At the heart of REDD+: a role for local people in monitoring forests?

Danielsen, Finn; Skutsch, Margaret; Burgess, Neil D.; Jensen, Per Moestrup; Andrianandrasana, Herizo; Karky, Bhaskar Singh; Lewis, Richard E.; Lovett, Jon C.; Massao, John; Ngaga, Yonika M.; Phartiyal, Pushkin; Poulsen, Michael K.; Singh, S. P.; Solis, Silvia; Sørensen, Marten; Tewari, Ashish; Young, Richard P.; Zahabu, Eliakimu

doi:10.1111/j.1755-263x.2010.00159.x

Cited by 162 publications

(186 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The workers, most of whom had primary education, were quick to learn the techniques and how to use the tools after capacity-building and field practice as observed by Skutsch (2005) and also probably resulted in more cost-effective study than if it had been done by professional foresters. In effect, Danielsen et al(2011) conclude that, when examining the reliability and comparing the cost of community…”

Section: The Value Of Community Monitoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Traditional shifting agriculture: tracking forest carbon stock and biodiversity through time in western Panama

Pelletier

Codjia

Potvin

2012

Global Change Biology

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Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) requires developing countries to quantify green-house gas emissions and removals from forests in a manner that is robust, transparent, and as accurate as possible. While shifting cultivation is a dominant practice in several developing countries, there is still very limited information available on how to monitor this land-use practice for REDD+ as little is known about the areas of shifting cultivation or the net carbon balance. In the present work, we propose and test a methodology to monitor the effect of the shifting cultivation on above-ground carbon stocks. We combine multi-year remote sensing information, taken from a 12-year period, with an in-depth community forest carbon stock inventory in Palo Seco Forest Reserve, western Panama. With remote sensing, we were able to separate four forest classes expressing different forest-use intensity and timesince-intervention which demonstrate expected trends in above-ground carbon stocks. The addition of different interventions observed over time is shown to be a good predictor, with remote sensing variables explaining 64.2% of the variation in forest carbon stocks in cultivated landscapes. Multi-temporal and multi-spectral medium resolution satellite imagery is shown to be adequate for tracking land-use dynamics of the agriculture-fallow cycle. The results also indicate that, over time, shifting cultivation has a transitory effect on forest carbon stocks in the study area. This is due to the rapid recovery of forest carbon stocks, which results in limited net emissions. Finally, community participation yielded important additional benefits to measuring

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Section: The Value Of Community Monitoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Traditional shifting agriculture: tracking forest carbon stock and biodiversity through time in western Panama

Pelletier

Codjia

Potvin

2012

Global Change Biology

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“…However, alternatives are rapidly developing in the form of community-based forest inventory supported by web-based applications [36], and there is great potential in community-based forest monitoring assisted by traditional photographic equipment mounted on drones [37]. There is increasing evidence that indicates the high accuracy of local community monitoring at the ground level [38] in comparison to remote sensing [39]. Such approaches will never offer total national coverage, since they are intrinsically linked to local areas in which people and organizations are motivated to monitor, but nevertheless, they are likely to generate much more precise and accurate data, which could feed into more generalized national systems with a view toward raising overall accuracy in the long run [40].…”

Section: Implications Of Using Mad-mex For Activity Data Monitoring Imentioning

confidence: 99%

Comment on Gebhardt et al. MAD-MEX: Automatic Wall-to-Wall Land Cover Monitoring for the Mexican REDD-MRV Program Using All Landsat Data. Remote Sens. 2014, 6, 3923–3943

et al. 2016

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Gebhardt et al. (2014) presented the Monitoring Activity Data for the Mexican REDD+ program (MAD-MEX), an automatic nation-wide land cover monitoring system for the Mexican REDD+ MRV. Though MAD-MEX represents a valuable first effort toward establishing a national reference emissions level for the implementation of REDD+ in Mexico, in this paper, we argue that this land cover system has important limitations that may prevent it from becoming operational for REDD+ MRV. Specifically, we show that (1) the accuracy assessment of MAD-MEX land cover maps is optimistically biased; (2) the ability of MAD-MEX to monitor land cover change, including deforestation and forest degradation; is poor and (3) the use of an entirely automatic classification approach, such as that followed by MAD-MEX, is highly problematic in the case of a large and heterogeneous country like Mexico. We discuss these limitations and call into question the ability of a land cover monitoring system, such as MAD-MEX, both to elaborate a national reference emissions level and to monitor future forest cover change, as part of a REDD+ MRV system. We provide some insights with the aim of improving the development of nation-wide land cover monitoring systems in Mexico and elsewhere.

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“…Excluded from view are areas of local importance to communities --fertile farmlands, areas rich in non-timber forest products, sacred forests, community settlements. Such carbon visibility exercises which were championed by local and international consultants in Nigeria and Ghana, as elsewhere [41,74] have not emphasised local knowledge and capacity for measuring carbon; despite a growing literature showing the importance and effectiveness of locally trained forest communities in accurately monitoring carbon in ways that safeguard local rights [75][76][77][78]. Though implementers in both countries have organised series of workshops on remote sensing, including at least one on-the-ground carbon estimation exercise at the community level in Nigeria, these exercises were rather symbolic as they were not significant enough to help communities crack open and sustainably engage with the black box of technical carbon estimations procedures.…”

Section: Visualizing Carbonmentioning

confidence: 99%

REDD+ in West Africa: Politics of Design and Implementation in Ghana and Nigeria

Asiyanbi¹,

Arhin²,

Isyaku³

2016

Preprint

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This paper analyses the design and implementation of REDD+ in the West African region, an important global biodiversity area. Drawing on in-depth interviews, analysis of policy documents and observation of everyday activities, we sought to understand how REDD+ has been designed and implemented in Nigeria and Ghana. We draw on tools from political ecology to examine how, and why REDD+ takes the form it does in these countries. We focus on three key dimensions that emerged as strong areas of common emphasis in our case studies --capacity building, carbon visibility, and property rights. First, we show that, while REDD+ design generally foregrounds an ostensible inclusionary politics, its implementation is driven through various forms of exclusion. This contradictory inclusion-exclusion politics, which is partly emblematic of the neoliberal provenance of the REDD+ policy, is also a contingent reality and a strategy for navigating complexities and pursuing certain interests. Second, we show that though the emergent foci of REDD+ implementation in our case studies align with global REDD+ expectations, they yet manifest as historically and geographically contingent processes that reflect negotiated and contested relations among actors that constitute the specific national circumstance of each country. We conclude by reflecting on the wider implications of these findings for understanding REDD+ implementation more broadly.

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At the heart of REDD+: a role for local people in monitoring forests?

Cited by 162 publications

References 22 publications

Traditional shifting agriculture: tracking forest carbon stock and biodiversity through time in western Panama

Traditional shifting agriculture: tracking forest carbon stock and biodiversity through time in western Panama

Comment on Gebhardt et al. MAD-MEX: Automatic Wall-to-Wall Land Cover Monitoring for the Mexican REDD-MRV Program Using All Landsat Data. Remote Sens. 2014, 6, 3923–3943

REDD+ in West Africa: Politics of Design and Implementation in Ghana and Nigeria

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