Tag: Special Interest Communities

2 October 2014 The People’s Climate March clogged the streets of Manhattan on September 21 as 400,000 people gathered to call for ambitious action at the United Nations (UN) Climate Summit the following Tuesday. The march in New York City was echoed by more than 2,000 other rallies in 162 cities around the world, from Paris to Melbourne to Rio de Janeiro. It was the largest civil demonstration about climate change in history, and the more than 120 heads of state that attended the Summit took notice.

As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s summary illustrates, many commitments came out of the Summit, but among the most ambitious in terms of emissions reductions was the New York Declaration on Forests through which government, business, civil society, and indigenous leaders pledged $1 billion to end deforestation by 2030. If successful, the pledge would prevent the emission of between 4.5 billion and 8.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.

“I asked for countries and companies to bring bold pledges, and here they are,” said Ki-moon. “The New York Declaration aims to reduce more climate pollution each year than the United States emits annually, and it doesn’t stop there. Forests are not only a critical part of the climate solution the actions agreed today will reduce poverty, enhance food security, improve the rule of law, secure the rights of indigenous peoples and benefit communities around the world.”

More than 150 partners, including 38 national governments, eight subnational governments, 35 companies, 16 indigenous peoples groups, and 45 civil society groups supported the Declaration. It includes an interim goal of halving deforestation by 2020 and also called for restoring 350 million hectares of forests and croplands an area greater than the size of India.

Norway alone pledged $300 million to Peru and $150 million to Liberia to support forest preservation efforts. The United Kingdom pledged £144 million ($235 million) to forests, which will be split between an existing program to close the European Union market to illegally harvested timber and jump start a new program to form public-private partnerships to support no-deforestation agriculture.

The United States, Canada and the European Union were all signatories to the pledge, but Brazil’s endorsement was conspicuously absent. Brazilian Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira said the country was not included in the preparation process for the Declaration and pointed out the futility of having a global forest initiative without Brazil.

The Ecosystem Marketplace Team

If you have comments or would like to submit news stories, write to us at [email protected].

Read more about the position here Forest and Climate Expert, DRC – ONF InternationalBased in Kinshasa, DRC, the Forest and Climate Expert will coordinate the development of REDD and other forest carbon projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and voluntary standards and participate in consultancy services around forestry and climate change. The position requires a degree in forestry, natural resource management, and/or climate change as well as five years of professional experience and knowledge of certification standards such as CDM, the Verified Carbon Standard, Plan Vivo and Gold Standard. A professional competency in both English and French is required; Spanish and Portuguese would be an asset. Read more about the position here Carbon Markets Internship – South Pole Carbon Based in Medellin, Colombia, the Carbon Markets Intern will conduct market research about the state of demand in Latin America for sustainability solutions offered to companies and organizations, including voluntary carbon offsets, development of carbon mitigation projects, and renewable energy certificates. The successful candidate will speak English and Spanish and have a postgraduate degree, or be in the final one to three semesters of studies. Knowledge of the Colombian and Latin American business environment is a plus. The position is for four to six months. Read more about the position here ABOUT THE FOREST CARBON PORTALThe Forest Carbon Portal provides relevant daily news, a bi-weekly news brief, feature articles, a calendar of events, a searchable member directory, a jobs board, a library of tools and resources. The Portal also includes the Forest Carbon Project Inventory, an international database of projects including those in the pipeline. Projects are described with consistent ‘nutrition labels’ and allow viewers to contact project developers. ABOUT THE ECOSYSTEM MARKETPLACEEcosystem Marketplace is a project of Forest Trends, a tax-exempt corporation under Section 501(c)3. This newsletter and other dimensions of our voluntary carbon markets program are funded by a series of international development agencies, philanthropic foundations, and private sector organizations. For more information on donating to Ecosystem Marketplace, please contact [email protected]

Continue reading “After The March, Time To Get Serious On Forest Carbon”

26 August 2014 | Finally there’s good news on climate change: We have part of the solution, and it’s already working.
For a long time, experts have theorized that indigenous people in forest communities and their management of these forests are critical to controlling and eventually diminishing carbon emissions in the atmosphere and now a new study shows that this is true. The report, called “Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change: How Strengthening Community Forest Rights Mitigates Climate Change” and released jointly by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) in July, “makes a strong case for strengthening the rights of indigenous and local communities over their forests as a policy tool for mitigating climate change.”

Forests suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere with unrivaled efficiency, and also serve as enormous filtration systems that provide clean water to millions of people. Every year as much as one fifth of the global carbon emissions may come from cut down trees, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The tenure of indigenous people over these patches of our planet who can maintain standing forests and see that the trees are not cut down is a crucial ingredient in the complex recipe for controlling carbon emissions and thereby tackling climate change itself.

Forest Communities as Vital Players

It’s something that Almir Surui has known for years. As chief of the Paiter-Surui people, Almir has traveled the globe from his tiny village deep in the Amazon Rainforest of Brazil to international climate-change meetings to conference rooms at Google bringing attention to the importance of the work that his people do in nourishing and maintaining their forest home. And in doing so, they maintain the “lungs of the planet” for all of us.

For Almir and his people, the pressure to clear the forest for logging with its easy, fast financial return has been intense, both outside the community and within, especially when the group has been plagued with food insecurity, disease, and natural emergencies, like fire.

It was Almir who negotiated an innovative deal for his community to earn money in exchange for the value that the Surui provide in reducing carbon emissions to the atmosphere known as carbon offsets. In this kind of deal, which provides funding for people to protect the forest rather than cut it down, companies seeking to offset their carbon emissions can buy carbon offsets from a forest community like the Surui, whose protection and management of the forest has earned them credits.

This financial mechanism is known as REDD, which stands for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. Although REDD has its share of critics, it’s clear that it’s working, and WRI/RRI study backs that up, stating, “payments under REDD+ could incentivize governments to reform their legal frameworks and strengthen community forest rights if they are an integral part of a REDD+ agreement and implementation plan.”

The deal for the Surui was a long and rocky road in coming: from the meticulous validation process (in which auditors measured the impact of the Surui’s maintenance of the forest on carbon emissions and established how many carbon credits the community actually could sell) to the verification phase (through which external groups ensured that the Surui were indeed preserving their patch of the Amazon) to the continuing temptation from loggers to simply clear-cut the forest.

Finally, in May of 2013, the Brazilian cosmetics company Natura officially made their purchase of carbon credits from the Surui, and other deals have been closed since then.

REDD transactions like the Surui’s are part of what is known as the voluntary carbon market. In 2012, more than half a billion dollars’ worth of carbon credit transactions took place in the voluntary carbon market, according to Ecosystem Marketplace’s 2013 State of Voluntary Carbon Markets Report.

The Boots on the Ground Against Climate Change: Stories of Success

The WRI/RRI study validates what groups like Forest Trends (publisher of Ecosystem Martketplace) have long focused on as a tool in the fight against climate change: the power of communities having land tenure. The nonprofit serves as the connective tissue between groups like the Surui, governments, and the private sector, and has been working for more than twenty years on the premise that communities are vital to healthy forests. Based on its own research and experience now supported by these new data the D.C.-based group has supported initiatives and REDD programs in its mission to create economic value in our natural ecosystem.

Their Communities & Markets program works in indigenous communities in education, capacity building, technical assistance, and with policy. For example, Forest Trends is working with the IKEA Foundation with both the Surui and the Yawanawa peoples in Brazil in agroforestry trainings about sustainable forest products, renewable energy installations, youth learning exchanges, and women’s empowerment strategies.

Another success story comes from the Brazilian state of Acre, which has a high economic reliance on agricultural, ranching and forestry/forest products and a small economy compared to other Brazilian states. Following suit to the success of REDD with the Surui, Acre has created a statewide REDD program, called System of Incentives for Environmental Services (Sistema de Incentivo a Serviços Ambientais, or “SISA”), with the German government as one of the early participants in buying carbon credits. The payments will support indigenous people in their traditional land management.

In Peru, the minister of environment has been working closely with Forest Trends to develop environmental law to control the exploitation of natural resources, including biodiversity and water. In June, Peru’s National Congress passed the country’s groundbreaking Payments for Ecosystem Services Law (Ley de Mecanismos de Retribucií³n por Servicios Ecosistémicos). Under this law, land stewards, including indigenous peoples, are compensated for practicing sustainable land use. And the Tolo River People of Colombia, who own 32,000 acres of rainforest, have also started using REDD programs to help them maintain their land tenure, joining the Surui and many others in the burgeoning voluntary carbon market.

Across the globe in Vietnam, where illegal logging is a serious problem, Forest Trends is working to establish clear and secure tenure rights for local people living near forests, which would give them the ability to sustainably harvest forest assets if they so choose which provides the incentive against illegal logging.

On a broader scale, a consortium of partners from Latin American are working under a grant from the U.S. government, as part of a program called Accelerating Inclusion and Mitigating Emissions (AIME). The second word in that name “inclusion” is important in what it implies: The program recognizes that the participation of indigenous people is key to fighting carbon emissions. With the goal of replicating the success of the Surui in payment for ecosystem services programs, AIME works to engage indigenous people in REDD.

The Case Is Clear

It is indisputable that the forests of the world play a vital role in combating climate change. And the people who have for years and years lived in these forests have been doing an excellent job of taking care of them. Now these people are being displaced or killed off by disease, forced to fight for basic rights of tenure and human rights, and “Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change” proves that there is something very wrong with this scenario. Indigenous people are an essential part of the equation when it comes to fighting climate change and the future of our planet and programs like REDD recognize and support that.

The fight against climate change is daunting and complicated, and the news isn’t always good. Success stories can seem few and far between and sometimes muddy in their functionality at scale. WRI/RRI’s report, however, is clear in its message: The tenure of indigenous people in our world’s forests has a powerful and positive impact on our ability to lower carbon emissions. The goal now is to apply this highly scalable and transferable “tool” more actively across the planet.

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25 August 2014 | Every morning, Jorge Vergara drives his motorcycle from the village of Acand­ to the Builes Ranch, where he tends the nearly 400 cows and cattle. The ranch is just a ten-minute walk from Tolo River village of Pealoza and one of many bordering their forest. On this day, two boys from the Tolo River community have tagged along to help him with the chores. Their payment will come in the form of a bottle of fresh milk. The night before, Vergara had separated the two dozen or so milk cows from their calves so their udders would be full of milk by the morning. The hungry calves are now mooing by the fence, pushing to get close to their mothers. Vergara lets one calf in, and it anxiously runs to its mom and starts suckling, only to be pulled away by Vergara’s young assistants once the milk-flow has “spiked. Then he takes over to squeeze the warm milk into a bucket. “Boy! he shouts. “Let another one in! Vergara is at the forefront of deforestation in this region, in part because land is so cheap here, and cattle ranching is so lucrative. That disparity left the forest at a disadvantage: living trees delivered no income, while cleared land did, and the desire that the Tolo River people had to save the forest was outweighed by their need to feed their families. To balance that disparity, they turned to REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), which would make it possible for them to earn money by saving trees. The amount of money would depend in part on the amount of carbon stored in the trees they saved and in part on demand for carbon offsets. The advantages of REDD are clear: it conserves tropical forests and unique natural biodiversity; it reduces our global impact on climate; and it fosters sustainable rural community development. Yet to realize and sustain the initiative’s success, many potential pitfalls need to be avoided as such projects scale up around the world.

The Economics of Deforestation

In countries where land is expensive, ranchers keep cows in relatively small spaces and feed them silage fermented fodder produced from grass and maize plants. It’s an efficient, albeit perhaps not humane, way to manage land, and a farmer can raise up to three animals per hectare, greatly reducing the size of the farm, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. In many tropical countries, however, land is cheap, or even free if no farmer has claimed it yet. Ranchers here exhibit a classic open-frontier mentality: when they see a forest, they feel the land is wasted because it would make a great pasture. “The farm needs to grow, says Vergara. “Silage is too much hassle. They opt for less land-efficient cattle operations because it is easy and cheap to expand the ranch by clearing some of the bordering rainforest. On average, they place only one cow per hectare of land. This ensures that the herd always has fresh pastures with waist-high grass to graze. It’s easy for cattle ranches in Choc³ to illegally grab the forest: they just clear the vegetation on a 60-by-80 foot plot near the edge of the forest, put a fence around it, a salt lick in the middle and let cattle in. Most of the flat lands in the region have already been converted to pasture, so cattle ranchers encroach on the hills of the forest. Some of these cleared plots have an almost 45-degree slope the cows look like mountain goats perched on the hillside.

With land so easy to grab, there’s little incentive to farm more efficiently. REDD, however, can change that equation by providing the Tolo River people with a way to earn a living by protecting and managing their forest. “Cattle ranching and illegal gold mines are the top two reasons for deforestation here, says Rub©n Guerrero from Colombia’s Ministry of Environment and Development. He explains that if the current rate of forest loss was to continue, half of Colombia’s rainforest would be gone by the end of the century.

Measuring The Carbon

Doctor lvaro Cogollo is a legendary conservation scientist in Colombia. He began working for forest protection more than 30 years ago when most people in the country hadn’t yet realized the importance of this natural system. “People have this idea that Amazonia has the most spectacular forest in the world, he says. “But the biggest trees are actually here, in Choc³. Cogollo and his 20 assistants spent three months in the Tolo River community forest studying the biodiversity and carbon contained in it. He calculated that one acre of the communal rainforest could contain up to 300 tons of carbon seven times more than the average carbon content in one acre of an Amazonian forest. But the Tolo River people have one weapon that people in other parts of the world don’t, says Natalia Arango, climate change coordinator in a Colombian non-government organization Fondo Acci³n. Specifically, she says, they have Colombia’s willingness to recognize the rights of indigenous and Afro-Colombian forest communities, which offers fertile grounds for the REDD initiative. The progressive 1991 Constitution allowed them to claim their ancestral lands and provided them communal private ownership to the lands they manage.

Colombian REDD

In the past couple of years, the country has received $7.7 million from the World Bank and the United Nation’s REDD program to prepare it for large-scale REDD-financed conservation. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) also invested $17 million in setting up local forest conservation projects in Colombia. This money is being used to estimate the amount of carbon stored in the nation’s forests, document the major drivers for deforestation in each region, and identify the deforestation rate in unprotected forests, which tends to hover between 1.5% and 2% across Colombia. Additionally, organizations such as Fondo Acci³n work with the indigenous land owners to design community development plans and economic alternatives to deforestation. Arango says that Colombia, despite its progressive legislation, tends to be very slow in practical matters. Implementing change takes a long time because it has a complex society with lots of indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombians. For good reason, the government tends to be very cautious in making big institutional changes. “But it is being too cautious, says Arango. “It has now spent years in the pre-pre-preparation phase of the strategy. And now we have some sort of public acceptance and agreement. We in the civil society think we need to go a bit faster because the forest is going very fast.

