Special Issue: The Potential Role for Community Monitoring in MRV and in Benefit Sharing in REDD+

Abstract

Abstract:Since the early design of activities to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD+) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the need to engage local communities and indigenous groups in monitoring and reporting has been recognized. REDD+ has advanced under the UNFCCC negotiations, but most countries still need to define formally what the role of communities in their national monitoring systems will be. Previous research and experiences have shown that local communities can effectively contribute in the monitoring of natural resources. This editorial introduces a Special Issue of Forests which discusses the implications of and potential for including community based monitoring (CBM) in monitoring and benefit-sharing systems in REDD+. It outlines the main points of the nine contributions to the Special Issue which cover a wide geographical area and report on projects and research which engages more than 150 communities from eight different countries from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The editorial summarizes how the articles and reports build further understanding of the potential of CBM to contribute to the implementation, monitoring and distribution of benefits in REDD+. It also discusses the results of an on-going opinion survey on issues related to CBM and its relation to benefit sharing, which indicates that there is still disagreement on a number of key elements. OPEN ACCESSForests 2015, 6 245

Unseen sentinels: local monitoring and control in conservation’s blind spots

“…The potential to adapt these systems was not the subject of our study. Nonetheless, when considering possible synergies with external interests, the options include how communities might participate in and contribute to externally overseen conservation (Cooke and Kothari 2001, Sheil and Lawrence 2004 or natural resource monitoring (e.g., Guijt 2007, Staddon et al 2014, including the various activities involved in monitoring as well as Measurement, Reporting and Verification of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) or payment-for-environmental-services schemes (Boissière et al 2014, Torres et al 2014, Torres and Skutsch 2015. Just as importantly, we can invert the question and consider when and how external conservation interests can contribute to existing community efforts.…”

Assessing the Claims of Participatory Measurement, Reporting and Verification (PMRV) in Achieving REDD+ Outcomes: A Systematic Review

“…The references of the relevant PMRV publications were used to identify additional publications. We included nine publications from a special issue of Forests on community monitoring in MRV [30], despite four of them being published after September 2014. The selection process is described in a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses (PRISMA) flow diagram (Fig 1), while the PRISMA checklist can be found in S1 Table.…”

Community forestry and REDD+ in Cameroon: what future?

“…In terms of testing benefit distribution, a project operating in three watersheds in Nepal calculated benefits to each community based on weighting of carbon achievements and a range of social criteria (poor groups, indigenous people, and women, aiming to prevent elite capture of benefits) and on a fixed total amount available for carbon payments within the project (Balderas Torres and Skutsch 2015). In Vietnam, the Programme for Forest Environmental Services is using an index called the K coefficient, which is based on forest status, type, and difficulty of management, to benefit mostly the poor; Vietnam is developing a similar index called the R-factor for REDD+ payments (Balderas Torres and , Hoang et al 2013).…”