Restoring and Conserving Khasi Forests: A Community-Based REDD Strategy from Northeast India

Abstract

An initiative to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) was launched in December 2007 at the Bali Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), yet little progress has been made in Asia in developing certified REDD projects, especially those that engage forest-dependent people. According to UNFCCC, REDD is a multilevel activity that involves both national policy and structures, as well as subnational projects involving local communities [1]. While many Asian nations are trying to create frameworks that link the national strategy to sub-national projects, in India this formal integration has yet to take place. As a consequence projects like the Khasi Hills Community REDD+ project fall outside the UNFCCC strategy and operate under voluntary standards (Plan Vivo) and markets. The project involves both avoided deforestation and reforestation components. The project is being implemented by a federation of ten Khasi tribal kingdoms, a major ethnolinguistic group in the Indian state of Meghalaya. Project experience may provide guidance regarding actions required to create a more enabling environment for community forest carbon projects in Asia. These findings may better inform the December 2015 21st UNFCCC Conference of Parties in Paris as they again address REDD strategy. The experience of this Khasi Federation [2] in designing and implementing a REDD project has led to the emergence of a modernizing forest management system that is helping to conserve and restore the Khasi's ancestral forests. Learning from this REDD project also illustrates the barriers that the Khasi communities have faced, including those imposed by national governments, certifiers, and carbon markets, that will likely constrain the expansion and replication of community-based climate initiatives. The author suggests some alternative policies and systems that may enable greater community participation in REDD projects.

Early REDD+ Implementation: The Journey of an Indigenous Community in Eastern Panama

“…Three years into project implementation, we felt that residents were still risk-averse but willing to take a chance after seeing the benefit/risk ratio of early participants. This "demonstration effect" is consistent with reports that pilot initiatives can act as a catalyst for others to engage and scale up [15,58]. Local willingness to participate and engage in new strategies can require long timeframes which need to be considered in the project design phase [59].…”

Incentives and Constraints of Community and Smallholder Forestry

“…Cashore et al [28] briefly review the link between global processes of REDD+ (reducing emission from deforestation and forest degradation, and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries (e.g., [19])), zero deforestation, and legality verification, and communal forest access and tenure. Of much interest for community forestry are global efforts to address climate change [12,15,19]. A considerable number of countries that pursue community and smallholder forestry development are preparing national REDD+ strategies and harbor high expectations to implement these strategies.…”

“…While REDD+ is believed to hold great potential, including for community and smallholder forestry, the implementation of the global REDD+ program still faces major hurdles [19]. These obstacles are evident in the Poffenberger [15] paper, which describes in detail the kind of challenges that are faced when attempts are made to derive compensation from the enhancement of carbon stocks in community forestry efforts.…”

“…Three papers are from Asia [9,11,15], two from Africa [13,16], two from Central America [12,17], and two from the Amazon basin [10,14].…”

“…Poffenberger [15], in turn, focuses on how villagers in Northeast India strive to adapt to standards that emerge from global efforts to align local forest management to wider goals of climate change mitigation. Etongo et al [16] examine the factors that incentivize tree planting among smallholder farmers in Burkina Faso, and Sloan [17] explores how communal forest management and reforestation contribute to forest cover and forest condition change, while interacting with corporate actors in the wider landscape.…”