An Imperfect Solution

Brodie Ferguson, an anthropologist from Stanford University, remembers first visiting Colombia nearly a decade ago. He was studying how the years of the Violence (a conflict between the Colombian Army and paramilitary and rebel groups) have affected indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities. After working in Choc³ for many months, he eventually developed a close and trusting relationship with the Tolo River community and helped them design their forest conservation project. When thinking about the principle behind REDD, however, his most vivid memory comes from an interaction with another indigenous group: the Arhuacos from Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

Ferguson remembers talking with Danilo, one of the chiefs of the Arhuacos. The indigenous leader, dressed in his traditional white robes, was skeptical about REDD. “Do I want to be paying the youth of our community to conserve the forest? he asked. “Shouldn’t they be doing this anyway out of appreciation for the forest and the community traditions¦ just because it’s the right thing to do? Ferguson concedes the point, but says that REDD isn’t about getting paid to conserve. Rather, when done right, it’s about jump starting new activities that can take the pressure off the forest for the long term. That, he says, means we must look at how REDD income is being spent. “It should be spent on things like education, creating environmental awareness, improving healthcare, empowering women, he says. Such programs have long-term positive effects. “Even if 100% of the profits go to the community the best- case scenario if they are not spent the right way, we are not achieving what we should be. Although new research from the World Resources Institute and the Rights and Resources Initiative indicates that REDD programs tend to strengthen the rights of forest people, that is not a foregone conclusion, and many forest peoples lack the legal protection that the Tolo River community enjoys. In many other countries, forest dwellers do not own the land or the forest they have lived in for centuries.

When Deforestation Moves Down the Street

Another challenge of implementing a REDD project is what happens when bad practices just move someplace else. Ideally, for example, the Builes Ranch and its competitors cwould simply adopt more sustainable land-use practices that let them expand production without gobbling up more forest. But what if the owners simply stop expanding on their current locations and start chopping elsewhere? Or what if some other ranch an hour north picks up the slack in production by gobbling up another patch of unprotected forest? This is known as “leakage, and individual REDD projects don’t claim to halt it. Instead, they try to account for it and reduce the damage that migrated from their total. The only way to resolve the problem with regional leakage is for a country to monitor its avoided carbon dioxide emissions at a national level. That is exactly what Colombia is currently trying to achieve with the $7.7 million grant from the World Bank and UN: to inventory all the carbon in the country and set up a national regulatory agency to monitor avoided deforestation. Even this approach, however, would not resolve the problem with exporting national deforestation to neighboring countries, i.e. across-border leakage, due to international demand for the products driving deforestation. The only hope for truly tackling this issue would be a well-coordinated international system for monitoring deforestation analogous to the cooperation between air traffic controllers or public health officials worldwide. Another concern that critics raise regarding REDD projects is that they might offer an opportunity for big polluters to green-wash their emissions by donating a little money to some remote community while continuing business as usual at home. The original intent for carbon credits, however, is to use them as a final step in a company’s process of reducing its carbon footprint  to offset only whatever emissions could not be cut in any other way. “I don’t think anybody likes the idea of a coal company saying OK, we’re going to continue producing coal and we’¢re going to buy some carbon credits halfway around the world just to offset that. Nobody envisions a system like that, says Ferguson. Indeed, the state of California has already considered ways to avoid abuse of its cap-and-trade system. According to California’s climate change legislation (AB32), carbon polluters are not allowed to offset more than 8% of their emissions. Instead, they have to figure out ways to reduce the remaining 92% of their pollution to a cap set by the law a cap that gets lower over time, although it will rise next year as transport fuels are phased into the program. REDD offsets, if eventually allowed into the California program, could only be used for a small portion of this and under very specific circumstances. On top of this is the cost of quantifying the carbon in all 6 million square miles of rainforest around the world. No two forests contain the same tree species and soils so carbon content can vary from 10 to 300 tons per acre. The threats to the standing forests also differ between regions as does the speed with which the forest would be lost had there not been REDD projects. “We don’t want the money to get rich, says community leader C³rdoba. “We want to develop organizationally. That way we can protect our territory, maintain peace, improve our lives. Even if they wanted, though, they could never get rich off a REDD project. Income from selling carbon offsets currently cannot compare to any of the alternative ways to use their land: cattle ranching, cocoa plantations, gold mines, not-to-mention coca growing. A recent study estimated that only a price above around $30 USD per ton of carbon dioxide could make a forest more valuable standing than cleared. There is, however, more to a forest than just carbon. Many biodiverse ecosystems are rich in natural life but do not contain much carbon. Therefore if people chose which forests to conserve only based on their carbon content, many precious spots might go unnoticed or even lose their protection. Although plantations, if well designed and managed, could harbor lots of animals and plants, REDD proponents do not envision this kind of carbon emissions reductions. In fact, to issue forest offsets for tree planting, the Verified Carbon Standard an organization which certifies and maintains an inventory of carbon credits worldwide requires a proof that native forest clearing took place more than two decades ago. What’s more, rich natural life and high carbon content need not be at odds with each other. A recent study found that combined carbon-biodiversity forest conservation strategy could simultaneously protect 90% of carbon stocks and wildlife (relative to a strategy focusing on either alone). So ultimately what is an unsuccessful, poorly-designed REDD project? “It is one where you have a London financier go down to Zambia, buy a bunch of land, hire some locals to protect the forest and then sell the credits on the market, says Ferguson. That is not community-based conservation, though, there are a lot of such REDD projects out there just not in the Tolo River community’s lands. NEXT INSTALLMENT: The Tolo River People Embark On Their REDD Project

Thirteen governors from rainforest states signed the Rio Branco Declaration, a commitment to cut deforestation 80% by 2020, if funding for avoided deforestation (REDD) materializes. Brazil, the country receiving the most performance-based payments from climate funder Norway, has successfully prevented the clearing of 6.2 million hectares of forest between 2007 and 2013, but many other countries are on the edge of deforesting… or not.

This article was originally posted in the Forest Carbon newsletter. Click here to read the original.

21 August 2014 | Forget presidents, kings and queens – governors may be the ones leading the fight to reduce deforestation, state by state. At last week’s Governors’ Climate and Forests (GCF) Task Force meeting in Acre, Brazil, 13 of them penned the Rio Branco Declaration, named after the Amazonian city they met in. Their commitment? To cut deforestation rates in their jurisdictions 80% by 2020 – a move that would prevent four billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions (tCO2e) from entering the atmosphere.

But they can’t do it for free. Deforestation, after all, is largely about economics, and lucrative oilseed crops – mainly palm oil in Indonesia and soybeans in Brazil – are driving deforestation in key rainforest countries. GCF states say that they can slow forest clearing and degradation if performance-based funding for reducing deforestation (REDD) is available, whether through carbon markets or other performance-based payment mechanisms.

So far, this financing has been hard to come by, though many developed nations have promised it. The Rio Branco Declaration explains that the six Brazilian GCF member states have already reduced deforestation 70% between 2006 and 2012, avoiding three billion tCO2e of emissions, but that GCF jurisdictions have seen little of the $7.3 billion pledged for REDD+ by donor governments since 2009.

“Humanity is in grave danger over the destruction of the Amazonia – the climate regulator of the planet,” Edwin Vasquez, the leader of the Huitoto People of Peru and Coordinator General of COICA (Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin), said at the meeting. “The 5,000 indigenous communities continue to protect the forests and preserve our cultures and the world, as we have done for thousands of years. We are the proprietors of 210 million hectares, covering 25% of the Amazon, which calls for an urgent proposal—’Indigenous Amazonia for Humanity,’ a $210 million project addressing the fact that climate funds have not reached our communities.”

The GCF is a collaboration of 22 states and provinces from Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Spain and the United States. On the buy-side, the US state of California is considering the inclusion of REDD offsets in its cap-and-trade program, which would be the first significant compliance market demand for offsets from avoided deforestation.

“Without action to reduce emissions from the deforestation of tropical forests, we are missing one of the keys to mitigating climate change,” said California Air Resources Board (ARB) Chairman Mary Nichols. “We think the sector-based offset crediting approach being evaluated for jurisdiction-wide programs, like the one in Acre, is the next frontier for California’s carbon offset program.”

Here at Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace, we’re tracking these developments closely – and putting out a last call to forest project developers to respond to our survey informing the State of the Forest Carbon Markets 2014 report. The survey is available in English HERE and in Spanish AQUí. Questions? Email us.

More news from the forest carbon marketplace is summarized below, so keep reading!

—The Ecosystem Marketplace Team

If you have comments or would like to submit news stories, write to us at [email protected].

INTERNATIONAL POLICY Top marks for Brazil Brazil has successfully avoided deforestation of 6.2 million hectares between 2007 and 2013, averting three billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions and generating large results-based payments from Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative. Brazil has received by far the most funding under the initiative with 44% of the $1.7 billion in total funds disbursed. Indonesia has only received 2% to date, but Norway’s development agency has pledged up to $1 billion to prevent deforestation in that country. However, there is concern that the upcoming presidential leadership change in Indonesia and weaknesses in its legal basis for REDD+ could derail those efforts. The agency has established bilateral partnerships with five other REDD+ countries: Ethiopia, Guyana, Mexico, Tanzania and Vietnam. NATIONAL STRATEGY AND CAPACITY An inconvenient truth What is the actual rate of deforestation in Indonesia? It’s a tough question to answer, say Agus Sari, deputy chair of the country’s REDD+ Management Agency, and Nirartha Samadhi, deputy chair of the Presidential Working Unit for the Supervision and Management of Development. Indonesia’s Forestry Ministry issued a decree that sets the country’s forest emission level at 0.816 billion tons, meaning actual emissions below that reference level constitute a reduction. The ministry estimated Indonesia’s deforestation rate at 628,000 hectares annually, but an independent study pegged it at about 850,000 hectares in 2012. The government is moving forward with plans to clear 14 million hectares of degraded forest between 2010 and 2020, despite a commitment to curb greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Ghana thinking strategically A study in three districts in Ghana aimed to identify REDD+ strategies that reverse agriculture’s adverse effects on forests and trees as part of the work being done to ensure that REDD+ becomes a key component of the country’s climate change mitigation and adaptation strategy. “Ghana’s REDD+ readiness process is nearing completion and a REDD+ package that would outline Ghana’s strategy and framework for safeguards, among others, would be completed by 2015,” said Samuel Afari Dartey, Chief Executive of Ghana’s Forestry Commission. Building a forest foundation South Korea’s Forest Service (KFS) is also working to incorporate REDD+ into its national strategy amid expectations that the country will have GHG emissions reduction requirements as part of a new international climate agreement. The country has a target to voluntarily reduce carbon emissions 30% by 2020. The KFS is developing a customized REDD+ model that features close bonds with local residents, the application of advanced information technology, and its experience overcoming post-war deforestation in the 1960s. “A successful REDD project not only involves the reduction of greenhouse gas but also considers the livelihood of local residents,” a KFS official said. PROJECT DEVELOPMENT For the birds The Audubon Society has sold half of the 450,000 offsets from its Beidler Forest project in South Carolina to companies in California’s cap-and-trade program. The 5,200-acre forest conservation project is registered through Blue Source and the offsets are selling at a minimum of $8/tCO2e. The Audubon Society receives 80% of the proceeds and directs the funds towards an endowment that will support the forest in perpetuity. Jeff Cole, the vice president of portfolio development for Blue Source, expects additional offsets to be generated in the future as the forest grows. Making new friends Wildlife Works’ Kasigau REDD+ forestry project is having a positive impact in the local community, not just in terms of stopping unchecked deforestation, but also providing a new source of income for impoverished residents and improving the habitat for elephants, lions, cheetahs, zebras and other native animals. “We were losing everything, but thanks to the project we have learnt even how to live with the wild animals,” said Mercy Joshua, a mother of four. “These days, we don’t cut down trees… they are our friends”. Buyers of the voluntary carbon offsets generated by the project include Microsoft, Barclays Bank and Kenya Airways, which have invested $3.5 million each since the project started. SUSTAINABLE COMMODITIES  Back to school Seven palm oil giants are jointly funding a year-long study to define what constitutes a High Carbon Stock (HCS) forest since many of these companies have agreed not to cut down these trees. The HCS has been a subject of debate among palm oil corporations, green groups and forest experts. The study underpins the Sustainable Palm Oil Manifesto, which sets criteria for sustainable palm oil production, including barring conversion of forests and peatlands for plantations, as well as creating traceable palm oil supply chains. But environmental groups such as Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network have sharply criticized supposed loopholes in the manifesto. The right kind of palm oil policy U.S. food giant ConAgra has adopted a new policy that will bar palm oil produced from new plantations established on HCS lands and require suppliers to have no-burn policies and respect the right of communities to give or withhold their Free, Prior and Informed Consent to new development. The policy change comes after Green Century Capital Management and the New York State Comptroller’s Office filed a shareholder resolution alleging the company purchased so-called GreenPalm credits from other sources growing palm oil sustainably, rather than preventing deforestation in its own supply chain. Investors say they are becoming more sensitive about palm oil deforestation, scaling back development plans to only clear degraded forests and setting aside some lands for conservation. FINANCE & ECONOMICS Give the EU some credit The European Union (EU) has declared its commitment to reduce tropical deforestation 50% by 2020 – but what’s its game plan? A recent paper by ClimateFocus and The Nature Conservancy looks at opportunities for the EU to mobilize REDD+ finance in the short to medium term. The authors identify two of the most promising options as being REDD+ Compensation Credits and voluntary sustainable supply chain initiatives. A structurally weak and economically depressed EU has stymied funding streams, but the authors offer some hope: “As European policy makers begin to realize that the current system is not providing the levels of funding that are needed, attention is beginning to shift to new and innovative funding streams,” they write. SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Bamboo beat Only in operation since June, Global Forest Watch-Fires (GFW-Fires) is already making some peoples’ jobs easier. GFW-Fires is an online platform that combines high-resolution satellite imagery, real-time fire alerts and land-use and concession maps to monitor and respond to fires. The system allows Indonesia’s REDD agency to warn communities in Indonesia of dangerous fires and also to track potentially illegal activity such as slash-and-burn agriculture. “Just imagine a village resident who beat bamboo tubes to warn others about an ongoing fire,” said agency head Heru Prasetyo. “This system works just like a giant bamboo tube that alerts officials and agencies responsible for handling fires on a massive scale.” HUMAN DIMENSION Trouble Down Under In western Australia, sheep farmer Peter Yench holds a permit to clear his properties of trees, which would open up more land for grazing. But he has agreed to keep almost 7,000 hectares of forest standing for 100 years in exchange for revenue through the government’s Carbon Farming Initiative. However, the recent repeal of Australia’s carbon price has left farmers such as Yench in limbo, and 140,000 hectares of semi-arid woodlands may be up for clearing if the 154 accredited carbon farming projects in Australia cannot find an income stream. STANDARDS AND METHODOLOGY VCS sees REDD in Golden State The Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) is ready to move into California’s regulated market in a major way. The leading voluntary carbon markets standard has now been authorized by the state’s ARB to pre-screen coal mine methane and other types of offset projects for California’s carbon trading program. In addition to evaluating currently eligible projects, the VCS has set a specific goal of helping California welcome REDD+ projects into the program. According to the related job posting, VCS sees California potentially as their first step towards involvement in other compliance markets throughout North America and worldwide. PUBLICATIONS Recipe for success? Secure tenure, stakeholder engagement, clear monitoring frameworks and methods to ensure permanence are among the key “enabling conditions” for successful payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs, according to a new United Nations (UN) report. The report explores forest services through 14 detailed case studies and provides guidance on PES programs, suggesting that a “code of conduct” should be established for valuation, engagement and compliance. It was jointly produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, the UN Economic Commission for Europe and the UN Environment Programme. Bigger, safer, stronger With much of the pledged financing for REDD coming from bilateral donors, these funders are beginning to move from a “do no harm” approach to proactively promoting positive social and environmental outcomes. In its recently released report, ClimateFocus looks at how the REDD safeguards adopted at the Cancun climate negotioations are currently being used, and how safeguard compliance may need to rely more heavily on country systems as REDD moves from the project scale to the jurisdictional scale. The paper calls for a strong Feedback and Grievance Redress Mechanism to catch major violations and for certain indicators for example, displacement without compensation and high-value biodiversity loss to be prioritized in safeguard monitoring. JOBS Director of North America Compliance Markets – Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) Based in San Francisco, California, the Director of North American Compliance Markets will ensure that VCS plays a prominent role in the success of California’s cap-and-trade program, and other emerging programs. The position will include engaging the California ARB and the broad community of stakeholders in the development of new offset protocols and how to incorporate sector-based offsets such as REDD+. Read more about the position here Senior Program Officer, Training and Learning Network – The Center for People and Forests (RECOFTC) Based in Bangkok, Thailand, the Senior Program Officer will manage RECOFTC’s capacity development activities, including customized courses and study tours for community forestry. The successful candidate will have at least 10 years of experience in participatory training in community forestry or natural resource management. Fluency in one or more languages from RECOFTC focal countries – Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam – is preferred. Read more about the position here Tropical Forest and Climate Initiative Assistant – Union of Concerned Scientists Based in Washington, D.C., the Tropical Forest and Climate Initiative Assistant will develop a more comprehensive understanding of the drivers of deforestation, policies to mitigate deforestation, and the importance of reducing deforestation rates as a climate change solution. The ideal candidate will have strong research and organizational skills, be attentive to detail, and be able to prioritize many tasks and communicate with diverse audiences. This is a one-year, paid, benefits-eligible internship position. Read more about the position here Executive Director – Non-Timber Forest Products Exchange Programme for South and Southeast Asia (NTFP-EP) Based in Manila, Philippines, the Executive Director will lead NTFP-EP, a collaborative, regional network of grassroots NGOs and peoples’ organizations that seeks to build the capacity of forest-based communities in the conservation and trade of non-timber forest products. The successful candidate will have at least 10 years of experience in development work and at least five years of experience in organizational and program management. Read more about the position here Manager, East & Southern Africa – Rainforest Alliance Based in Nairobi, Kenya, the Manager for East & Southern Africa will be responsible for the successful implementation of Rainforest Alliance Sustainable Agriculture projects, managing and implementing partnerships and maintaining relationships with important stakeholders and partners. The successful candidate will have 7-10 years of experience in the tea and/or coffee sector and farmer training, as well as experience with certification/verification issues and systems. The position requires travel to Kenya and other countries in Eastern and Southern Africa up to 40% of the time. Read more about the position here Senior Science Writer and Producer – Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) Based in Bogor, Indonesia, the Senior Science Writer and Producer will work across a range of mediums and topics to turn out compelling, innovative and high-quality communications materials designed to help translate CIFOR’s high-caliber research into meaningful, real-world impact. The ideal candidate will have a strong editorial background, be an excellent writer, and have a rich, varied body of work that demonstrates the ability to think across multimedia platforms.  Read more about the position here ABOUT THE FOREST CARBON PORTAL The Forest Carbon Portal provides relevant daily news, a bi-weekly news brief, feature articles, a calendar of events, a searchable member directory, a jobs board, a library of tools and resources. The Portal also includes the Forest Carbon Project Inventory, an international database of projects including those in the pipeline. Projects are described with consistent ‘nutrition labels’ and allow viewers to contact project developers. ABOUT THE ECOSYSTEM MARKETPLACE Ecosystem Marketplace is a project of Forest Trends, a tax-exempt corporation under Section 501(c)3. This newsletter and other dimensions of our voluntary carbon markets program are funded by a series of international development agencies, philanthropic foundations, and private sector organizations. For more information on donating to Ecosystem Marketplace, please contact [email protected].

