“Avoided
deforestation" policies and indigenous peoples and local
communities: urgent debate needed on potential social impacts
Forest conservation
is back on the international climate agenda…big time!
More and
more Northern and Southern governments, bilateral development
agencies, multilateral development banks and big conservation
NGOs are arguing that “countries” should be compensated for protecting
the “carbon reservoirs” in standing forests. Under some plans,
Southern governments’ forest protection plans would generate pollution
rights that the governments could then sell to Northern industries
to allow them to continue business as usual.
Almost all
enthusiasts for such “avoided deforestation” (AD) policies reject
the “project-by-project” approach to forest conservation. Under
the AD policy option,
referred to as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation (RED)
under official UNFCCC terminology, they
want national or regional schemes that include large
areas of forest. This, they say, would reduce the cost of monitoring:
it’s much cheaper to measure deforestation from a satellite than
visit lots of different project sites on the ground.
AD proponents
also say that crediting “countries” as the agent responsible for
saving forests would help promote a more comprehensive approach
to national forest policies that could help prevent forest protection
in one place leading to deforestation elsewhere in the same country.
Yet in all
the excitement over AD, relatively little attention has been paid
to the social risks and challenges -- or the potential impact
on indigenous peoples and local communities whose livelihoods,
cultures and well-being depend on forests. Forest movements and
activists will need to engage in this debate, because of the big
impact it could have on their ancestral forests and their fundamental
rights and freedoms.
Public
funds or global carbon trading?
Some governments,
most notably that of Brazil, propose that economic incentives
for developing countries to protect forests should come from a
specialised international fund created from public money from
donor countries. In the UK government’s Stern Review on the
Economics of Climate Change published in early 2007, ex-World
Bank economist Sir Nicholas Stern recommended that “…international
support for action by countries to prevent deforestation should
start as soon as possible…” through pilot schemes, which “…could
be based on funds with voluntary contributions from developed
countries, businesses and NGOs”. Stern suggests that public funds
for AD could be targeted where they can provide most benefit at
the country level, and could be used to tackle poverty reduction
and underlying drivers of deforestation.
On the other
hand, big conservation NGOs, so-called “carbon finance” and “carbon
forestry” companies, together with some Southern governments like
Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea, argue that public funds will
never provide enough finance to ensure adequate and sustained
finance for avoided deforestation. This group maintains that only
a global trade in pollution credits would deliver sufficient funding
for effective RED schemes. Advocates of trading in AD include
an increasing number of carbon finance companies consultants who
are eager to make big money from the forest carbon trade, such
as EcoSecurities. These companies and entrepreneurs, together
with many forest scientists, large NGOs and the World Bank, are
now engaged in intense lobbying of donor governments to persuade
them to give legal and institutional support to global forest
carbon markets.
World
Bank seeking to capture global carbon funds
The World
Bank backs a mix of public and market-based approaches to forest
carbon finance. The Bank is now moving fast to try to capture
any new global funds for avoided deforestation as a central part
of its controversial proposal for a new Global Forest Alliance
(GFA) with large conservation NGOs, like the Nature Conservancy,
Conservation International
and WWF. Within the GFA framework, the Bank plans to pilot avoided
deforestation schemes in five tropical countries under its proposed
Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), which it is
asking the G8 group of industrialised countries to back at their
next summit in Germany in June 2007.
Meanwhile,
the Bank is already inviting the governments
of Papua New Guinea, Costa Rica and Indonesia, and regional bodies
in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to fund forest
protection through avoided deforestation. In May 2007, the World
Bank was seeking to persuade these countries to sign agreements
to limit carbon emissions from deforestation by 2009 or 2010,
in return for US$250 million in investment.
TFAP
again?
Yet once
again, it seems that World Bank, government and NGO plans to combat
deforestation at the national level, as well as their proposals
for including conservation in the global carbon economy, are being
developed with little or no informed participation of potentially-affected
forest peoples. At a recent meeting in Oxford, the Forest Peoples
Programme was shocked to hear from forestry consultants that human
rights and indigenous peoples’ concerns are a “side issue” and
a “distraction” from forest protection policies. They concede
that some indigenous peoples might unfortunately get “trashed”,
but this may be a price that has to paid to achieve the greater
goal of slowing climate change!
Yet any
rapid expansion and implementation of AD schemes without the participation
of forest peoples and without due regard to rights and social
issues risks repeating the past mistakes of failed global initiatives
to tackle tropical deforestation (such as the Tropical Forest
Action Plan (TFAP) run by the FAO and the World Bank in the 1980s).
[i]
Potential
social risks
Supporters
of the new “avoided deforestation” schemes argue that compensation
rates must be higher than the returns from other land uses which
directly cause deforestation (such as oil palm expansion, industrial
tree plantations, conversion to agriculture, hydrocarbon extraction,
etc.). According to current estimates, governments could earn
hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars a year for not
clearing forests.
Such sums,
could easily be large enough to create incentives for state forest
and protected area authorities to throw people they consider “encroachers”
out of forests. In their scramble to receive compensation payments
by showing satellites overhead that forest clearance and burning
has stopped, over-zealous forest protection agencies may be tempted
to evict shifting cultivators and to cordon off forests completely
against any use by traditional forest dwellers and other forest-dependent
communities.
