Source: Mongabay.com

3 November 2009 - Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD), a climate change mechanism proposed by the U.N., has been widely lauded for its potential to simultaneously deliver a variety of benefits at multiple scales. But serious questions remain, especially in regard to local communities. Will they benefit from REDD?

While much lip-service is paid to community involvement in REDD projects, many developers approach local communities as an afterthought. Priorities lie in measuring the carbon sequestered in a forest area, lining up financing, and making marketing arrangements, rather than working out what local people — the ones who are often cutting down trees — actually need in order to keep forests standing. This sets the stage for conflict, which reduces the likelihood that a project will successfully reduce deforestation for the 15-30 year life of a forest carbon project.



Brodie Ferguson, a Stanford University-trained anthropologist whose work has focused on forced displacement of rural communities in conflict regions in Colombia, understands this well. Ferguson is working to establish a REDD project in an unlikely place: Colombia's Chocó, a region of diverse coastal ecosystems with some of the highest levels of endemism in the world that until just a few years ago was the domain of anti-government guerillas and right-wing death squads.



Ironically, violence in the Chocó is one reason why the region's ecosystems are in relatively good shape — armed conflict discouraged investment in the area. But waning guerrilla activity has ushered in commercial interest in the region leading to new conflicts between the traditional owners of land — indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities — and developers, notably ranchers and agribusiness. But thanks to Colombia's 1991 constitution, which established a collective titling system for traditional land users, indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities have the upper hand, at least from a legal standpoint. Still, these communities are poor, marginalized, and subject to manipulation and intimidation by developers. Some groups have signed deals that have provided them with a small amount of money upfront at the expense of the ecosystems on which their livelihoods depend.

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