Additional resources

12 August 2014 | RIO BRANCO, Brazil | Indonesia’s largest cash crop is palm oil. In Brazil, it’s soybeans. Those two crops are driving deforestation in both countries, yet governors from oilseed-dependent states in both countries have vowed to slash deforestation if funding for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) materializes.

Thirteen of them on Monday launched the Rio Branco Declaration, which is a clear commitment to reduce deforestation in their states by 80% between now and 2020. That commitment, however, is contingent on developed countries delivering on their own promises to step up funding both market-based and non-market-based to engineer a shift to sustainable land-use practices built in part on support for indigenous agriculture.

The declaration was signed at the 8^th Annual Meeting of the Governors’ Climate & Forests (GCF) Task Force here. The GCF is a collaboration among 22 states and provinces from Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Spain, and the United States. Three additional Mexican states Tabasco, Quintana Roo and Jalisco are expected to join this week. Governors from other GCF member states say they will also sign the declaration.

“GCF members come from different provinces and countries, but we have a common goal to protect forests and build sustainable environments for improved livelihoods for all both now and into the future, said Governor A. Teras Narang of the Indonesian state of Central Kalimantan. “That future is now.

The REDD Factor

Narang’s country, Indonesia, is attempting to halt deforestation by shifting palm-oil development from forested lands to degraded lands a daunting task akin to moving the farms of the US Midwest to the plains of Texas. It amounts to the largest voluntary land-swap in history, and the government aims to use REDD finance to achieve it, while also engaging the demand side of the equation by working with companies willing to re-engineer their supply chains to avoid deforestation.

“Only standing forests are capable of removing greenhouse gases such as CO₂ from our atmosphere, helping to reduce global warming, said Governor Dr. Cornelis MH, a signatory to the declaration and Governor of the Indonesian state of West Kalimantan. “Performance-based incentives or assistance from donor countries to support REDD+ programs and low emissions development will not only rehabilitate forests but support livelihoods among forest-dependent communities€both small-holder farmers and indigenous communities.

Edwin Vasquez is the leader of one of those communities, the Huitoto People of Peru, and as Coordinator General of COICA (Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indí­genas de la Cuenca Amazí³nica, Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin), he represents nearly 400 other indigenous communities across the entire Amazon Basin.

“Humanity is in grave danger over the destruction of the Amazonia the climate regulator of the planet, he said. “The 5,000 indigenous communities continue to protect the forests and preserve our cultures and the world, as we have done for thousands of years. We are the proprietors of 210 million hectares, covering 25% of the Amazon, which calls for an urgent proposal Indigenous Amazonia for Humanity, a $210 million project addressing the fact that climate funds have not reached our communities.

The Declaration

The declaration aims to put the GCF on the world stage, and it invites the international community and partner organizations to work with the GCF to develop clear and transparent mechanisms for securing and delivering performance-based benefits to forest-dependent communities, smallholders, and indigenous peoples.

“For the last 6 years the GCF has been the source of incredible innovation that is now ready for the world stage, said Dan Nepstad, Executive Director of Earth Innovation Institute. “If the GCF states and provinces decide in Rio Branco to reduce 80% of deforestation by 2020, this means 4 billion tons of avoided CO₂ emissions on top of the 3 billion tons of emissions already avoided.

Now, he says, it’s up to the rest of us to step up.

“For the 2020 commitment to become real, the GCF will need the support of companies, donors and investors, and a strong commitment to channel benefits to forest-based communities, said Nepstad. “All of the pieces are coming together for this to happen in the coming months.

California Key

On the buy-side, the US state of California is considering the inclusion of REDD offsets in its cap-and-trade program. The state played a leadership role in the early days of the GCF, and it remains a key driver.

“Without action to reduce emissions from the deforestation of tropical forests, we are missing one of the keys to mitigating climate change, said California Air Resources Board Chairman Mary Nichols. “We think the sector-based offset crediting approach being evaluated for jurisdiction-wide programs, like the one in Acre, is the next frontier for California’s carbon offset program.

Additional resources

This article was originally posted in the Forest Carbon newsletter. Click here to read the original.

7 August 2014 | Five years ago, the Tolo River People of northern Colombia were facing threats from all angles. Externally, wealthy businessmen in a nearby town were expanding their cattle ranches into the community’s forests. Internally, the Tolo themselves were logging the forests commercially to feed their families.

“This wood is worth around three million pesos,” about US$1,500 said Frazier Guisao, a former logger, referencing a giant centennial almendro tree on a walk through the forest with journalist Tanya Dimitrova. Guisao estimates that he could take down the tree in two hours, but today, he’s content to leave it standing.

By teaming up with US-based carbon project developer Anthrotect, Guisao and his community-based organization COCOMASUR were able to create a REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation of forests) project that would save the roughly 13,000 hectares of forests that would otherwise be lost to cattle ranching, agriculture and logging. The project verified its first emissions reductions under the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) in 2012, and last year it sold 70,000 offsets at $9 apiece on the voluntary carbon market. These financial returns flow much slower than logging revenues, but they may be enough to pay for forest patrollers’ salaries (that’s Guisao’s new gig) and, eventually, to improve the Tolo’s community health care services and send young people to university.

“Our community will always continue trying to protect our forest with or without the project. But having the project gives us the resources to do that,” says community leader Aureliano Cí³rdoba.

Read the full story here, which is the first in a series adapted from “Modern day forest conservation: A Colombian community protecting its rainforest one carbon credit at a time,” by Dimitrova.

And, speaking of projects like these, we’re now in the final stages of data collection for our State of the Forest Carbon Markets 2014 report. This annual report is the only market-wide, freely available benchmark on the forest carbon market, providing transparent information on transactions and project developments. If you are a forest carbon project developer (or know one!) please make sure to get in your response.

The survey is available in English HERE and in Spanish AQUí. Questions? Get in touch with Allie Goldstein or Gloria Gonzalez.

The Ecosystem Marketplace Team

If you have comments or would like to submit news stories, write to us at [email protected].

INTERNATIONAL POLICY A sour margarita REDD remains a divisive issue in the run-up to the United Nations’ Conference of Parties climate negotiations in Peru in December, as seen by dueling proclamations issued last month. A meeting of 130 civil society organizations in Venezuela ended with the Margarita Declaration, which claimed that carbon markets are a “false solution” to the climate change problem and called market-based REDD projects “dangerous and unethical.” But a competing statement issued by NGOs and carbon market industry associations urged governments to help secure the financing needed to support REDD+, namely interim incentives for stimulating REDD+ investment during the 2015-2020 period before any new international climate agreement takes hold. NATIONAL STRATEGY AND CAPACITY Thank you, Mr. President Environmental advocates have gotten their wish with the victory of President-elect Joko Widodo, who will assume the presidency of Indonesia in October, despite the fact that little is known about his views on climate change. Indonesia has recently surpassed Brazil as having the world’s highest rate of deforestation, but the country’s new REDD+ Management Agency is developing measuring and reporting metrics for REDD+ projects. Heru Prasetyo, head of the agency, urged the incoming government to ensure passage of legislation safeguarding the land tenure of indigenous groups, which hold rights to an estimated 45 million hectares of forest being misused as commercial concessions. California thirsty for forest offsets Severe drought conditions in California have led officials to impose criminal penalties for water wasters, but could also help make the case that the US state should allow projects aimed at curbing tropical deforestation into its carbon trading program. The potential connection between deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and the drought has caught the attention of staffers at the California Air Resources Board (ARB) who are planning to consider allowing sector-based REDD projects to supply offsets to the program. ARB staffers are also planning to recommend that the board lift its ban on forestry projects based in Alaska. The Last Frontier going up in flames Forest fires have taken hold across Canada’s Last Frontier. Of the 186 wildfires instigated by extremely dry conditions in Canada’s Northwest Territories this year, 156 are still burning. The acreage burned to date is six times greater than the 25-year average, according to Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center data. Boreal forests like those in the Northwest Territories are burning at unprecedented rates, a major challenge as the combined boreal forests of Canada, Europe, Russia and Alaska account for 30% of the world’s carbon stored in land. Ecosystem Marketplace’s Forest Carbon Portal currently tracks 15 forestry projects in Canada. PROJECT DEVELOPMENT This is a monkey’s world Project developer Face the Future and the Uganda Wildlife Authority have just completed the latest carbon monitoring campaign in Kibale National Park, measuring a total area of 70 hectares. The park, located in western Uganda, is known for its diversity of monkeys and great apes, but deforestation in the past 20 years has led to habitat degradation and endangerment of biodiversity.  So far, the project has restored more than 6,200 hectares and planted over 1.4 million trees. Despite complications from rain and equipment failure, the developer completed its planned monitoring work and hopes to issue VCS offsets in the third quarter of 2014. SUSTAINABLE COMMODITIES Failing the forests? Two new subsidiaries of palm oil company PT Austindo Nusantara Jaya Tbk have cleared forests in areas of New Guinea that would be off-limits under voluntary zero deforestation commitments made by companies such as Wilmar that purchase the parent company’s products, according to an analysis by Greenomics Indonesia. Both of the subsidiaries, acquired in January 2013, had forest land relinquishment permits issued by the Minister of Forestry. But Wilmar, the world’s largest palm oil trader, made a zero deforestation pledge in December 2013 and the company should answer questions about the connection between the clearing of intact forest landscapes for palm oil plantations in New Guinea and its pledge, according to Greenomics Indonesia. The best a farmer can get Consumer goods company Procter & Gamble has partnered with the Malaysia Institute for Supply Chain Innovation for a 6-month study to uncover new options for working with small farmers to separate sustainable sources from non-sustainable sources in the production of palm oil and palm kernel oil. The company is already working with larger suppliers in its supply chain as part of its zero deforestation pledge. But working with small farmers in places such as Malaysia and Indonesia is critical because they account for 35-45% of palm oil production. Japanese consumer goods giant Kao Corporation has become the latest company to join the zero deforestation trend by committing to sustainable procurement of raw materials by 2020. FINANCE & ECONOMICS Will the coffee be green too? Ethiopia’s Climate Resilient Green Economy Strategy aims to guide the country’s efforts to become a low-carbon, middle-income economy by 2025. The strategy prioritizes the implementation of REDD projects as part of its focus on protecting and re-establishing the economic value of forests and their importance to the ecosystem. The strategy also includes reducing the demand for fuel wood through the distribution and use of fuel-efficient stoves and increasing afforestation and reforestation, among other forest conservation activities. But implementing the strategy will be a pricey proposition, with an estimated $150 billion required over the next 20 years. SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Palm oil’s appeal Fibre plantations are the main cause of deforestation in Indonesia, not the palm oil plantations that usually take the blame for the country’s skyrocketing rate of deforestation, according to new research from the University of Adelaide, Australia. Of the 14.7 million hectares of forest destroyed in the country between 2000 and 2010, 12.8% were removed for fibre plantations compared to 6.8% for palm oil plantations. In 2011, Indonesia stopped issuing permits to firms to clear forests on about 64 million hectares, but the ban did not apply to previously issued permits. The under-story Long-term global warming has little effect on the overall storage of carbon in tropical forest soil or the rate at which that carbon is processed into carbon dioxide, according to a new study of Hawaiian forests published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The findings dispel concerns raised by short-term climate studies showing that rising temperatures increased the rate of soil respiration. These earlier studies caused scientists to worry that global warming would decrease the amount of stored carbon in tropical soils. “If these findings hold true in other tropical regions, then warmer temperatures may not necessarily cause tropical soils to release their carbon to the atmosphere at a faster rate,” says Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science.   HUMAN DIMENSION Wrestling with orangutans Renowned conservationist and founder of Orangutan Foundation International Birute Galdikas was at first skeptical of entrepreneur Todd Lemons’ idea to use REDD to save the Seruyan Forest of Borneo. “I loved what he was saying, but I wasn’t convinced it would work,” she says. But with the peat forest slated to convert to palm oil within five years, Galdikas was out of other options. After seeing Lemons, a former college wrestler, wrangling with the orphaned orangutans and after seeing how quickly he caught onto Indonesian social cues  she decided to take a gamble on what would later become the Rimba Raya REDD project. Read Ecosystem Marketplace’s fourth installment of this series here. STANDARDS AND METHODOLOGY Seeking a fair shake The second Fair Carbon Standard meeting was held in Melbourne, Australia last week, after an inaugural workshop last January. Proposed by the Aboriginal Carbon Fund, the Standard aims to promote a robust voluntary carbon market in Australia by including a minimum price (to cover costs), co-benefits and long-term relationships with buyers. “One of our great challenges will be to shift carbon credits from being a top shelf commodity to a standard commodity that is purchased routinely by ordinary consumers and corporate Australia, according to the non-profit fund, which aims to build a sustainable Aboriginal carbon industry. PUBLICATIONS The carbon keepers Indigenous people and local communities currently have legal or official rights to at least 513 million hectares of forests, about an eighth of the world’s total, according to Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change, a new report by the World Resources Institute and the Rights and Resources Initiative. The study finds that two key ingredients legal land tenure and positive government action to support those land rights are key to preventing the 37.7 billion tonnes of carbon stored in community-owned forests from being released into the atmosphere. If done right, “payments under REDD+ could incentivize governments to reform their legal frameworks and strengthen community forests rights,” promoting an often “undervalued” approach to mitigating climate change, the study finds. Under the table Ninety-three percent of logging in Mozambique last year was illegal, costing the country $146 million in lost duties and taxes since 2007, according to a new report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). The vast majority of this illicitly logged wood was shipped to China. Mozambique has the opportunity to access $3.8 million to establish a REDD strategy to reduce deforestation, but the EIA report calls into question whether such an approach could work given the widespread crime and corruption. All together now As part of the United Nations REDD project in Vietnam, development organization SNV recently piloted a Participatory Subnational Planning approach in the coastal province on Binh Thuan. The organization has now released a step-by-step guide that might be adopted for any participatory REDD or land-use planning process. It walks participants through preparatory studies and training as well as safeguards analysis and monitoring workshops. The guidance aims to promote a multi-stakeholder approach that increases ownership of and transparency throughout the REDD planning process. Jobs Post-doctoral Research Fellow Bangor University Based in North Wales, United Kingdom, the Post-doctoral Research Fellow will work through the School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography on a project called “Can Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) deliver environmental and livelihood benefits?” The key case study will be a PES program in the Bolivian highlands, established by the Bolivian NGO Fundacií³n Natura Bolivia. Candidates should have a PhD (or equivalent) in economics, sociology, geography, conservation science or a related subject and experience with field work in Latin America. – Read more about the position here Program Manager, Greater Mekong Conservation International Based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the Program Manager will work to expand Conservation International’s Greater Mekong program. The position involves developing new business and partnerships in relevant policy and programmatic subject areas, including REDD and freshwater management. The preferred candidate will have a master’s degree, at least five years of experience working with NGOs and experience monitoring and evaluating programs. – Read more about the position here Team Leader REDD+ Project in Southern Laos “sterreichische Bundesforste Consulting Based in Pakse, Southern Laos, the Team Leader will lead the implementation of a REDD+ project in Xe Pian National Protected Area and its buffer zone and support the government of Laos in preparing for national implementation of REDD+. The successful candidate will have an advanced degree in forestry or a related discipline and a minimum of five years relevant work experience, at least two years prior experience abroad. Knowledge of English, German and Lao Language is preferred. – Read more about the position here Operations Manager Proforest Based in Oxford, United Kingdom, the Operations Manager for Proforest will help manage a period of growth and change while overseeing offices in the UK, Malaysia, Brazil and Ghana. The position requires strong interpersonal skills, the proven ability to multi-task and operate in a multi-cultural environment, and a knack for seeing the big picture and prioritizing tasks. At least three years of experience working as an operations manager is required; experience with information technology systems is useful. – Read more about the position here Forest Officer, Responsible Forest Programme World Wide Fund for Nature, Malaysia Based in Selangor, Malaysia, the Forest Officer will promote Responsible Forestry practices to the forest managers in Malaysia through the implementation of Global Forest and Trade Network Participation and forest certification. The successful candidate will have at least two years of experience in forestry and an interest in forest resource management and the timber trade, and the way they seek to improve their management practices. Must be able to speak or write in English, Bahasa Malaysia and/or Mandarin. – Read more about the position here ABOUT THE FOREST CARBON PORTAL The Forest Carbon Portal provides relevant daily news, a bi-weekly news brief, feature articles, a calendar of events, a searchable member directory, a jobs board, a library of tools and resources. The Portal also includes the Forest Carbon Project Inventory, an international database of projects including those in the pipeline. Projects are described with consistent ‘nutrition labels’ and allow viewers to contact project developers. ABOUT THE ECOSYSTEM MARKETPLACEEcosystem Marketplace is a project of Forest Trends, a tax-exempt corporation under Section 501(c)3. This newsletter and other dimensions of our voluntary carbon markets program are funded by a series of international development agencies, philanthropic foundations, and private sector organizations. For more information on donating to Ecosystem Marketplace, please contact [email protected].

