Showing posts from category forests.
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VIDEO: Jon Barnett on Remembering REDD Realities
›June 26, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffIn the run-up to December’s Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen, the idea of REDD, Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, is gaining greater currency as a way to bring forests into climate mitigation efforts. Australian geographer Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne finds the principle of compensating states or communities for reducing deforestation sound. Yet he cautions that the devil is in the details when it comes to implementation. Barnett stresses that deforestation’s diverse causes is an initial challenge in designing effective responses. And to whom should payments be made? Should they go to national governments that may or may not share those resources with communities affected by the restrictions on forest use?
In this interview conducted at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Barnett addresses these questions and highlights a number of areas where translating REDD from principle to practice remains challenging at best and counter-productive at worst: governance and corruption; social justice; monitoring and verification; and potential carbon leakage between participating and non-participating states. -
Are Fences the Bridge to a Sustainable Future in Kenya?
›May 18, 2009 // By Brian Klein
“Kenya is destroying itself,” Julius Kipng’etich, director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, told The Observer. “The population has reached an unsustainable level. We are killing ourselves by slowly destroying the forests and settling there.” Drought, poverty, and population growth have led large numbers of the rural poor to encroach on protected forests in search of arable land, reports The Observer, jeopardizing Kenya’s food and water security and hydroelectric energy production. The government’s inability to manage land tenure has further exacerbated the situation.
In response to these developments, a local conservation group called Rhino Ark has erected a 250-mile electric fence (see photo slideshow) around the Aberdare mountain range north of Nairobi. When members began the project in 1989, they were attempting to protect the area’s rhinoceroses. However, their efforts eventually grew into a broader campaign to safeguard the Aberdares’ critical water and forest resources.
Proponents of the Aberdare fence—including Nobel Peace Prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai—contend that it serves multiple purposes. First, it discourages settlers from grazing livestock in the forest or felling trees to make way for crop cultivation. Other regions of the country—notably the Mau Forest Complex, the water source for millions of people in Kenya, northern Uganda, and southern Sudan—have suffered severe deforestation and degradation, with serious consequences for human and ecological health. Forests provide a wide spectrum of essential ecosystem services, such as regulating the water cycle, filtering groundwater, and sequestering atmospheric carbon.
The fence also mitigates human-wildlife conflict, argue its supporters. According to a recent 60 Minutes report, some Maasai herdsmen have resorted to poisoning lions and other predators to protect their livestock. Farmers have targeted elephants and other animals that trample crops to safeguard their livelihoods. As a result, wildlife populations—the lifeblood of the Kenyan tourism industry—have been devastated. A study published in the Journal of Zoology found precipitous declines in wildlife at Maasai Mara, one of Kenya’s most renowned national parks. Robin Reid, a co-author of the paper, explains, “There appears to be a ‘tipping point’ of human populations above which former co-existence between Maasai and wildlife begins to break down.”
Following Aberdare’s example, the Kenyan government is considering building thousands of miles of fencing around similarly vulnerable forests and parks. Yet fences may soon prove inadequate. The country’s population has grown from 10 million to 36 million over the past 45 years, and it could exceed 65 million by 2050, given that the decline in its fertility rate has stalled. In addition, its GDP per capita has steadily decreased, leaving more than 55 percent of citizens below the official poverty line.
With more people clamoring for more resources, a sustainable future will depend on robust community conservation programs and land-rights reform. Successful models of community conservation in East Africa include the Lion Guardians and Il Ngwesi Group Ranch, as well as other efforts discussed at the Wilson Center last year. A 2008 report from the Rights and Resources Initiative argues that authorities should shift away from traditional forms of conservation, which focus on excluding people from protected areas, in favor of approaches that empower local communities to care for and benefit from the land through customary tenure or individual property rights.
Finally, Nairobi should craft national forest management practices with an eye toward ongoing international climate negotiations. Policymakers are poised to include provisions for compensating developing countries for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in the next international climate treaty, to be concluded in Copenhagen this December. Kenya could benefit substantially if the government takes appropriate action.
Photo: A giraffe in Maasai Mara, where their population has declined 95 percent over the last 15 years. Courtesy Flickr user angela7dreams. -
Cowboy Logging to Carbon Cowboys: Natural Resources in Indonesia and India
›May 6, 2009 // By Rachel Weisshaar“Indonesia’s forest loss continues more or less unabated, despite global concern for the resource and forest-dependent people, as well as a wealth of knowledge about the problems and solutions: poor governance, corruption, perverse incentives in the industrial sector,” said AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow Steve Rhee. Rhee was joined by Henrik Urdal of the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), who also studied the effects of environmental degradation on conflict in Indonesia, for “Demography, Environment, and Conflict in Indonesia and India,” an April 21, 2009 event sponsored by the Environmental Change and Security Program.
