International and domestic laws are being enacted or adjusted to implement climate goals, such as to fight deforestation—a key source of carbon emissions in tropical countries like Peru. These laws are increasingly connecting trade and the environment and becoming more intertwined at the national and international levels. This analysis reviews Peru’s recent change of its domestic environmental and land tenure laws partially in response to the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) as one recent example of the complexities involved in this interaction. Promoters of this legislative change in Peru frame it as a necessary alignment with the EUDR, but environmentalists argue that it is an excuse to weaken domestic forest protection rules, contrary to the intentions of the EUDR. This case study shows the importance of understanding the specific context of each of the countries targeted by new international zero-deforestation rules and highlights the tensions these new policies can encourage.
Tag: deforestation
Taking Stock of Carbon Rights in REDD+ Candidate Countries: Concept Meets Reality
In the discourses on who should benefit from national REDD+ implementation, rights-based approaches are prominent across various countries. Options on how to create viable property rights arrangements are currently being debated by scholars, policy makers and practitioners alike. Many REDD+ advocates argue that assigning carbon rights represents a solution to insecure individual and community property rights. But carbon rights, i.e., the bundle of legal rights to carbon sequestered in biomass, present their own set of theoretical and practical challenges. We assess the status and approaches chosen in emerging carbon-rights legislations in five REDD+ countries based on a literature review and country expert knowledge: Peru, Brazil, Cameroon, Vietnam and Indonesia. We find that most countries assessed have not yet made final decisions as to the type of benefit sharing mechanisms they intend to implement and that there is a lack of clarity about who owns rights to carbon as a property and who is entitled to receive benefits. However, there is a trend of linking carbon rights to land rights. As such, the technical and also political challenges that land tenure clarification has faced over the past decades will still need to be addressed in the context of carbon rights.
The farmer-driven landcare movement: an institutional innovation with implications for extension and research
There is a sound basis for assuming that watershed degradation does not have to be an inevitable consequence of using sloping land for agriculture. Small holders can engage in farming and management of natural forest resources in both a productive and resource-conserving manner. Awareness of this has focused attention on evolving demand-driven, community-based approaches to watershed resource management, in which those who occupy the land actively participate in management and sustainable utilization of their local watershed resources for multiple purposes. A look at current prescriptions for more sustainable farming systems in Asian watersheds reveals an enormous variability in conditions, and consequently a high degree of technical uncertainty about the effectiveness of the solutions proposed. The problems are not solved by simple recipes. Often, the issues need to be tackled at a scale bigger than the individual household, cooperatively at the community level.
Estudio Global Comparativo de CIFOR SOBRE REDD+ (GCS REDD+)
El GCS REDD+ (www.cifor.org/gcs) es la investigación enfocada en REDD+ más amplia del mundo, que por más de 10 años ha generado evidencia crucial para el análisis e implementación de REDD+ y otras iniciativas similares. Con trabajo en más de 20 países, el GCS REDD+ ha generado resultados que permiten avanzar hacia un REDD+ “3E” (eficaz, eficiente y equitativo).
Kelompok Penasihat Proyek Studi Komparatif Global tentang REDD+ (GCS REDD+)
Brosur ini menguraikan peran penting, kegiatan utama dan kontribusi dari Kelompok Penasihat Proyek (Project Advisory Group atau PAG) Studi Komparatif Global tentang REDD+ (GCS REDD+).
Archetypes of tropical moist forest change
Despite growing commitment for tropical forest conservation, the understanding of complex spatio-temporal deforestation patterns and their underlying drivers remains limited. This study uses archetype analysis to examine global spatio-temporal deforestation patterns in tropical moist forests (TMFs) over the last two decades. This work underpins our attempt to develop a systematized diagnostic of tropical forest policies, aimed at stemming deforestation and forest degradation. We identify seven archetypes of forest state and its change in tropical moist forests, assess conversion from forest to other land uses in deforestation areas, and evaluate deforestation risk in landscapes with high remaining forest cover and low historical deforestation. Our analysis covers approximately 2.8 billion hectares of land area in the tropics that contained tropical moist forest in 2000 – equivalent to about three quarters of the world’s TMF landscapes – and thus includes both forest and non-forest areas within those units. Only less than a third of TMFs were classified as intact forest areas (i.e., high forest cover, low deforestation), while approximately a quarter were classified as deforestation areas (i.e., high deforestation). TMFs in Southeast Asia are showing higher proportions of deforestation areas and degraded forests than other regions. Central and South America has the largest absolute area of deforestation areas. While deforestation rates in sub-Saharan Africa have historically been lower, the proportion of deforestation areas is similar to that in the other continents. We could not discern clear patterns linking deforestation areas to specific types of land-use conversion, which suggests that local context plays a more significant role in shaping deforestation patterns. Low accessibility provides passive protection to a substantial part (34%) of intact forest landscapes with good agricultural suitability, particularly in the Amazon, the Congo Basin and southern New Guinea. These results indicate that tropical moist forests remain under continued pressure, with deforestation persisting at high rates. Once elevated deforestation levels are reached, they become difficult to reduce. The archetypes approach is a pragmatic tool to classify tropical deforestation, identify important hotspots under threat, and support spatially targeted policy interventions.
The present paper provides the analytical foundation for four country reports, each examining deforestation policies through the lens of deforestation archetypes in a specific national context: Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Indonesia, and Peru. Together, these five papers introduce the deforestation diagnostic framework.
African forestry: leading research issues and constraints
A global focus on Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn
The consortium on alternatives to slash and burn
Follow the money: Can REDD+ finance compete with established and emerging land investments in Mai-Ndombe, Democratic Republic of Congo?
Climate finance is often considered an avenue of transformational change to address deforestation. However, financial dynamics influencing forests extend beyond climate related initiatives; forest landscapes are subject to a myriad of actors and interests. This paper examines if and how REDD+ finance can lead to transformative decisions in a complex political landscape of competing land uses, interests, and financial flows in Mai-Ndombe, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We employ a critical global political economy perspective to investigate inequality within global forest governance. We use a telecoupling framing combined with open-source research methods to examine public information and databases on company ownership and structures, to capture flows of finance and commodities. Our study demonstrates that, in Mai-Ndombe, climate finance incentives have limited influence in the presence of dominant interests and investments in extractive activities; particularly when mining, livestock, timber, and carbon concessions overlap, and oil exploration permits are in use by state and private sector actors. REDD+ strategies in the DRC inadvertently reinforce historical inequalities by focusing on local interventions; this overlooks persistent power relations that are visible in discursive practices, financial flows, and incentive structures centering around extractive land uses. The methods and data in this paper provide insights into how finance and investments in both climate change mitigation and industrial land use are driving land-use change and inadvertently reinforcing inequality. We encourage funders, policymakers, and researchers at the intersection of climate and forests to move beyond oversimplified narratives of who is to blame for deforestation, and instead trace the financial flows to examine who actually benefits.