Click here to read this article in its original format.

31 July 2014 | José Maria Arara, Almir Surui, and Aureliano Cí³rdoba all have three things in common: each is the leader of a traditional forest community of the Amazon; each lives in a country that nominally recognizes their rights to their forests; and each has used carbon finance to exercise and reinforce their rights. And they’re hardly alone, according to a new study called “Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change“, which was published jointly by the World Resources Institute (RRI) and Rights and Resources International (RRI) this week.

High Praise for REDD Finance

More than a year in the making, the study provides deep, clear, and compelling evidence that indigenous people and traditional forest dwellers act as guardians of the forest but only if they have clear land rights. An earlier study, “Stopping Deforestation: What Works and What Doesn’t“, also found a high correlation between the presence of indigenous people and good land stewardship, but it found little correlation between deforestation rates and land tenure. That was published in May by the Center for Global Development.

Both studies reinforce earlier analysis showing that community rights can be strengthened through mechanisms that use carbon finance to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+).

“Many countries with REDD+ strategies identified strengthening community forest rights as part of their own strategy, the WRI/RRI report states. “In addition, respect for the rights of local communities and Indigenous Peoples is an internationally agreed safeguard to ensure REDD+ does not harm people or the environment.

The RRI/WRI report contends that successful implementation of a REDD+ strategy depends on community rights.

“If a community.s forest rights are weak or nonexistent, then the community will also likely lose their rights to carbon in the forest,” it says. “This will undermine their ability to engage in REDD+ initiatives equitably, effectively, and independently.”

It also singles out REDD+ as a bright spot among development efforts.

“With the exception of some international initiatives to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+), development agencies, governments, and others have failed to give enough weight to the connection between strengthening community forest rights and mitigating climate change, it says.

Not a Panacea

Still, the report says, REDD without rights won’t deliver environmentally, economically, or socially.

“Governments and companies often have legal rights to forests, but communities do not,” the report says. “If REDD+ payments for carbon begin to flow in such a legal environment, governments and companies rather than communities will capture the benefits.”

Recommendations

The report offered “five practical, evidence-based recommendations to donors, governments, civil society, and other stakeholders working on climate change, land rights, and forestry, which we have reprinted verbatim below:

1. Provide Indigenous Peoples and local communities with legal recognition of rights to their forest. Attention must be given to the millions of forested communities without legal rights to their forest. In Indonesia, where communities generally have no or weak legal rights, new legislation is pending to recognize communities ownership of their forests. Where communities have some legal forest rights, governments and their partners should strengthen these rights. While this recommendation applies to all relevant countries, those that are heavily forested and have weak community forest rights are of critical importance. In addition, stakeholders should support strengthening community forest rights as part of a future agreement on REDD+.

2. Protect the legal forest rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Governments and their partners should help protect community forest rights by, for example, mapping community forest boundaries, helping to expel illegal loggers, and not granting commercial concessions over community forests. In Brazil, the government maps and registers indigenous community forests, helps communities remove illegal settlers, and is generally barred from granting commercial use of community forests to companies. Governments and their partners should commit funds and invest in supporting communities and their civil society partners. In addition, governments and donors should include programs to support community forest rights in their climate change strategies

3. Support communities with technical assistance and training. Governments, donors, and civil society should provide training and technical assistance to communities and should undertake capacity-building activities. For example, in Mexico some communities receive training and support from the government to improve sustainable forest use and market access. In addition, governments, donors, and civil society should help ensure that people and local communities are able to participate genuinely in the development of legal and policy frameworks related to REDD+.

4. Engage forest communities in decision-making on investments affecting their forest. Governments and businesses should work together to ensure that government planning is consistent with international standards and that investments do not violate community forest rights. In Peru, the government’s failure to comply fully with international standards contributes to high deforestation of indigenous community forests. For example, national laws should require that the status of Indigenous Peoples and local community forest is determined well in advance of any decisions affecting the community. Also, if legal commercial extraction of subsurface minerals does occur on indigenous or local community forestlands, ensure that the extraction is conducted in the least invasive way possible and only after free, prior, and informed consent of the affected communities.

5. Compensate communities for the climate and other benefits provided by their forest. Governments and their partners should commit funds and invest in supporting communities and their civil society partners to increase the economic incentives for communities to manage their forests sustainably. In addition, stakeholders should support strengthening of community forest rights as part of a future agreement on REDD+. Ensure that communities receive payments for protecting their forests as part of the design and implementation of REDD+.

29 July 2014 | Five young men are cutting their way through dense rainforest vegetation in the northernmost part of Colombia forest that was already old-growth when the conquistadors first set foot on the continent five centuries ago. The silence is interrupted only by the sound of running water from the many streams dissecting the hilly terrain. It is midday, and the heat is intolerable even for the mosquitoes. Frazier Guisao, an ex-logger, heads the single-file line, slicing through the thick undergrowth with a machete to carve out a narrow tunnel. The crew is patrolling the forest to protect it from illicit clearing.

Old trees in this pristine forest reach as high as 10-story buildings, emerging well above the thick canopy, and the men sit for a rest at the buttress roots of a giant centennial almendro tree. Guisao examines the trunk and makes a quick calculation in his head.

“This wood is worth around three million pesos, he says. That’s about $1,500 USD. As a former commercial logger, he knows it would have taken him about two hours to fell it with the chainsaw. The work they’re doing now isn’t nearly as lucrative in the short-term, but it’s much more rewarding.

Preserving the Forest; Protecting the Future

Guisao and his team are wearing T-shirts with the bright colorful letters COCOMASUR, which, in Spanish, stands for Black Communities of the Tolo River and South Coast the name of their small Afro-Colombian community organization. The national constitution grants land titles to traditional forest peoples, and the Tolo River inhabitants now collectively own 32,000 acres of rainforest in Chocí³ region, near Colombia’s border with Panama. The patrol leader says it takes him four days to walk the entire perimeter.

They need the patrols because they need the forest, which feeds and nurtures the Tolo River, which in turn provides the community with both its name and its drinking water. The forest also protects animals and plants for future generations.

From Logger to Ranger

Guisao began his transition from being a logger who harvested the forest to being a ranger who protects it after a community assembly four years ago, when the 1500 members of the Tolo River organization jointly decided to affirm their land rights and protect the forest. That transition, however, didn’t come easy because there were two major threats to the trees. One was external: wealthy businessmen in a nearby town were expanding their cattle ranches. The other was internal: community members like Guisao who logged the forest commercially and depended on the practice to feed their families.

To save the forest, the Tolo River people needed to wean themselves off the logging that paid their bills and find a way to pay for patrols that would keep outsiders from chopping down their trees.

A Global Challenge

It’s a challenge faced by forest people around the world, and one that impacts all of us. Indeed, the loss of pristine forest in the tropics and its blow to biodiversity and ecosystem services are massive and irreversible. To make matters even worse, carbon emissions from deforestation compound the problem of climate change every year as much as one fifth of the global carbon emissions may come from cut down trees, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Traditionally, there has been little funding for conservation, but this may be changing, and the Tolo River people are at the forefront of that change.

The Carbon Content of Trees

An additional benefit for both the community and the rest of the world is that the trees and the soil in their forest contain large quantities of carbon, which bonds with oxygen to form the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide when released into the atmosphere.

Fortunately for the community, many companies and governments around the world volunteer to fund forest conservation projects as an attempt to offset part of their own carbon emissions. This international initiative is named Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). The principle is simple: a company striving to be carbon neutral would first try to reduce its own carbon emissions as much as possible through more energy-efficient equipment and strict monitoring of its supply chain. Whatever emissions it could not reduce, it would offset by paying a forest community to protect the trees from clearing.

Measuring the Carbon

To best estimate the amount of carbon the Tolo River community could prevent from being emitted, COCOMASUR teamed up with Anthrotect, a U.S.-based organization that “works with community landholders to implement payment for ecosystem services projects that connect communities with emerging markets for carbon and biodiversity, according to documents filed with the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), which is the certification program under which they chose to become certified. The organizations then contracted forestry experts from Bogota, Medellin, and the US state of California who compared the forest with other unguarded forested areas nearby and concluded that roughly 13,000 hectares would be lost to cattle ranching, agriculture, and selective logging if defensive actions weren’t taken immediately. Based on the blend of trees in the forest and their average height and width, they pegged the total greenhouse gas emissions from that destruction at 2,800,000 tons of carbon dioxide over the next 30 years.

COCOMASUR and its partners then began the arduous process of protecting the forest by raising awareness of collective identity and rights, demarcating territorial boundaries, establishing regular community patrols and developing sustainable agricultural and silvopastoral practices.

Verifying the Results

In 2012, VCS-certified auditors visited the site and concluded that these actions had saved 170,000 trees containing about 28,000 tons of carbon. That carbon would have converted to over 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide if released into the atmosphere, or the equivalent of 20,000 cars being taken off the road for a year.

While the first tranche went largely to cover the cost of launching the project, future sales will be used to pay the forest patrol salaries, improve the community health care services, send young people to universities, and strengthen the community organization. The community uses this revenue to pay the forest patrol salaries, improve the community health care services, send young people to universities, and strengthen the community organization.

A Big Year for REDD

That year, half a billion dollars worth of carbon credit transactions took place in the voluntary carbon market, according to Ecosystem Marketplace’s 2013 State of Voluntary Carbon Markets Report. In addition, the United Nations is leading an initiative to streamline REDD projects around the world in anticipation that mandatory carbon offsetting might eventually become part of a new global climate treaty. During the latest Climate Conference in Warsaw in December 2013, all countries agreed on a forest conservation mechanism to be implemented in the years to come a large step forward for conservation projects around the world.

The Innovator’s Dillemma

But when the Tolo River people began their project, REDD was still a poorly-understood mechanism, and the VCS was untested. Critics weren’t convinced the standard could both deliver the environmental rigor it promised and keep out “carbon cowboys who they feared would run roughshod over the very indigenous people REDD was designed to protect.

Still, the Tolo River people were determined to succeed and remain so to this day: “Our community will always continue trying to protect our forest with or without the project. But having the project gives us the resources to do that, says community leader Aureliano Cí³rdoba.

It is crucially important to learn from mistakes and look for successful models for the sake of the forest, the people who live in it and the global climate.