Parsing the Patterns: Population, Resources, and Conflict
Urdal argued that case studies have sometimes overstated the links among population, resource scarcity, and conflict. Researchers tend to choose cases where there is conflict and then look for a population or resource dimension. If you look hard enough, “it’s always possible to find some connection,” said Urdal.
However, quantitative studies are also imperfect, cautioned Urdal, because most of them use national-level data, which do not capture local dynamics. In addition, they have a tendency to ignore conflicts in which the state is not involved.
Two Sub-National Studies: India and Indonesia
Urdal sought to avoid these problems by using sub-national data and including political violence and riots, as well as armed conflict, in his quantitative studies of India and Indonesia. From 1956-2002, he found that high rural population growth and density, as well as declining agricultural wages, increased the likelihood of violence in Indian states. Surprisingly, those states with high rates of urban population growth were less likely to experience conflict.
In Indonesian provinces, Urdal and his colleagues found a relationship, albeit a weak one, between population growth and non-ethnic violence between 1990-2003. They also found an increased risk of non-ethnic violence in provinces with high population growth and high levels of inequality between different religious groups. However, there was no relationship between land scarcity and conflict.
Forests, Conflict, and Participatory Mapping in Kalimantan: Unintended Consequences
Forty million Indonesians—one-fifth of the population—depend on forests for their livelihoods, said Rhee. Yet much of Indonesia’s forests have never been surveyed, so the people who live there are considered squatters and receive little or no compensation from the logging and mining industries. This inequity has generated both violent and non-violent conflict between the indigenous dayaks, the government, and extractive-industry companies.
In an attempt to resolve some of this conflict, the Center for International Forestry Research initiated a participatory mapping project in 27 villages in the Malinau district of Kalimantan in 1999. Participatory mapping enables dayaks to establish land rights and negotiate compensation from companies.
Following the 1998 ousting of President Suharto, district governments, rather than the central government, began issuing timber permits. The villages in Malinau often used the maps they had created to justify their claims to the land. But the district government did not cross-check the claims, so this generated inter- and intra-village conflict—roadblocks, protests, and lock-ups of timber equipment.
Although the “cowboy logging” that characterized the late 1990s and early 2000s has largely ceased, Rhee believes it may be replaced by “carbon cowboys” seeking to capitalize on the UN Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) program, which aims to reduce carbon emissions by paying governments to preserve forests. “With climate change, and the link between climate change and forests, -
Food, Water, Energy, Timber, Population: Do Madagascar’s Forests Stand a Chance?
›April 22, 2009 // By Kayly OberA graphic published recently in Le Monde reveals that companies from South Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are the top purchasers of foreign farmland. These corporations from water-strapped, land-starved, and/or densely populated countries often make bargain-basement deals with unsavory African and Asian governments—or even warlords—to increase their own profits and their home nations’ food security.
A case in point: The International Criminal Court’s indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for human-rights abuses has not deterred Saudi Arabia’s Hail Agricultural Development Co. from developing 9,200 hectares of land in Sudan or the UAE from investing in agricultural projects in several Sudanese provinces, including a 17,000-hectare farm for wheat and corn.
As previous New Security Beat posts have pointed out, allowing foreign governments to purchase land could threaten food security within the host country, and around the world. The heads of the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development raised eyebrows last weekend when they suggested that these deals could be “win-win” situations, if done right.
These business ventures can also have serious political consequences: Several months ago, seeing an opportunity to capitalize on increasing population growth and limited arable land in its homeland, South Korean conglomerate Daewoo signed a deal to buy more than half of the arable land in Madagascar to grow grain and palm oil. Widespread anger at the terms of the deal—from which the island’s people would gain little—contributed to then-President Marc Ravalomanana’s unpopularity. After weeks of riots, Ravalomanana was ousted by Andry Rajoelina, who immediately axed the deal. “In the constitution, it is stipulated that Madagascar’s land is neither for sale nor for rent, so the agreement with Daewoo is cancelled,” Rajoelina told BBC News.
Yet although Rajoelina’s actions may seem to have preserved Madagascar’s land for its people, the coup he launched has spurred unprecedented destruction of this land, in the form of deforestation. The breakdown of authority that accompanied the coup spread into Madagascar’s protected areas, where groups of thugs have been illegally felling valuable trees at a rapid rate since the coup. This environmental destruction is particularly tragic for a country like Madagascar, which possesses some of the richest biodiversity on the planet and relies heavily on ecotourism for jobs and economic growth.
