Posted for Anjali Nayar

New initiatives to save tropical forests and curb climate change could marginalize forest communities, according to a report by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

A priority of this year’s UN climate change negotiations in Copenhagen is to conclude a global agreement on cutting greenhouse gasses for the period after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires.

One of the pressing issues is whether to make mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) eligible for carbon credits on the carbon market. The idea is that in addition to cutting in-country emissions, rich nations can buy credits from the market to meet their agreed targets. In turn, developing countries can earn money simply by keeping their forests standing, rather than cutting them down.

The importance of tropical forests in the global carbon cycle is well established; they store between 40–50% of carbon in terrestrial vegetation and annually process about six times more carbon through photosynthesis and respiration than human emissions from fossil fuels. According to the IPCC, current deforestation and forest degradation (mostly in the tropics) account for almost a third of all the human emissions of carbon dioxide.

But as the IIED report suggests, including REDD credits in the carbon market could feasibly cause land disputes by making forested land profitable enough that corrupt governments take it away from forest communities. The report argues that a well-established system of “rights, rules, institutions and processes regulating the access and use of [forested lands]” will affect how REDD strategies benefit or marginalize forest communities.

“Much of the forest that’s left is because local people have kept it,” says Simon Lewis, who studies climate change in tropical African forests at Leeds University. “Formalizing their ownership over the land is a quick and cheap way of ensuring the forests continued existence.”

The IIED report is based on both written legislation on land rights in rainforest countries as well as interviews with key local experts about how land laws are implemented, according to James Meyers, one of the lead authors of the report.

The report suggests that land laws in the 7 rainforest countries they researched – Brazil, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guyana, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea – were all very different. Furthermore, how those laws work on the ground was also very different, and not necessarily a representation of how stringent the land laws were on paper.

The study is not the first to question the negative side-effects of including REDD credits in the carbon market. It’s been argued that REDD credits could flood the market and destabilize carbon investments because of the uncertainties in measuring the carbon content of forests and ensuring remote tropical forests remain standing in the long term.

Some researchers are also worried that REDD credits will just lead to deforestation elsewhere, what’s known as “leakage.” Decreasing deforestation could lead to higher food and lumber prices, Lewis said. “You could get a scenario where some countries specialize in stopping deforestation, and other countries specialize in meeting the demand.”

Some researchers suggest side-stepping the carbon market and allowing direct payments to developing nations for REDD type projects that are tailored to their specific system of laws and local governance, could make the projects more effective in keeping forests standing.

Despite researchers’ concerns, several projects have already been launched to help get REDD projects into the carbon market, according to Maria Sanz-Sanchez from the UNFCCC Secretariat. The World Bank’s $300 million Forest Carbon Partnership is working with 37 countries and the UN-REDD project [link fixed] is working with 8 9 countries to strengthen governance of forests.

“You can produce thousands of numbers and the uncertainty is quite high,” said Sanz-Sanchez. “What you cannot deny is that we need action and globally the contribution of forests is substantial.”