This is the story of one community that found a way to do this right.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: Meet the Cattlemen

Tanya Dimitrova just graduated from University of California, Berkeley, with a masters degree in energy and resources. She lives in Texas and works as freelance science and environmental journalist.

This article is the fourth in a series. You can also view the previous installment here.

24 July 2014 | As a former collegiate wrestler,  Todd Lemons knew the look of an eager athlete ready to grapple, and  these orangutans had that look in spades.

He encountered them in the forest behind Orangutan Foundation International‘s (OFI) orphanage in Pangkalan Bun, on the island of Borneo. All were  adolescents who had witnessed the murder of one or both of their parents, and all of them owed their lives to the woman escorting him: OFI founder Birute Galdikas.

Instinctively, Lemons crouched to engage the first one to step forward. They waddled around in circles, each looking for an opening in the other’s defense. Finally, the orangutan lunged; Lemons intercepted; others loped into the fray. Soon, at the age of 40, Lemons was engulfed in a gaggle of rowdy red apes, all of them rolling and wrestling and – yes – laughing.

“It was at once the most amazing experience of my life and one of the most heart-wrenching,” he says. “Amazing because they’re better than us in many ways: They’re generous and intelligent, but they’re also naí¯ve, and they have an amazing sense of humor.” Heart-wrenching, he adds, because they don’t belong in an orphanage.

Emotional Engagement

Lemons had flown from Hong Kong to Borneo just hours earlier, and that first spontaneous encounter with orangutans provided what he calls “an early point-of-no-return” – his first emotional engagement with the orangs of the hutan – the “people of the forest” in the languages of both Indonesia and Malaysia. It also provided Galdikas with an opportunity to learn a bit about this hyperactive businessman who’d called her just a week earlier with a crazy plan to save the forest and had now shown up on her doorstep unannounced.

“I realized then that Todd loves the orangutans,” says Galdikas. “He still gets down and wrestles with them and rolls around like they do – it’s the most wonderful thing.”

Lemons would return to the orphanage scores of times in the coming years – sometimes alone, and sometimes with his Indonesian partner, Rusmin Widjajam, or with his American partner, Jim Procanik. Often they’d come for business, but just as often they’d come for respite from the David and Goliath struggle they found themselves enmeshed in as they struggled to save the forest.

“In my darkest hours throughout our epic five-year battle, I went back to the care center many times to strengthen my resolve,” says Lemons.

Muddling Through It

Impressed by the way Lemons connected with the orangutans, Galdikas asked him to accompany her on a boat ride to Camp Leakey, the rescue facility she built in the early 1970s with the support of her mentor, primatologist Louis Leakey. Lemons soon found himself teetering along underwater balance beams that served as a sort of jungle boardwalk in the dry season – which this wasn’t.

“I was surprised at the grace with which Birute navigated the slippery, unseen boards knee-deep,” he says. “I kept slipping off and spent half my time up to my chest in swamp water.” It was, he says, a visceral re-connection with the elements he’d always sought as a child but only found intermittently as an adult.

“I got my start in the Amazon, but I’d spent the past five years of my life manufacturing widgets in China,” he says. “Now I was back in the forest with a meaningful purpose, with wild-born orangutans, and with a world-renowned scientist who had made the cover of National Geographic twice.”

It was, he thought, a life his grandfather would approve of.

How the World Works

He and Galdikas spent the evening at Camp Leaky under a solitary solar-powered light bulb – in a setting that Lemons describes as “epic”.

“Up to then, I had looked at this from an academic and economic viewpoint,” he says. “Now, it was taking on profound philosophical tones. I began to feel like I could really make a difference in the world that my kids would inherit.”

Galdikas, however, still wasn’t sold. She’d hosted more than her share of wide-eyed idealists and overconfident businessmen over the years, and very few of them ended up doing anything of value for the orangutans. With the Seruyan Forest disappearing just over the horizon, she needed someone who not only wanted to make a difference but had both the smarts to get it done and the fortitude to see it through.

“I could feel Todd’s sincerity, but I still thought he was naí¯ve,” says Galdikas. “Nobody who’s not a native-born person will ever understand a new country completely.”

Lemons begs to differ. In his mind, Galdikas is more Indonesian than anything, even though she grew up in Canada. “She sometimes calls me ‘Mr. Todd’ – the way Indonesians call someone ‘Pak’ so-and-so,” he says. “She loves this country the way certain immigrants to the United States love their adopted home.”

She lectured Lemons on the value that Indonesians place on politeness, hierarchy and rules; and she warned him that the brashness that gets you to the top in California would come across as oafish on Kalimantan, the Indonesian word for Borneo. Lemons told Galdikas about his career in forestry, and how he’d navigated the cultures of Latin America and China. He said he was tired of the rat-race and was looking forward to working with conservationists and other “civilized” folk.

Her response took him aback.

“She read me the riot act,” says Lemons. “She told me that compared to doing business in China, doing conservation in Indonesia was a snake pit.”

Galdikas told him not to idealize the world of conservation. “There are some wonderful people in this field – some of the best I’ve ever met,” she says. “But I told him that when you start dealing with some of the big conservation groups, the fundraising tail is wagging the conservation dog.”

What’s more, she added, those dogs only see one pie of funding. “They’re all fighting over that pie behind the scenes,” she says.

Lemons countered that REDD would change all that because it would make the pie bigger.

A New Conservation Paradigm

REDD, he said, was part of a whole new economic paradigm built on the premise that our economy depends on our ecology, and that good land stewardship delivers a higher economic value than palm oil does. While some blamed market mechanisms for all the world’s ills, Lemons saw markets as a powerful but amoral tool that sometimes needed direction. REDD, he said, directed the power of the market into conservation.

“I loved what he was saying, but I wasn’t convinced it would work,” she says. “I knew there’d be opposition from people who don’t like markets, and so did he, but I also knew that a lot of the traditional conservationists would see him as treading on their turf.” As an anthropologist, she told Lemons, she’d learned a few things about turf wars, and she warned him it wouldn’t be pretty.

“It was an amazing lecture, about NGO culture and business culture and about Indonesian culture and North American culture,” says Lemons. “She was married to a Dyak chief, and as an anthropologist who straddles two cultures, she really understands the cosmology of the Indonesian people and how that cultural and historical worldview shapes the way they behave.”

As a Canadian, she also understood where Lemons was coming from, and she pointed out how his own cultural and historical worldview conditioned him to seek consistency, while Javanese cosmology embraced paradox.

“She gave me amazing advice early on that I didn’t even understand at the time,” he says. “But it rang clear and true as I found myself immersed in a very complex and foreign culture.”

Still, it was the ideological differences between the business world and the nonprofit world that he found most challenging – differences that he says he should have seen by the way REDD had evolved.

Chasms and Camaraderie

Long before there was REDD and its efforts to pay for the protection of trees based on their carbon content, there was the timber trade, which paid for forests based on their “merchantable” wood content. In order to pay for that merchantable wood, they had to measure it, and they became incredibly adept at doing so. After all, millions of dollars were at stake on every transaction, and they wanted to get it right. Lemons came from that world, and when he heard of REDD, he assumed the powers-that-be would just adopt the calculus of timber to save the forest rather than destroy it. He was wrong.

Galdikas, meanwhile, was beginning to think Lemons might actually be able to get the job done – not because of anything he said, but because of something he did.

“As we sat around barefoot on the floor with the Camp Leakey staff, Todd immediately picked up on the cultural taboo of exposing the bottom of ones feet to the other guests,” says Galdikas. “Also, they have a custom that when somebody in the group gets up, they kind of hunch over so as not to tower over the other guests.”

Like the ubiquitous Western handshake, the Indonesian hunch is a modern custom with traditional roots: the Dyaks of Indonesia always kept their heads lower than that of the king’s, and today it’s just good manners. Galdikas says that Lemons picked up on that right away, too. “That’s when I realized he might have a chance at navigating the complexities of Indonesian society,” she says.

But Lemons had questions of his own.

The Peat Bog Wild Card

His questions weren’t about Galdikas – after all, she was a public figure, and he’d researched her thoroughly – but he’d been spooked by those scraggly trees that dominated the landscape. “I came from a forestry background, and I knew those trees didn’t hold enough carbon to cover the cost of measuring them,” he says.

He had a list of criteria that would have to be met if this thing was going to work commercially: the forest would have to be in danger (check). It would have to be home to an endangered species (check). It would have to contain massive amounts of carbon (question mark).

Lemons knew that Kalimantan’s carbon was locked in peat bogs, because those bogs made headlines around the world when the El Nií±o draught lit them up  in 1997 and 2003. On satellite images, those bogs looked like smoke bombs, and scientists estimated they pumped 200 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere  in 1997 alone. That translates into 734 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in the air, or the equivalent of 180 million extra cars on the road.

“I know there are peat forests on Kalimantan,” Lemons told Galdikas. “But where are they?”

“We’ve been knee-deep in one all day,” she laughed. “Well, I’ve been knee-deep; you’ve been neck-deep – but it’s the same forest, just on the other side of the park.”

And that, says Lemons, is when it all finally fell into place. “Somehow, I had stumbled into a peat swamp forest that provided a critical buffer zone to a national park, home to one of maybe four remaining forests with high-density relic populations of wild orangutans,” he says. “My potential partner was a conservation rock star, and if there was ever a forest that met the definition of being under ‘imminent threat’, this was it.”

This forest, he told her, had environmental value, and REDD made it possible to convert that to economic value. Economically, he said, it wasn’t worth more alive than dead, but it was worth enough alive that they could use REDD to save it.

“We’ve been trying to save the Seruyan for seven years, and I’m out of options,” she said. “They’ve given it to palm oil, and in five years, it will be gone. If the entire eastern border goes to palm oil, they’ll deforest half the national park. They’ve already illegally deforested 2,000 hectares of the northern quadrant.”

She paused.

“OK,” she said. “Let’s do it. If you can save this forest, you’ll make a believer out of me.”

Next Installment: Birute visits the Minister of Forestry while Todd dives into the calculus of REDD.

This article was originally published in the Forest Carbon newsletter. Click here to read the original.

16 July 2014 | Ecosystem Marketplace’s third installment of our Palm Oil vs The Peatland Forest series is now live. In it, we meet Todd Lemons, an ‘ecosystem entrepreneur’ who, as a 20-something, found himself in the Bolivian rainforest sourcing hardwoods for major American furniture dealers. After finding beautiful pieces of mahogany in the scrap pile, Lemons implemented a “cut-to-size” program that required less wood for more furniture and developed an obsession with using sensible economics to address environmental challenges.

Years later, in 2007, he found himself in Borneo driving through a patchwork of palm-oil plantations and second-growth native forests on his way to Tanjung Puting National Park, a massive lowland peat swamp that has been amassing carbon for 10,000 years. Lemons didn’t know it at the time, but the trip was the first step in developing the Rimba Raya REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation of forests) project that would hold off the encroaching palm oil developers and prevent the annual release of more than 3.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

“We know now that peatland has about eight times as much carbon per hectare as a typical rainforest of the Amazon,” says Heru Prasetyo, the head of Indonesia’s REDD Task Force. “Back in 2007, no one really knew.”

As Steve Zwick reports, though, REDD didn’t create an “incentive” to save the forests. A typical palm-oil plantation generates $1,000 per hectare in pure profit – more than twenty-fold the income that could be generated from the sale of offsets. So REDD will not sway those responding to purely economic incentives, but it does create a financing mechanism that may make it possible for people who want to save forests to do so. The Rimba Raya project has sold five million tonnes of offsets since 2010 and verified another five million tonnes of emissions reductions, more than four million of which remain unsold.

The full series of stories will be available here.

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Help us spread the word!

Our survey for forest carbon project developers is available in English HERE (http://survey.ecosystemmarketplace.com/forestcarbon2014/) and in Spanish HERE http://survey.ecosystemmarketplace.com/es_forestcarbon2014/)

Responding to the survey is also the best way to get your project information updated on the Forest Carbon Portal, a hub of information for potential investors, researchers, and other market participants. We’re building a community there, and if you haven’t already, we’d love for you to join us. Once you do, your profile will appear in our Member Directory, and you will be able to post projects, jobs, and events on the Portal.

