Seeing REDD over forest peoples

Arun Agrawal, BBC Green Room 4 May 10;

By the end of this year, governments may have finalised arrangements for preserving developing countries' forests under the UN climate convention. But, argues Arun Agrawal, forests used to belong to people - and people are being left out of the equation.

A long time ago - before the Copenhagen summit, before words such as biodiversity or development were invented, before even colonialism - most of the world's forests belonged to people.

People lived in them. People depended on them.

And people used forests for food, for firewood, for timber - indeed, for much of what they needed.

But by the beginning of the 20th Century, governments owned most of the world's forests.

Industrial expansion, coupled with colonialism and blossoming government capacity, made it both desirable and possible for governments to assert control over forests.

They did so in the name of a greater ability to protect and manage forests. The interests and claims of local communities and forest-dependent populations received short shrift in the global forest grab that occurred between 1850 and 1950.

Governed destruction

But forests today - all four billion hectares of them - are no more than a remnant of the vast stretches of vegetation that used to cover the entire planet.

The global spasm of deforestation that has occurred in the 20th Century took place under government ownership of forests.

Governments cut down trees themselves. But more importantly, they caved under pressures from timber companies to allow logging, failed to enforce their own regulations to reduce deforestation, and often encouraged clearing of forests for agricultural development.

Worried about deforestation, international donors spent billions of dollars in the 1980s in an attempt to increase forest cover.

In many countries, there have been incipient efforts to decentralise control, with donors and local communities demanding a greater say for forest-dependent peoples in what happens to forests.

Despite massive investments, forests continue to be lost because of a combination of high demand for wood products in the West and in emerging economies, imperfect decentralisation, ongoing disenfranchisement of local communities, and corrupt enforcement.

Today, the critical importance of forests - this time in the context of global climate change - is being recognised again.

Forests stores more than twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. If they disappear, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will easily cross 1,000 parts per million. Long before that, dangerous climate change will become unstoppable.

Governments and non-governmental actors alike recognise the dangers.

At the recent Copenhagen climate negotiations, one of the key accomplishments was to set aside substantial funds towards Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+).

(The "+" signifies that in addition to reducing emissions, REDD+ projects should also strive to protect biodiversity and local livelihoods.)

Six developed world nations pledged $4.5bn to developing country governments to build their capacity to reduce deforestation and increase the carbon stored in tropical forests.

Before the commitments at Copenhagen, the World Bank and the United Nations had already launched other forest carbon schemes, although on a smaller scale. The World Bank started its Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) three years ago.

UN-REDD is a similar effort, with pilot projects in developing countries to demonstrate that carbon sequestration in forests is possible.

Chasing capacity

In comparison to the $40bn global trade in forest products, the sums allocated for REDD are small.

But they are very substantial in comparison to the budgets of forest departments in developing countries.

Of course, the greater hope is that a global carbon market will emerge in the next five to 10 years, and today's initiatives will jumpstart massive private sector involvement in forest carbon trade.

The question is whether the planned REDD+ projects and investments will indeed encourage major changes in how governments have managed tropical forests.

Current attempts to involve governments in forest carbon storage suffer from many flaws - problems that should not be swept under the carpet.

One major problem is that most of the emphasis in REDD+ capacity-building projects is on increasing national government capacity.

There is little attention to the interests of local populations, poorer communities, and indigenous peoples.

The funding for implementing REDD+ projects will flow to government departments, to reward demonstrated improvements in forest carbon storage. It will support training and capacity development of civil servants, and help build monitoring systems managed by national governments.

There is little attention to strengthen the capacity of the real forest stakeholders - poor, local communities that depend on and use these forests.

The emphasis on carbon storage means that government departments will feel free to ignore the needs of local populations once again. To be counted as successful, they will assume ownership of carbon in forests and exclude local communities and poor forest-dependent peoples.

A hundred years of historical experience with centralised forest ownership shows that governments may be unable to enforce forest regulations against powerful corporate interests; but they are certainly able to exclude less powerful, poor, forest peoples.

It will be a shame if the international community, in the rush to protect carbon storage, encourages projects and policies that hurt poorer and marginal peoples.

The inequalities that have characterised forest policies for more than 100 years are ready to be encouraged once again through forest carbon management.

Climate change is a danger that has been created by the actions of rich, profligate consumers the world over. It will visit its worst effects on those who are most vulnerable, those who generate the least emissions.

The greatest irony of Copenhagen will be that it may have supported policies that will further exacerbate the unequal impacts of climate change.

To guard against such perverse outcomes, governments must involve local communities and indigenous populations in the design and implementation REDD+ projects and policies.

International donors should support institutional mechanisms to ensure that the greater share of REDD+ related international funding flows reach local communities.

And local communities and indigenous peoples themselves will need to mobilise and articulate clearly the benefits of inclusion and risks to carbon sequestration in tropical forests if people are excluded from REDD+.

Arun Agrawal is associate professor of natural resources and environment at the University of Michigan, US

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website