Next month, a Wilson Center event will explore some of the motivations, patterns, and implications of this rush for farmland. Five Wilson Center programs are co-sponsoring this event—demonstrating the global, cross-sectoral implications of this issue.
Photo: Deforestation in Madagascar. Courtesy of Flickr user World Resources Institute Staff and Jonathan Talbot. -
PODCAST – Forests for the Future: Family Planning in Nepal’s Terai Arc Landscape
›April 3, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“The Terai Arc Landscape has a very high population growth rate; people are very much dependent on the natural resources,” says Sabita Thapa in this podcast from the Environmental Change and Security Program.“We are especially working through the population, health, and environment project to address the issues of forest conversion, forest encroachment, and fuel extraction,” explains Thapa
. In this podcast, Thapa, now an environmental advisor with the United Nations Development Programme in the Solomon Islands, and Dhan Rai, senior project manager with World Wildlife Fund-Nepal, discuss WWF’s PHE program in Nepal’s Terai region.
To learn more about PHE in Nepal, read FOCUS Issue 18, “Forests for the Future: Family Planning in Nepal’s Terai Region.”
And for additional resources, please visit our PHE webpage.
Photo: Sabita Thapa. Courtesy of Meaghan Parker. -
Grassroots Efforts Help Achieve Population, Health, and Environment Goals in Nepal
›April 1, 2009 // By Will Rogers“If you want to bring about conservation of these big, iconic species that need lots of area to roam, you have to work with the people that are living there,” said Jon Miceler at a March 19, 2009, event, “Population, Health, and Environment in Nepal.” Miceler, managing director for the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Eastern Himalayas program, and Rishi Bastakoti, director and co-founder of Resource Identification and Management Society Nepal (RIMS Nepal), discussed their ongoing work on population, health, and environment (PHE) programs in Nepal.
Protecting Tigers in the Terai
To protect endangered Bengal tigers in Nepal, WWF seeks to simultaneously protect the ecosystem and support sustainable livelihoods in the Terai Arc Landscape (TAL), a biodiverse region that spans the India-Nepal border. Environmental threats to the Terai include:- Conversion of forest into farmland;
- Overgrazing;
- Forest fires;
- Excessive extraction of timber and fuelwood;
- Poaching;
- Human-wildlife conflict; and
- Population growth.
“By protecting a tiger—which is what we call an ‘umbrella species’—you’re actually protecting a whole host of species below that, and a whole host of ecosystems that are connected with the tigers,” said Miceler.
Piloting PHE in Khata
In the Khata corridor, a region of the TAL, WWF worked with local leaders and community forest user groups to create a “permanent community-managed health clinic with basic clinical tools,” Miceler said. In addition, the program:- Distributed 172 arsenic filters to remove naturally occurring arsenic from the groundwater, as well as 44 hand pumps to provide clean drinking water;
- Improved access to family planning services and increased the contraceptive prevalence rate from 43 percent to 73 percent in two years; and
- Provided 136 biogas plants with attached toilets and 100 improved cookstoves, reducing the need for fuelwood, which in turn decreased deforestation and the number of acute respiratory infections.
WWF will be “taking results from the successes we’ve had in the Khata corridor and lessons learned from other PHE projects in other countries to scale them up in other areas of the Terai,” said Miceler.
PHE at the Grassroots Level
“The average fertility rate in Nepal is 3.1,” said Bastakoti of the Nepalese NGO RIMS Nepal. “But it is much higher among the ethnic communities living in the remote areas with low education.”
RIMS Nepal works with 82 community forest user groups in Dhading to improve livelihoods, health, and environmental conservation. Since 2006, the project has:- Increased the contraceptive prevalence rate from 44 percent to 63.1 percent; and
- Distributed biogas and other improved cookstoves, helping reduce the incidence of acute respiratory illness from 55.5 percent to 5 percent and saving 1,178 metric tons of firewood each year.
RIMS Nepal trained 375 people to be peer educators and community-based distributors of contraceptives. “Local volunteers are key for the success of PHE,” Bastakoti explained. “They become role models for behavioral change.”
In addition, with RIMS Nepal’s help, 24 community forest user groups incorporated PHE activities, including family planning, into their operational plans. The “integration of family planning and health brings added value to conservation, poverty reduction, and livelihood improvement,” said Bastakoti, calling community forest user groups “one of the greatest grassroots-level institutions”—and key to advocating for the PHE approach at the national level.Photo: Rishi Bastakoti. Courtesy of the Woodrow Wilson Center.