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INTERNATIONAL POLICY Chile, Vietnam forests get the nod The World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) Carbon Fund accepted Chile and Vietnam into its pipeline last month, allocating up to $650,000 for each country to develop a full proposal for implementing national REDD+. The Republic of the Congo and Peru also presented Program Idea Notes; the Republic of the Congo’s was provisionally accepted while Peru was asked to make deeper revisions. Cambodia, Colombia, Guatemala, Indonesia and Madagascar also presented early ideas for national REDD+ programs, and the FCPF offered feedback, from clarifying land concessions in Cambodia to explaining how current REDD+ projects will fit into a nested national program in Guatemala. NATIONAL STRATEGY AND CAPACITY Dazed and confused Laos would have started selling carbon offsets last year, but its REDD readiness process has been stalled because “officials from state agencies in charge of the work do not understand what they were supposed to do,” said Khamphay Manivong, the country’s deputy director general of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s Forest Department. Laos has plans to protect 9.5 million hectares of forests and restore forest cover to 65% of the country by 2015. The FCPF has committed up to $3.6 million to Laos’ program. PROJECT DEVELOPMENT O little watershed of Bethlehem The Bethlehem Authority that manages the forested watershed of Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains recently struck a deal with Disney, which will purchase forest carbon offsets from a 20,000-acre project. The four-year contract with the entertainment giant will replace a previous agreement with automaker Chevrolet. The authority estimates that the sale of offsets will bring in $140,000 to $170,000 annually, which it will use to improve the aging water system and protect the forest. For Disney – long a lover of forestry projects as this Ecosystem Marketplace story noted – buying offsets from this project helps the company meet its environmental goals such as reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 50% by 2013 (a goal it achieved). FINANCE AND ECONOMICS REDD scores another goal The 20 members of the United Nations (UN) REDD Programme Policy Board last week approved $35.5 million in readiness funding, including allocations to the national programs of Argentina, Cote d’Ivoire and Mongolia in the amounts of $3.8 million, $3.2 million, and $4.0 million, respectively. Argentina’s program will address soy production as one of the major drivers of deforestation, Cote d’Ivoire’s will consider land competition for the cocoa, timber and rubber industries, and Mongolia’s is the first funded national REDD program for boreal forest. Meanwhile, the UN’s Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice met and discussed the importance of the non-carbon benefits of REDD, but punted on deciding how (and whether) to incentivize those benefits. HUMAN DIMENSION Ebola caused by deforestation? An ongoing Ebola outbreak, which as of July 1 has claimed 467 lives in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, may be linked to deforestation, scientists say. As habitat is destroyed, chimpanzees, gorillas and bats that may carry the disease have more frequent contact with humans. “The increase in Ebola outbreaks since 1994 is frequently associated with drastic changes in forest ecosystems in tropical Africa,” according to a 2012 study in the Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Research. Other researchers, however, reject the neat “outbreak narrative,” claiming there are additional factors at play. A picture’s worth a thousand trees Photographer and Brazilian native Rodrigo Baleia spent a dozen years flying 218,000 miles back and forth across the Amazon rainforest, photographing its destruction at the hands of cattle ranchers, loggers and developers. “I live this torment,” he says, “because I’m not sure if my work was good or strong enough to make an effective change in people’s lives.” He also observes that “the deforestation areas are smaller than they used to be.” His photographs can be viewed in The Wall Street Journal. Colombia: Post-conflict, post-deforestation? Aureliano Cí³rdoba, a leader of an Afro-Colombian community living along the Tolo River, fled to Panama during the Colombian civil war and returned in 2001 to find that cattle ranching posed a continuing threat to his village’s forests – its only source of fresh water. Three years ago, his community decided not to log its 32,000 acres of rainforest, and began working with Brodie Ferguson, now founder of carbon project developer Anthrotect, to draft a proposal for a REDD project. Last year, the community sold 70,000 carbon offsets at about $9 per tonne (tCO2e) – more than twice the $4.2/tCO2e average price for REDD offsets, according to Ecosystem Marketplace’s State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets 2014 report. Colombian oil services firm Independence bought 20,000 offsets from the project. PUBLICATIONS The 54-million-tonne loophole Forest degradation in the Amazon may be releasing 54 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per year – up to 40% of the emissions from deforestation, according to a study published in Global Change Biology. The impacts of degradation, including selective timber extraction, burning and fragmentation are difficult to detect using satellite data alone, so the study paired satellite imagery with field study. Japan breaking the rules of the forests Japan, the fourth largest consumer of wood products globally, is unfortunately getting much of its supply from illegally sourced timber. San Xia Economic and Trade Company, one of the largest importers of illicitly cut Russian pine and ash, is selling 90% of its finished products to Japan, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). “Importing cheap illegal wood from eastern Russia is a tragic crime of convenience that directly undercuts Japanese business trying to play by the rules,” said Kate Horner, Director of Forest Campaigns at EIA. REDD could fly high Emissions from aviation are expected to quadruple by 2050, and technology improvement and efficiency gains won’t compensate for the increasing number of flights. If offsets are used to ‘cap’ net emissions from the aviation industry, demand could reach hundreds of millions of tonnes in 2030, according to a recent analysis by climate and energy consultant Adam Whitmore. REDD offsets are potentially positioned to fill this level of volume. The International Civil Aviation Organization last year agreed to look at using market-based mechanisms to cap net international aviation emissions at 2020 levels. JOBS Sector Leader REDD+ – SNV Netherlands Development Organization Based in Vientiane, Laos, the Sector Leader REDD+ will be responsible for steering SNV’s REDD+ programs in Laos, working in close collaboration with the management team and other sector leaders. The position requires five years of relevant experience in program or project management, strong knowledge and experience in REDD+ approaches and concepts, and experience in forestry inventory and land use planning in Southeast Asia. Knowledge of Geographical Information Systems and an entrepreneurial attitude are desirable. – Read more about the position here Communication Consultant – The Forests Dialogue Based in New Haven, Connecticut, the Communication Consultant will develop and execute communications strategies in alignment with The Forests Dialogue’s strategic plan and goal of reducing conflict among stakeholders over the use and protection of vital forest resources. The position requires building clear and consistent programmatic messaging, drafting press releases and media advisories, and engaging key audiences on social media. The consultant is expected to travel internationally regularly and will work an average of 20 hours per week. – Read more about the position here UN-REDD MRV Forestry Officer for the Congo Basin Region – Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Based in Nairobi, Kenya, the Forestry Officer will provide technical and policy expertise to support the implementation of the FAO’s Strategic Objectives in the Congo Basin. The position requires helping countries to access UN-REDD support and providing guidance on monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) frameworks. The ideal candidate will have an advanced degree, seven years of relevant experience in the field of forest resources monitoring and assessment or forest management, and working knowledge of English and French (with some knowledge of Spanish). – Read more about the position here Research Assistant, Carbon Monitoring, Land Use and Social Forestry – Woods Hole Research Center Based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the Research Assistant will work with Project Equateur, a pilot REDD+ project in Equateur Province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The position requires working on community-level REDD+ carbon monitoring and land use planning research, development, and capacity building activities, and spending lengthy periods in Mbandaka, Equateur Province. The successful candidate with have an advanced degree, at least two years of international work experience in forestry, and excellent command of written and spoken French. – Read more about the position here Illegal Logging Lawyer – ClientEarth Based in London, United Kingdom, the Illegal Logging Lawyer will work on strengthening the implementation and enforcement of the European Union (EU) Timber Regulation, which seeks to prevent illegally logged timber from entering the EU market. The position is for a lawyer with outstanding legal, analytical and strategic skills and will require building and maintaining relationships with key partners in the EU and internationally, as well as representing ClientEarth’s work to external audiences. – Read more about the position here See more jobs on the Forest Carbon Portal jobs page ABOUT THE FOREST CARBON PORTAL The Forest Carbon Portal provides relevant daily news, a bi-weekly news brief, feature articles, a calendar of events, a searchable member directory, a jobs board, a library of tools and resources. The Portal also includes the Forest Carbon Project Inventory, an international database of projects including those in the pipeline. Projects are described with consistent ‘nutrition labels’ and allow viewers to contact project developers. ABOUT THE ECOSYSTEM MARKETPLACE Ecosystem Marketplace is a project of Forest Trends, a tax-exempt corporation under Section 501(c)3. This newsletter and other dimensions of our voluntary carbon markets program are funded by a series of international development agencies, philanthropic foundations, and private sector organizations. For more information on donating to Ecosystem Marketplace, please contact [email protected].

Click here to read this article in its original format.

This article is second in a series.

23 June 2014 | Pak Ahmed has a little game he used to play, sometimes by himself, and sometimes with friends.

He’d begin just after the sun woke the sky above his village of Telaga Pulang, which stands on stilts along the eastern bank of Borneo’s Seruyan River. He’d continue as he rolled his first cigarette of the day and traversed the wooden bridge to the boardwalk that serves as the village’s spine. Then he’d climb into his hand-hewn  klotok,  fire its engine, and klatok-tok-tokk out into the broad, dead river – where he knew the game would end, and not the way he hoped.

Soon, children would be clattering along the elevated structure in their school uniforms, and their mothers would gather outside the two shacks that serve as general stores, each stocked with soaps, salves, and other sundries derived from the product that was slowly enslaving them.

“Before Palm Oil came, we fished from about 6am to noon, and then relaxed,” he says. “Sometimes, we hunted in the woods in the afternoon.”

Like most of the people of Telaga Pulang, he speaks of the product as if it were a sentient entity devouring the forest. For them, Palm Oil isn’t just a fatty acid used in toothpaste and cereal. It’s a proper noun encompassing the product, the plantations, the imported workers, and the dead river.

Palm Oil, he explains, came to this part of Borneo in 2005, when workers carved shallow drainage canals into the soft peat soil on the western bank of the river, across from Telaga Pulang. Then they strategically removed teak and other choice timbers before grinding 10,000 hectares of forest into pulp, murdering any orangutans who got in their way and kidnapping the now-homeless sun bears, clouded leopards and gibbon apes, which they sold as exotic pets.

After dispatching the forest and its inhabitants, the workers inserted palm saplings as far as Pak Ahmed could see. Then they fertilized the saplings, and the fertilizer dribbled down the canals and into the river, where it fed massive algae blooms that killed the fish and destroyed the economy of his village. Mines came, too, and their poisons killed more fish, so upstream fishermen began dropping explosives instead of nets, depleting the stocks even further.

Yet, as he pulled his bamboo cage up out of the water on this day in 2007, Pak Ahmed still indulged that little tingle of hope that kept him coming back day after day, week after week – for months after the rest of his family and most of his neighbors had gone to work for Palm Oil. That tingle was to him what the unturned card was to the blackjack addict, and it was the only prize his game ever yielded anymore, because the game was this: as he awakened and rowed and worked, Pak Ahmed tried to pretend that he didn’t know what he’d find when he pulled his bamboo traps up from those dead waters.

Before the mud parted and the cage emerged into the light, he could still imagine it was 2005 instead of 2007.

But eventually the  cage did emerge, and in it Pak Ahmed saw what he knew he’d see: dozens of baby “fingerlings” flopping desperately in a basket designed for one or two fat adults 100 times their size. In terms of saleable product, his hauls were down 90%, and it was about to get worse.

A company called PT Best had laid claim to the entire Seruyan Forest, which is a massive natural filtration system that regulates water flows and provides non-timber forest products like honey, wax, and wild rubber for hundreds of other villagers. It also acts as a protective buffer to a quarter-million hectares of peat forest in the Tanjung Puting National park, which means its destruction would affect the rest of us, too.

That’s because peat is a thick, rich loam of decaying plants that have been accumulating for thousands of years, locking up carbon in the process. If the peatland went, it would release hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change.

Eight thousand miles to the west, Biruté Galdikas was engaged in her own variation of the game as she frantically zipped between appointments in Los Angeles, where she’d gone in a futile effort to raise the money she needed to save Pak Ahmed’s forest.

Like the Seruyan River, the City of Angels had been a fertile fishing ground. It served as Galdikas’s fundraising hub and helped her build Orangutan Foundation International (OFI) into a bulwark against the slaughter of orangutans in the Tanjung Puting.

Unlike the Seruyan, however, Los Angeles hadn’t stopped delivering. It had simply been eclipsed by Palm Oil, which generates roughly $1 million in profit per year for every thousand hectares harvested. That’s  more than OFI’s entire operating budget, and PT Best had a license to convert 150,000 hectares of forest to palm-oil plantation. Each of those hectares would become another cog in a cash machine that Galdikas knew she could never match. Yet, like Pak Ahmed, she kept going back to the source that had served her so well, day after day, week after week, month after month.

That’s what she was doing when her phone rang.

“I remember it clearly,” she says. “This man says he’s calling from Shanghai, China, and he won’t stop talking, won’t let me get a word in edgewise, and then he asks me – and I’ll never forget this – he asks me if there’s a forest that needs to be saved.”

The man’s name was Todd Lemons, a serial entrepreneur from the United States who’d grown up listening to his grandfather’s tales of his adventures in the Amazon and reading National Geographic. It was on the magazine’s October, 1975 cover that he first encountered Galdikas. Although less than 30 years old when the photo was taken, she was already a rock star in the world of primatology, and she looked the part. Strikingly attractive, her gaze was brooding and world-weary and motherly all at once. A baby orangutan clung to her neck, and an adolescent lolled playfully in front of her. Both were orphans, and both had suffered the trauma of seeing their mothers murdered before their eyes.

She was one of three researchers known then as the “Trimates”, the others being Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. The name came from their mentor, Louis Leakey, who had helped Galdikas launch the operation that would become OFI. Over the decades, she had rescued and rehabilitated thousands of orphaned orangutans, and in 2001 she asked for permission to expand into the Seruyan Forest.

Her application, however, disappeared into the local bureaucracy, and a few years later she learned that PT Best, working through subsidiaries, had gotten concessions to convert the entire forest into a palm-oil plantation. Now, with one hand on her steering wheel and the other holding her phone to her ear as she navigated Los Angeles traffic, she was fighting to save the forest from certain destruction.

“When Todd called, I thought it was like a deus ex machina – you know, like in the old Greek plays? When the writer got himself into a mess, he’d lower Zeus down in a machine, and he’d pop out and save the day,” she says. “But then he  started going on and on about how trees capture carbon and people would pay us to save the trees to stop global warming, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh, a carbon cowboy.'”

Still, something kept her on the phone. Maybe it was his knowledge of forestry. Or maybe it was just curiosity on her part. Whatever it was, when they hung up, she’d pegged him as sincere and knowlegeable about the timber trade –  but naí¯ve about the rest of the world.

He called again about a week later, this time from his home in Hong Kong, and caught her on her way to Los Angeles International Airport.

“I was in a hurry,” she says. “So I told him that if he was serious, he’d have to come and visit me in in Pangkalan Bun.”

About a week after that, she heard a knock on her door. It was Lemons.

Next Week: Who is Todd Lemons?

As fºtbol fans tune in for the World Cup, host country Brazil’s emissions have also been in the spotlight. The International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) pledged to offset all direct emissions from the event, while local companies and foreign visitors alike have been encouraged to offset their impact. Local project developer, Mariama Vendramini of Biof­lica, says this represents one of several initiatives that has helped increase domestic interest in forestry offsets.

18 June 2014 | While emissions reduction projects are dispersed across the world’s fifth largest country, recent initiatives have caught the attention of local businesses. In addition to FIFA’s offsetting goals, Brazil has encouraged private companies to donate offsets for the World Cup. So far, 11 companies have received a Low Carbon seal – representing 30% of the estimated emissions generated – to use in advertising during the games. This marks the first time private sector donations have been used in the quadrennial event.

Last year, offsetting in Brazil also scored international headlines when the Brazilian costmetics giant Natura Cosmeticos purchased 120,000 tonnes of carbon from the Paiter-Surui people. The project marked the first indigenous REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) project in the world.

Mariama Vendramini, Finance and Commercial Director of Biof­lica, spoke to Ecosystem Marketplace’s Kelley Hamrick about the impact of these and other trends in Brazil. Biof­lica, a Brazilian company working to conserve the rainforest through environmental markets, has currently invested in and developed five REDD projects throughout Brazil’s western states.

KH: What have you seen in the Brazilian market this year? MV: We’ve been seeing a scattered market. We’ve seen demand mostly for small volumes and corporate social responsibility (CSR) purposes. We have our national plan on climate change that, within other activities, sets a cap on important sectors of Brazil’s economy: the largest emitters from sectors such as industry, agriculture, mining and transportation. So far they are in the phase of inventories development. On average and except land use, they have a 5% reduction target over the estimated level of emissions in 2020 considering 2005 as a base year. So that’s what’s happening on the compliance side. While this happens, companies that are more consumer-driven will do their CSR activities and some of them are considering offsets. So there are a few companies that have been steadily buying volumes on the voluntary market.

KH: It sounds like most are domestic?

MV: We have domestic companies but we also have Brazilian branches and subsidiaries of multi-nationals. So it’s not only Brazilians, but Brazilian companies are main front runners in sustainability. All are still learning what REDD+ is. We’ve found a little bit of skepticism from these companies because REDD+ was out of Clean Development Mechanism and we had all these struggles with technical aspects. But this changed as companies are getting to know more about REDD+, technical issues have been rapidly evolving and as the Warsaw Platform for REDD+ brought legitimacy by turning REDD+ into a wide accepted tool to tackle climate change under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. People are getting to know REDD+ better and understanding that projects and programs on the ground need to be carried out so that local realities can be changed and result in aggregate decline of deforestation.

Natura, a Brazilian company, bought significant amounts from the Surui project last year and this was good as a signal to other companies. Other examples come from the Brazilian chain of gas stations Ipiranga, Brazilian subsidiaries of the French Ticket Edenred and of the Spanish Santander. There are other companies moving the market with lower volumes still but as they get to know the mechanism more, they are getting more interested. But we’re still on the way with it. There are a few issues that need to be demystified: first is the carbon management itself, then the use of offsets and afterwards advancing towards REDD+ as a high value added type of offset. This is where we are in the Brazilian market today.

KH: The World Cup might help with awareness, right?

MV: Exactly. And we see that there are a few prompts that are being developed in parallel with each other. There is the Brazilian government buying CERs and asking for companies to donate those CERs to be retired in the name of the government. An official stamp will then certify to the public that Brazil’s official emissions were made neutral.
There’s also FIFA’s initiative to offset their emissions in a program managed by BP Target Neutral. Then there are other initiatives driven by sponsors on their own emissions, such as the one done by TAM Airlines on offsetting their flights during the World Cup.