Top-down
forest policies and a return to “guns-and-guards conservation”?
One result
could be increased state control over forests; unjust targeting
of indigenous and marginal peoples as the “drivers” of deforestation;
violations of customary land and territorial rights; state and
NGO zoning of forest lands without informed participation of forest
dwellers; unequal imposition of the costs of forest protection
on indigenous peoples and local communities through unequal and
abusive community contracts; land speculation, land grabbing and
land conflicts (made worse by competing claims on AD compensation);
corruption and embezzlement of international funds by national
elites; and increasing inequality and potential conflict between
recipients and non-recipients of AD funds.
RED or
REDD?
Some proponents
of the new AD schemes, like the government of India, want afforestation
and natural regeneration schemes to be compensated for as well
as forest conservation. This idea is called Reduced Emissions
from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). Others
point out that to include reforestation schemes would raise all
the same scientific and social problems that are associated with
much-criticised carbon offset projects involving tree planting.
[ii]
It would also raise the question of what counts as
“degradation”. Other influential AD supporters, like Brazil, thus
maintain that global schemes must be confined to deforestation
only (RED).
Unresolved
problems with carbon trading
One problem
with AD is that it requires measuring how much forest has been
saved above a “baseline” of a “business-as-usual” rate of deforestation.
That rate, of course, will be determined by a small circle of
technical experts – with all the scope for intellectual corruption
that implies.
Another
problem afflicts schemes that include carbon trading. Some indigenous
peoples’ organisations and social justice campaigners have questioned
the ethics, politics and science of trading carbon stocks on the
international market.
[iii]
These critics reject the idea that the climate problem
can or should be addressed by allowing Northern industrial and
corporate polluters to buy the “right” to continue polluting from
the governments of heavily-forested Southern countries. They also
dismiss the notion that the value of forests can be reduced to
the monetary value of their carbon stocks, and stress that for
their people the non-monetary cultural and spiritual values of
their forest are of utmost importance and must be respected. They
maintain that trade in carbon credits is impractical because it
does not tackle the root cause of climate change (continuing and
increasing emissions from fossil fuels).
[iv]
Then there
is the question of property and sovereignty: can foreign buyers
“purchase” carbon stocks in standing forests that do not belong
to the state or individual private property owners, but are rather
held collectively under customary laws and aboriginal title? How
would prior consent be obtained in these cases and on what terms?
And what
about forest peoples?
Some people
argue that with a public fund, many of the scientific, legal and
ethical problems associated with a global carbon market
could be avoided –though not the essential issue of allowing
polluters to continue to pollute. Moreover, public and ODA
funds for large-scale global and national AD schemes would still
imply social risks. To this, proponents of the idea argue
that if these risks can be eliminated or reduced, then AD policies
and increased funding outside carbon trading may offer important
opportunities for indigenous peoples and forest-dependent communities.
However, little mention is made about the full respect of their
rights or regarding their priorities and decision-making
capacity in the design and implementation of avoided deforestation
policies.
In case
this type of schemes were to be implemented, AD policies should
at least include solid and locally-enforceable guarantees
to uphold human rights and address equity, governance and
rights issues. Vague promises that all these issues will be
dealt with through future certification of RED forests, as advocated
by many conservation NGOs and the World Bank, are not good
enough. Secure guarantees of respect for forest peoples’
rights must be established before governments and international
donors and multilateral development banks plough ahead with RED
schemes.
Urgent
debate needed on the social aspects of avoided deforestation policies
As a first
step, it is essential that indigenous peoples and other grassroots
movements are fully involved at the international and national
levels in the debate about the pros and cons of avoided deforestation
in global climate policies.
Who will
decide which forest areas will or will not be in national AD schemes?
Who will decide land tenure and ownership rights to the forests
included in avoided deforestation programmes? Who determines which
forests are eligible for REDD payments and how? How should protected
forests be used? What activities would be permitted and which
ones would be prohibited in protected forests in order to receive
AD compensation? Who will receive compensation payments? Will
such schemes really benefit local people?
This debate
must start without delay if forest peoples are to avoid yet another
round of top-down global and national forest policies that fail
to take their rights and interests into account. Forest
movements must organise to debate the issues, challenges and opportunities
as soon as possible so they can engage governments and policy-makers.
Without this, their rights are unlikely to be respected in the
design and implementation of future avoided deforestation policies.
This article
was compiled by Tom Griffiths, Forest Peoples Programme (FPP),
e-mail:
tom@forestpeoples.org. For more information on some of the
social issues raised by global policies on avoided deforestation,
see the article Seeing RED: Avoided deforestation and the rights
of Indigenous Peoples and local communities available at
www.forestpeoples.org
[i]
See Colchester, M and Lohmann, L
(1990) The Tropical Forestry Action Plan: What Progress?
WRM and The Ecologist, Penang and Sturminster Newton.
[ii]
WRM (2000) Climate Change Convention:
Sinks that stink WRM, Montevideo
[iii]
International Forum of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities
on Climate Change (2000) “Second
International Indigenous Forum on Climate Change - Declaration
of Indigenous Peoples on Climate Change” The Hague, November
11-12,2000;
[iv]
See especially,
Lohmann,
L (2006) “Carbon Trading: a critical conversation on climate
change, privatisation and power” Development Dialogue No.48
(September 2006)