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Rwanda: More Than Mountain Gorillas
›February 27, 2009 // By Rachel WeisshaarIf you’ve visited
Destination Nyungwe Project (DNP), which I visited yesterday with the leaders of the East Africa PHE Network, is trying to change all that. It envisions
Nyungwe has a lot to offer; as the largest montane rainforest in
As these larger projects are constructed, DNP—which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and implemented by International Resources Group, Family Health International, and the Wildlife Conservation Society—is also working to improve the health, livelihoods, and environmental management of the local communities. A health coordinator works with local clinics to improve maternal and child health, family planning and reproductive health, and hygiene. Health and family-planning activities are key to ensuring the park’s survival because high population growth, and the resulting demand for land, is one of the key threats to the park, says Munanura. A small-grants program provides micro-loans to local people for sustainable livelihoods, such as setting up cultural tourism attractions or producing soap, lotion, and oils from forest products.
Nyungwe National Park still struggles to attract tourists, as it lacks the luxury accommodations offered at
Rachel Weisshaar is attending the meeting of the East Africa PHE Network in Kigali,
Photo: Nyungwe National Park, Rwanda. Courtesy of Rachel Weisshaar. -
In Rio de Janeiro, an Opportunity to Break Barriers
›January 23, 2009 // By Will RogersThe city of Rio de Janeiro’s plan to erect a 650-meter long, three-meter high concrete wall between the 7,500 residents of the Dona Marta slum and the surrounding rainforest signals the government’s reluctance to address the underlying causes of environmental degradation. Although it is heralded by authorities as an “eco-barrier” that will protect the rainforest and “improve living standards and protect slum residents from the armed gangs that control many of Rio’s 600 or so slums,” the wall does not address the issues of acute poverty and lack of access to affordable housing that keep many Brazilians living in slums, harvesting resources from the rainforest.
Without access to decent housing and living-wage jobs, many slum residents will continue to encroach on the hillsides, warn Brazilian environmentalists. “It is hypocrisy to talk about protecting the Atlantic rainforest without considering the issues of housing and transport to take the pressure off the forest,” said Sergio Ricardo, a leading environmental campaigner in Rio de Janeiro, in an interview with the Jornal do Brasil.
Slums have often stalled Rio’s efforts to improve its environmental report card, as slum residents tend to be focused more on daily survival than on the environmental consequences of their actions. But slums do not have to be a thorn in the side of the government’s eco-friendly image. In fact, Rio’s previous attempts to reverse deforestation through grassroots reforestation projects have been extremely successful.
According to a 2005 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, municipal reforestation projects around Rio employed several hundred slum residents to plant millions of trees surrounding their communities. The projects “resulted in the return of dozens of species of birds, monkeys and other animals—many not seen in decades,” as well as cooler air temperatures, writes William Bennett. At the same time, the municipal projects became a source of steady work for residents. “Before this job, I worked as a day laborer; one day I would have work—the next day nothing,” said Carlos Alberto Ribeiro, a reforestation worker who earned about $200 a month planting trees. By 2005, community reforestation projects had employed 914 slum residents in 93 projects that had restored a total of 4,500 acres of native-species trees to the region.
Rather than segregating slum residents from the rest of the city in what some critics have called “social apartheid,” perhaps Rio should scale up community forestry projects, employing greater numbers of slum residents to improve the health of the Atlantic rainforest. While the government still has far to go in providing affordable housing, a steady wage could help residents secure access to adequate housing and reduce pressure on the region’s delicate environment.
Photo: Rocinha, one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest slums with an estimated 200,000 residents, is one of hundreds of slum neighborhoods surrounding Rio, putting extreme pressure on the region’s environment. Courtesy of flickr user andreasnilsson1976.
“Kenya is destroying itself,” Julius Kipng’etich, director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, told 
“Indonesia’s forest loss continues more or less unabated, despite global concern for the resource and forest-dependent people, as well as a wealth of knowledge about the problems and solutions: poor governance, corruption, perverse incentives in the industrial sector,” said AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow Steve Rhee. Rhee was joined by Henrik Urdal of the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), who also studied the effects of environmental degradation on conflict in Indonesia, for “Demography, Environment, and Conflict in Indonesia and India,” an April 21, 2009 
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“If you want to bring about conservation of these big, iconic species that need lots of area to roam, you have to work with the people that are living there,” said Jon Miceler at a March 19, 2009, event, “
If you’ve visited 
The city of Rio de Janeiro’s plan to erect a 
