As seen on ClimateWire

Elizabeth Harball | Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Forest carbon trading efforts will prove unsuccessful until nations grant indigenous peoples and local communities control of their land, argues a new report.

Released today by the nonprofit Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), the report singles out the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), a program meant to coordinate payments from wealthy countries to developing countries to preserve forested land. The report claims the program does not include sufficient safeguards for people living in forests in its plan.

According to the FCPF website, the program’s main objectives include testing strategies to “sustain or enhance livelihoods of local communities” and “ensur[e] equitable benefit sharing.” It also calls forest governance a “pillar of sustainable forest management, and reducing deforestation and forest degradation.”

But RRI argues that the World Bank’s program has neglected to include important protections for communities that live in forests and often depend on them for their livelihoods.

“The issue is that as it’s currently worded, the framework doesn’t adequately mention the need to respect and enforce the rights of local communities and peoples to forests,” said Bryson Ogden, a private-sector analyst at RRI.

Ogden argued that “secure tenure must be a precondition to implementing the project.” Otherwise, he said, communities “stand to lose” if forest carbon becomes a monetized commodity.

Touchy issue for negotiators

Last year, RRI worked with the World Resources Institute on a report stating that indigenous or local communities have rights to 1.27 billion acres of the world’s forested land, which sequesters 41.5 billion tons of carbon. The report argued that stronger rights for indigenous and local communities make it less likely that these forests will be cleared (ClimateWire, July 24, 2014).

Working off this assumption, RRI analyzed eight of the 11 nations the World Bank’s FCPF is readying for forest carbon payments and found that just two — Guatemala and Mexico — have laws defining forest carbon rights. Over 79 percent of forested land in the eight countries analyzed is owned by governments, while indigenous and local communities’ rights are protected on about 16 percent of this land.

“Many of these carbon ‘ready’ countries are actually far from ready for the reality and certain complexity of carbon transactions,” RRI stated in the report. “To avoid significant risk to existing community forest rights and the associated increase in rural poverty and conflicts, stronger forest rights should be a precondition for any World Bank Carbon Fund project.”

The World Bank responded to the report with the following statement:

“The FCPF will be piloting results-based payments for a small number of forest countries to demonstrate that REDD+ [Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation] can be implemented and accounted for at scale. Currently, no emission reductions payment agreements have been set up for any of the 11 countries selected, and before this happens all criteria and indicators of the FCPF Carbon Fund’s methodological framework would have to be met.”

It added, “Local community and self-selected indigenous peoples representatives have been involved in all stages of the development of the framework.

Transparent, consultative and participatory stakeholder engagement is an integral part of all stages of the FCPF’s operations.”

Protection for indigenous peoples affected by payments to keep forests standing was also a flashpoint at the most recent climate talks in Lima, Peru.

Negotiations on REDD+ regarding how countries report “safeguards” for forest communities ended in a stalemate (ClimateWire, Dec. 10, 2014).