unexpected opportunities for the recognition and protection of indigenous and community rights. It reveals that the pursuit of REDD+ has resulted in important variations in how human rights standards are understood and applied across multiple sites of law in the field of REDD+, with mixed results for indigenous peoples and local communities in Indonesia and Tanzania. With its original findings, rigourous research design, and interdisciplinary analytical framework, this book will make a valuable contribution to the study of transnational legal processes in a globalizing world. This title is also available as Open Access.