KH: Any other developments?

MV: We are also working with IPAM and GCP on the development of a Brazilian business case for an interim finance facility for REDD+. It would work as a linkage between what we have of forest supply that is being developed until 2020 and the potential Brazilian emissions reductions market that we are assuming will start operating in 2020. Our climate change national policy already mentions a Brazilian market as a tool to reduce emissions, and we are building upon that with a proposition of a viable mechanism to finance forestry emissions reductions generated until 2020. We’re working in many ways to scale up demand for REDD+.

KH: What are your future predictions about demand? Will these policies help?

MV: Demand will rise as public awareness grows with examples such as the World Cup’s, Natura’s and other companies’ activities on the voluntary market. And it has a shifting potential with a push from the to-be-established Paris agreement. Despite of the level of commitment to be assumed, we are already seeing the development of local mechanisms to price carbon that are popping up around the world pushed by this trend. We are seeing it happening within countries that had no reductions commitments under Kyoto. New pricing mechanisms being established around the world, recognition of REDD+ under the Convention and the increasing gap of emissions reductions needed to be made to keep us under a secure level or temperature increase put us in a path where demand for REDD+ will have to scale up.

27 May 2014 | More than 4 million people die each year from strokes, cancer and cardiopulmonary diseases caused by indoor cooking, according to the World Health Organization. That’s more than AIDSs, malaria, and tuberculosis combined, and it’s a key reason corporations are channeling their enviro-dollars into carbon offset projects that fund the distribution of clean cookstove technology.

Now, governments are looking at the co-benefits of cookstoves and are willing to pay above-average prices to achieve them. Last year, the Swedish Energy Agency (SEA) purchased carbon offsets to fund the distribution of clean cookstoves, opening the door to new opportunities for cookstove project developers – and, in doing so, further blurring the lines between voluntary and compliance markets.

Cookstoves on the Rise

Ecosystem Marketplace and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (“the Alliance”) first collaborated in 2013 to track carbon finance for cookstove projects, finding that the projects’ additional social, economic and environmental benefits (“co-benefits”) were exactly what buyers are looking for.

Read more about the EM/Alliance report here.

Ecosystem Marketplace’s 2014 State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets report notes that buyers paid above average prices – $9.2 per tonne of carbon dioxide eliminated – to buy carbon offsets from cookstove distribution projects that downsize household CO2.

Click here to see a demonstration of clean cookstoves
and learn how carbon finance pays for their distribution.

The number of cookstove project developers relying on carbon finance rose fourfold in Alliance’s Results Report last year – representing half of the organization’s 246 survey respondents. Demand for their offsets was virtually evenly split between companies using offsets to comply with the EU’s regional carbon emissions cap (aka the “compliance market”), and those purchasing offsets to fulfill voluntary corporate social responsibility targets (aka the “voluntary market”). Together, they offset emissions equivalent to 16.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

But such an even split is uncommon, given that regulation-based demand typically dwarfs voluntary action. “Having a 50-50 split in projects is very unusual to find in the carbon market,” noted Grattan MacGiffin, a manager at EcoInvest Services.

In a world of less-than-optimistic outlooks for the fate of the EU-driven Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and of a voluntary market full of competing offset project types like avoided deforestation, this balance merits deeper examination.

Tipping the Scales?

Late 2013 saw two large-scale contracts which could tilt the balance towards the compliance market. Both Climate Care and UpEnergy secured forward contracts with the Swedish Energy Agency to deliver 500,000 offsets each by 2020; amounts they said were not possible from any other buyers.

“My personal experience in the voluntary market over the last six months is that …it’s such a buyer’s market that nobody will sign forward contracts. So if one is looking for significant deal sizes that you can actually plan around and actually build a business around in the long term, you have to go to the CDM markets now and you have to have sovereign buyers making these above-market commitments,” said Erik Wurster of UpEnergy.

Yet even these contracts aren’t perfect. Both organizations admitted they would have preferred even larger contracts – ideally, closer to 1,000,000 offsets. “We still have to worry about outgrowing the contract,” said Tom Morton, Director of Climate Care.

The Sweden Energy Agency didn’t just fund Climate Care and UpEnergy last year – the country specifically sought out cookstoves projects from around the world to fund. While these projects had to meet baseline criteria, officials then judged each shortlisted project on an individual basis and tried to capture a spread of initiatives, explained Kenneth Moellersten, a Senior Scientific Advisor of The Swedish Energy Agency.

“We could prioritize other types of activities where emissions reductions can be achieved at a lower cost,” he said. “So choosing to prioritize cookstoves programs is a way of demonstrating that we’re prepared to be paying a premium to programs or projects that have clear co-benefits as well, besides emissions reductions.”

Facing Forward

Moellersten confirmed that Sweden is looking at an increasing number of above-average pricing and/or creative ways of paying projects for demonstrated environmental performance (i.e “pay for performance”) instead of simply purchasing the cheapest Certified Emission Reductions (CER) available.

Luckily for large-scale projects, Sweden’s not the only country considering this. The country has joined several multi-lateral initiatives seeking to address this issue, including the World Bank’s Carbon Initiative for Development (Ci-Dev), which seeks to provide performance-based payments to the world’s poorest countries.

The Ci-Dev Carbon Fund targets carbon projects that focus on clean energy technologies. Recently, the Fund received additional financial support from Sweden, the United Kingdom and the Swiss-based ClimateCent Foundation, in the form of a $125 million pledge.

While the primary actors supporting payment for performance mechanisms for cookstoves remains limited, Morton believes more will appear in the future. “There’s a growing trend – Sweden won’t be the last,” he argued. “European countries are acting because they want to salvage the CDM. They believe in it.”

“Compliance” in Name Only?

With states now joining companies to pay above-average prices for compliance cookstove credits, the compliance market has never looked more like the voluntary market.

The current compliance market for “high impact” projects like cookstoves hardly reflects the commoditized instrument envisioned in the initial CDM documents.
“In a perfect world, [cookstove projects] would all be compliance” explains Adrian Rimmer, CEO of the Gold Standard Foundation. “But there simply isn’t the available price. So what you have is a situation where those CDM projects that were being done have been sold in the voluntary market for a long time. Mostly what they’re doing is selling CERs to voluntary buyers.”

For those cookstove projects still sold within the compliance market, the prices are decided on a project-level basis instead of through impartial market forces of supply and demand. In this sense, said Wurster, the current compliance market already follows those key defining characteristics of the voluntary market: lack of price transparency and lack of liquidity.

As states like Sweden start to prioritize a credit’s co-benefits, and are willing to pay extra for it, the lines are even more blurred. When discussing the SEA’s experience with project developers, Moellersten said that the price paid varied from project to project. One project might work with very poor households and need a larger subsidy to be sustainable; another may only need a bit of additional income for scaling up their project. It was determined on a case by case basis, similar to voluntary cookstove transactions.

Following the Money

However, this isn’t to suggest that the voluntary market is out of the picture. A closer look at the Results Report 2012 data reveals that credits sold on the voluntary markets earned an average $11/tCO2e – significantly more than the compliance market’s $9.3/tCO2e average.

While both CERs and Verified Emission Reductions (VER) may be sold on the voluntary markets, the bureaucratic tape surrounding CERs means such projects take longer to develop. All CER projects must abide by CDM regulations, which include getting a country level sign-off on the project from the Designated National Authority (DNA). If both project developer and DNA know their carbon, the project might not take too long to get off the ground; but if either is inexperienced, businesses risk losing money during the long processing period.

Furthermore, many credits sold on both the compliance and voluntary markets gained additional certification through the Gold Standard (a full 75%, according to this study by the Stockholm Environment Institute; including 40% of all compliance market cookstove credits).

Though the label isn’t required, buyers value the sustainable development aspects, Rimmer explained. Voluntary buyers don’t just buy offsets for their emissions-reductions value. “The carbon is almost secondary,” MacGiffin agreed, when referencing EcoInvest’s experiences in the cookstove sector, including its early stage project in Malawi.

In effect, the CER credits must meet two sets of additional costs – from the CDM and Gold Standard – compared to VER credits. Thus project developers face a choice: risk longer transaction times for the potential to sell larger volumes of credits to the compliance market – and if not, retaining the flexibility to sell to the voluntary – or take the more straight-forward VER route for less time and potentially higher payments.

So will we see a change in the proportion of cookstove compliance and voluntary offsets in this year’s Results Report, to be released in September? Only the data will tell.

Note: Previously, this article cited the  2013 State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets  report, which found that buyers paid $11.2 per tonne.  

Additional resources

The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) recently surveyed 23 subnational forest carbon projects in Brazil, Peru, Cameroon, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Their findings? Project proponents are driven to save forests, but a lack of demand and unclear tenure remain their biggest challenges.

This article was originally posted in CIFOR’s blog. Click here to read the original.

29 April 2014 | Bogor | Indonesia | Actions must be taken to clarify land tenure in forest-rich developing countries, and to improve the economic viability of REDD+ or risk jeopardizing efforts to reduce deforestation and mitigate climate change, a new study based on 23 forest carbon initiatives suggests.  

Hundreds of pilot initiatives designed to test the feasibility of REDD+, or Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, have got under way in recent years. But with obstacles mounting and a climate agreement still elusive, some initiative proponents are losing their enthusiasm for REDD+, according to the study, led by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

“The initiative proponents are a spirited, determined group of people who believe in what they’re doing to protect forests,” said William Sunderlin, principal scientist at CIFOR and lead author of The Challenge of Establishing REDD+ on the Ground: Insights from 23 Subnational Initiatives in Six Countries.

“But they’re encountering major challenges whose root causes lie outside their project boundaries, particularly tenure insecurity and what we call the ‘disadvantageous economics’ of REDD+,” Sunderlin said. “These subnational initiatives need more committed support from national and international processes to create circumstances that allow REDD+ to function as intended.”

REDD+ emerged in 2007 as a promising mechanism to slow anthropogenic climate change by providing financial incentives to keep forests standing, given that forests absorb carbon from the atmosphere and that deforestation and forest degradation contribute up to 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. For example, in Indonesia, the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, more than 75 percent of emissions come from conversion of forests to farmland, agriculture and peat fires — roughly equivalent to emissions from about 400 million cars each year.

What makes REDD+ different from previous — and generally unsuccessful — efforts to reduce deforestation is that it is based on performance-based incentives. As originally conceived, REDD+ would generate a revenue stream by placing a financial value on carbon, with forest managers receiving a share of that revenue only if they actually achieved emission reductions or enhanced carbon stocks.

“Conditional incentives give REDD+ an extra point of leverage, but for this system to work, there must be a clear stream of income and it must be clear who is entitled to benefit,” Sunderlin said.

“Our study shows that these aspects in particular are weak, and this is where attention needs to be focused.”

A Contested Landscape

Insecurity over tenure — the right to own, access or use land — remains the biggest challenge for proponents, the study found.

“REDD+ is being established in places where tenure rules are often unclear and contested,” Sunderlin said.

“But the REDD+ rewards system requires clarity over who holds the right to forests or carbon, who is responsible for reducing emissions, and who can claim the benefits.”

In an earlier survey of villages in five countries involved in REDD+, more than half of the respondents reported that at least some of their tenure is insecure, and more than a fifth had been unable to exclude unwanted outsiders. Furthermore, as tenure problems are generally national in scope and origin, resolving them often lies outside proponents’ control.

The challenge, while daunting, is not insurmountable, Sunderlin notes, as path-breaking tenure reforms are beginning to take shape.

In Indonesia, for example, the government has launched the One Map Initiative to improve tenure and land-use planning, and last year a Constitutional Court ruling aimed to grant indigenous people land ownership rights.

The Highest Bidder

Yet for anyone to benefit, REDD+ must generate income in the first place, and the REDD+ revenue stream originally envisioned through trading carbon credits on carbon markets has fallen short of targets.

Undermining efforts to generate revenue are the lack of a binding international climate agreement to induce regulatory changes, weak carbon markets and the ongoing dominance of powerful business interests, according to the study.

“If you think of REDD+ as a bidding process in an auction, where those who make the highest bid can control forest land use, the bid offered by big agricultural companies often outcompetes what can be offered by REDD+,” Sunderlin said.

“This could change with the establishment of new conditions — some combination of development assistance, international or national funds, or a market-based mechanism — that can generate a stream of income from REDD+ and cover the opportunity costs of forest conversion.”

The existing funding gap is estimated at US$15 billion to US$48 billion by 2020, with the supply of carbon credits outstripping demand by 13 to 39 times, according to the International Forest Finance Project. Initiatives such as California’s cap-and-trade program show promise for generating revenue through carbon markets, but, Sunderlin said, “there is still an urgent need for something that does not yet exist.”

Nevertheless, in combination with research turning a spotlight on challenges and possible solutions, the positive developments under way and increasing impetus to act can lead to “breakthrough solutions,” he added.

“There is growing awareness among governments that tenure problems and the economics of REDD+ are fundamental and need to be resolved soon,” Sunderlin said.

“You can’t rule out the possibility of dramatic improvement in climate change mitigation policy in the next few years — simply because world leaders cannot afford to ignore climate change anymore.”

For more information about the topics of this research, please contact William Sunderlin at [email protected].

Katoomba XX kicks off on Earth Day in Lima, Peru, and just in time – new UN Food and Agricultural Organization data shows that emissions from agriculture, forestry and fisheries have nearly doubled over the past half century. At the ninth meeting of the Carbon Fund, efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation did, however, make some headway, with four nations’ REDD+ proposals approved. This unlocks a potential $50 million to $70 million in financing for each country.

This article was originally published in the Forest Carbon newsletter. Click here to read the original.

 24 April 2014 | Forest Trends’ Katoomba events are known for bringing people who don’t always talk to each other – soy tycoons and environment ministers, for instance – together to discuss practical solutions to major ecosystem services problems. The twentieth event, which begins today in Lima, Peru, has this kind of ambitious agenda. The theme is alignment. Attendees will consider how climate change, forests, water and people are deeply intertwined, and how payment for ecosystem services (PES) strategies addressing these issues must align, too. Current events in Peru provide an interesting (albeit frustrating) backdrop: The country’s comprehensive PES law, in development for six years now, was finally slated to be formally debated before the National Congress last week – but that debate has been delayed yet again.  

Katoomba speakers will include Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Peru’s Minister of Environment; Almir Surui, the Chief of the Paiter Surui people in Brazil; Rachel Kyte, World Bank Vice President and Special Envoy for Climate Change; Cesar Augusto Garcia, Director of Science and Technology at the Colombian Cattlemen Federation; and many more diverse actors from the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Discussions from the event will lead into the twentieth United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties, to be held in Lima in December.
   

Conversations between conservationists and big agriculture, policymakers and business executives are especially urgent in light of new UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) data that shows emissions from agriculture, forestry and fisheries have nearly doubled over the past half century and could increase another 30% by 2050. The largest source of agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is livestock methane (from belches), followed by synthetic fertilizers, methane releases in rice paddies, and savannah-burning. Net GHG emissions due to land use change (mainly forests converting to other land uses) fell almost 10% between 2001 and 2010, but still averaged four billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) per year.
   

Efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation did, however, make some headway during the ninth meeting of the Carbon Fund held in Belgium from April 9 to 11. Launched in 2011 by the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, the Carbon Fund is meant to provide performance-based payments to countries that make significant progress in Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation of forests (REDD). Four of those countries’ REDD+ proposals – Nepal’s, Ghana’s, Mexico’s, and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) – were selected at the meeting, and may each receive between $50 million and $70 million in financing. Mexico’s National Forestry Commission has already signed an agreement to receive $3.8 million. Chile’s and the Republic of Congo’s proposals were not selected this time around, but they’ll have another chance in June when the Carbon Fund will consider five to seven more countries vying for their available $465 million.
   

More stories from the forest carbon markets are summarized below, so keep reading!

If you have comments or would like to submit news stories, write to us at [email protected].

INTERNATIONAL POLICY A price tag beyond carbon? How should non-carbon benefits (NCBs) be incorporated into REDD? Seventeen countries weighed in by submitting comments on the UNFCCC’s methodological guidance document. The comments emphasize the strong link between NCBs such as improved forest governance and enhanced forest resilience and the REDD safeguards for communities and indigenous peoples. However, countries have different opinions as to whether NCBs should be incentivized with performance-based payments. The European Union commented: “The main incentive for countries to strive for NCBs are the NCBs themselves. Hence, there is no need for dedicated payments or price premiums for NCBs under the UNFCCC.” The Philippines, on the other hand, observed that: “REDD+ finance must incentivize other key outcomes…”   NATIONAL STRATEGY AND CAPACITY A crumbling façade Tree plantations in New Zealand removed 71.6 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere between 2008 and 2012, just over the country’s 70.7-million-tonne allowance, and enough to meet its Kyoto Protocol obligation. But net emissions in New Zealand are on the rise – some projections show by as much as 50% in the next 10 years – and maturing forests soon won’t be able to make up the difference. “From 2008 to 2012 the country’s 25% increase in carbon emissions was masked by carbon stored in forests planted in the 1990s,” said Forest Owners Association chief executive David Rhodes. “As these trees are harvested, forestry will move from being a carbon sink to being a carbon source.”   Practice makes perfect Cameroon has been pursuing REDD since 2008, but it wasn’t until last week that the government published a guide outlining good practices. The guide was developed in collaboration with World Wildlife Fund, the German development agency Deutsche Gesellschaft fí¼r Internationale Zusammenarbeit, and the Cameroon Centre for Environment and Development. It identifies steps for gaining indigenous and community consent for REDD projects, including providing full information about proposed activities and holding pressure-free negotiations.   Seeking dry land California is going to great pains to embrace agricultural and forestry carbon offsets in its cap-and-trade program, with the state’s Air Resources Board set to considering adding a rice cultivation project type in September. But market participants see opportunities for even more land-based project types to be added to the system, including avoided grassland conversion, wetland restoration, composting and rangelands. Bringing additional land-based offsets into the program is challenging due in large part to high monitoring and verification costs, but aggregation of project activities could help solve this problem.   PROJECT DEVELOPMENT Safe cooking, post-danger The Darfur Low Smoke Project was up against tough odds. It took two years for an auditor to agree to visit North Darfur to verify the 36,000 tonnes of emissions reductions achieved by the Gold Standard project, which has delivered 6,000 of its target 10,000 clean-burning liquid petroleum gas cookstoves to date. The project was launched in 2007 by the local Women’s Development Association Network, Practical Action, and Carbon Clear. Its first offsets were recently sold to a United Kingdom-based insurance firm. Carbon Clear created a micro-loan scheme to help women pay the upfront costs of the stoves, and repayment rates are now above 90% despite widespread poverty in the region. Women associated with the project have also established 42 community forests.   Yurok first to the finish The Yurok tribe in April became the first organization to earn forestry offsets under the compliance pathway featured in California’s cap-and-trade program. The Yurok Tribe/Forest Carbon Partners CKGG Improved Forest Management Project covers 8,000 acres in Humboldt County and was issued 836,619 offsets for potential sale to compliance buyers. “We have lost many of our old trees to deforestation, and numerous native plant and animal species, especially deer and elk, are struggling because of it,” said Thomas P. O’Rourke Sr., Chairman of the Yurok Tribe. “This forest carbon project enables the Tribe to help transition these acres back into a tribally managed natural forest system where wildlife and cultural resources like tanoak acorns, huckleberry, and hundreds of medicinal plants will thrive.”   Beyond Petroleum? The Hoopa Valley tribe of California is negotiating a potential multi-million-dollar deal with oil major BP to generate carbon offsets by preventing the chopping of old-growth timberlands in its 12-mile-square reservation, also in Humboldt County. A 2012 study by project developer Finite Carbon found that the forest could generate an impressive 250 offsets per acre for a value of $80 million to $120 million over 100 years. Some tribal members fear that carbon offset sales would damage their reputation by giving BP a ‘permit to pollute’ while others are excited about the large potential for job creation in the valley.   FINANCE AND ECONOMICS Conservation pays Code REDD, a nonprofit organization that calls on major private sector players to support and scale REDD+ projects, held a high-profile event in Bogotí¡, Colombia on April 9. The location was significant in that 80% of the world’s REDD offsets originated from projects in Latin America in 2012, according to Ecosystem Marketplace’s State of the Forest Carbon Markets 2013 report. Deforestation is now estimated to cost the global economy $2-5 trillion per year in lost ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and water purification, according to a Code REDD press release. “Through our experience we have learned that conservation IS economic activity,” Chris Abrams, Director of Environment at the United States Agency for International Development, said at the event.   SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY The good dirt In an analysis synthesizing data from 92 forests in various climatic zones, researchers found that soil nutrients may play a larger role in forest carbon storage than previously understood. Forests growing in fertile soil were able to sequester about 30% of the carbon they acquire through photosynthesis, while forests rooted in nutrient-deficient soils retained only 6% of the available carbon, the study found. “When plants are in nutrient poor conditions, they send out more roots and produce chemicals that can help dissolve nutrients from the soil. This takes energy, though, and so the plants produce less biomass,” said Michael Obersteiner, one of the study’s authors.   Smoker’s lungs The “lungs of the Earth” won’t be able to breathe as well if they’re on fire. In fact, fires in the Amazon rainforest could turn the largest carbon sink in the world into a source of carbon emissions, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week. While temperature increases and precipitation decreases have long been included in climate models, “it’s only in the past couple of decades that fire has even been recognized as a major disturbance,” said Jennifer Balch, who co-led the study. The problem is not specific to the Amazon. The Indonesian province of Riau made headlines last week for its burning peatlands.   HUMAN DIMENSION Hands off our rainforest On April 12, the civil society group Yasunidos delivered 54 boxes containing 756,291 signatures to the Ecuadorian capital. Its aim? To keep the 846 million barrels of crude oil beneath Yasuní­ National Park underground. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa had sought $3.6 billion from the international community in exchange for keeping intact the biodiversity and carbon sequestration the Park provides but abandoned the plan in August when only a fraction of the money had been raised. However, the signatures are more than the 600,000 needed to bring the issue to a popular vote. First, though, 30 people will spend a month verifying the signatures, with another 30 observers from Yasunidos overseeing the process.   Don’t hate me because I use palm oil Major palm-oil user Proctor & Gamble, the maker of products such as Bounty paper towels and Pantene shampoo, announced a commitment to no deforestation in its supply chain, upping the ante from its previous promise to purchase only certified palm oil. The announcement came after a Greenpeace report claimed that Proctor and Gamble’s suppliers in Indonesia were causing deforestation and that less than 10% of its supply chain was actually certified. A Greenpeace exposé also led to paper packaging giant Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) to announce a zero deforestation policy a year ago.   Ready for their close-ups What do you do when thousands of scientists issue a dire warning for the planet (for the fifth time) and policymakers still drag their feet? Well, one new idea is to pull in celebrity ‘correspondents’ such as Jessica Alba, Matt Damon, and Arnold Schwarzenegger to report the story in a fresh way. The first episodes of Years of Living Dangerously aired on Showtime in April. Indiana Jones star and Conservation International board member Harrison Ford is the ‘face’ of the series on deforestation in Indonesia, which explains the REDD mechanism to a lay audience. “This series has a reach … which exceeds nearly every other public climate change communication project that has been done,” said co-producer Jeff Horowitz in an interview with Monagabay.com.   Just say no (to deforestation) We’ve heard of ‘leakage’ in relation to forest carbon projects, but new research by geographer Kendra McSweeney shows that it may also apply to the ‘war on drugs’ in Mexico, which has been causing narco-traffickers to ‘leak’ their operations south to Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. This has an unfortunate side effect for forests as the landing strips and roads associated with the drug trade lead to increased rates of deforestation. In Honduras, for instance, annual deforestation quadrupled between 2007 and 2011 in coincidence with a surge in cocaine trafficking. And this may lead to yet another unfortunate side effect: Those that get rich off the drug trade tend to invest their profits in cattle ranches and palm oil – more drivers of deforestation.   STANDARDS AND METHODOLOGY SMUD getting its feet wet The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), one of the largest publicly-owned utilities in the United States, is joining forces with the American Carbon Registry (ACR) to develop a methodology to quantify and credit emissions reductions from restoration of California deltaic and coastal wetlands. The protocol would allow offsets from restoration projects to be sold on the voluntary carbon market and – they hope – would eventually make their way into California’s compliance market. The potential is huge: ACR estimates that between 7-26 million tonnes of emissions reductions could be achieved through wetlands restoration in California. But SMUD understands that protocol adoption is a long process, so wetlands offsets would likely not be included in California’s compliance regime until 2018, at the earliest.   Greening China’s grass A new methodology just approved by the Verified Carbon Standard could help farmers in China and other countries tap into the carbon markets to help them manage their grasslands more sustainably. The methodology, developed by the FAO, the Chinese Academy of Agriculture Science, the World Agroforestry Center and the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, could be particularly useful in mitigating the impact of China’s growing population on its carbon footprint. Projects under the methodology, which helps overcome the major hurdle of high measuring and monitoring costs, could also be recognized by the China Certified Emissions Reduction offset program.   The grazing could always be greener ACR recently released a new methodology for avoided GHG emissions on grazed grasslands for public comment. Developed by Terra Global Capital with support from the Environmental Defense Fund, Silver Lab at the University of California Berkeley, and the Marin Carbon Project, the methodology provides an accounting framework for the carbon storage achieved by adding compost to fields – both by enhancing plant growth and by diverting organic waste that would otherwise decompose in landfills, releasing methane. If approved, it would generate offsets for the voluntary carbon market. The public comment period is open through May 14.   PUBLICATIONS I’ll pay you unconditionally A new report by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), The challenge of establishing REDD+ on the ground, examined 23 subnational REDD+ initiatives in six countries – Brazil, Cameroon, Indonesia, Peru, Tanzania, and Vietnam. Among other findings, researchers stated that 18 of the 23 initiatives have or will implement conditional incentives, but only nine viewed them as the single most important thing that would reduce deforestation, calling into question whether performance-based payments – once considered the cornerstone of REDD – are as central as previously believed.   Burning up in sub-Sahara Africa Current climate models predict that average temperatures in Central Africa will be 1.4 degrees Celsius hotter in 2050 than today. But a recent study published in the Journal of Climate finds that deforestation in the Congo Basin could add another 0.7 degrees Celsius to that figure. “Once deforestation has occurred, the solar energy that rainforests would otherwise use to evaporate water accumulates near the Earth’s surface, causing the atmosphere to warm,” the authors explained.   JOBS Director of Governance Research – CIFOR Based in Bogor, Indonesia, the Director of Governance Research for the CIFOR will be responsible for the development, management, delivery and scientific quality of the organization’s governance research. The position requires managing a multidisciplinary research team, fostering partnerships, and representing CIFOR at key international forums. The successful candidate will have a PhD in a relevant discipline, extensive research management experience, and a proven fundraising record. – Read more about the position here   President – Microsol Based in Paris, France, Lima, Peru, or Mexico D.F., Mexico, Microsol’s President will lead teams over these three geographic locations and pursue Microsol’s work in the generation, certification and sale of high-social-impact carbon projects in Latin America. The successful candidate will have a master’s degree or equivalent and at least seven years of experience in a similar position; be able to ensure the firm’s financial health; possess strong leadership and negotiation skills; and speak French, English and Spanish. – Read more about the position here   Northwest Site Manager – Blue Ventures Conservation Based in Ambanja, Madagascar, the Northwest Site Manager will manage the field implementation of Blue Ventures Conservation’s community-based Verified Carbon Standard mangrove project in the Ambaro and Ambanja Bays of Northwest Madagascar. The manager will also help start up a fishery and aquaculture scheme, and help develop a sustainable mangrove timber harvesting approach. – Read more about the position here   Finance Associate / Business Manager – BioCarbon Group Based in New York, New York, the Finance Associate / Business Manager will provide key financial leadership to the BioCarbon Group, an international investor in land-based carbon projects, such as forests and cookstoves. The successful candidate will have three years of experience in investment banking, managing consulting, or financial services; an understanding of corporate financial statements; experience in environmental markets and carbon project development; and working experience in developing countries, particularly Africa/South America. – Read more about the position here   Communications Manager, Energy and Finance Program – Rainforest Action Network Based in San Francisco, California, the Communications Manager will shape the communications strategy for Rainforest Action Network’s Energy and Finance Program, which has pushed leading banks to pass policies that curb investments in companies that contribute to deforestation. The job involves writing op-eds, letters to the editor, talking points and other media materials; training staff and volunteers in media skills; and creating press lists and keeping the media contact database current. The successful candidate will have three years’ experience as a media liaison or journalist, with a strong public relations component. – Read more about the position here   Applied Forest Scientist – Climate Smart Land Network (CSLN) Based in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Applied Forest Scientist will support the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences’ CSLN, which is designed to help large-scale forest landowners integrate climate science into their forest management and planning. The position requires synthesizing existing science on climate change adaptation for forests; structuring monitoring protocols for regional threats; working with CSLN members to link this information to their planning, management, and monitoring processes; and documenting how CSLN members are responding to climate change. The successful candidate will have a master’s or PhD in forestry and strong analytic skills. – Read more about the position here ABOUT THE FOREST CARBON PORTAL The Forest Carbon Portal provides relevant daily news, a bi-weekly news brief, feature articles, a calendar of events, a searchable member directory, a jobs board, a library of tools and resources. The Portal also includes the Forest Carbon Project Inventory, an international database of projects including those in the pipeline. Projects are described with consistent ‘nutrition labels’ and allow viewers to contact project developers. ABOUT THE ECOSYSTEM MARKETPLACE Ecosystem Marketplace is a project of Forest Trends, a tax-exempt corporation under Section 501(c)3. This newsletter and other dimensions of our voluntary carbon markets program are funded by a series of international development agencies, philanthropic foundations, and private sector organizations. For more information on donating to Ecosystem Marketplace, please contact [email protected].

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23 April 2014 | California has adopted ambitious – some would argue too ambitious – goals for reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It needs emission reductions from carbon offset projects to get there without putting too much of a financial strain on businesses regulated in the state, according to regulators.

In 2006, then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32) – a landmark piece of legislation that outlined the state’s efforts to reduce climate change. The legislation featured targets for reducing California’s GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

One of the ways the state chose to pursue its 2020 target was to adopt a carbon trading program that allows emissions reductions from projects in unregulated sectors such as agriculture and forestry. State regulators see these carbon offsets as a vital element of the program because the price of carbon in the state could double by 2020 without them, said Rajinder Sahota, Chief of the Climate Change Program Evaluation Branch of the California Air Resources Board, the agency overseeing AB 32 implementation.

California’s cap-and-trade program already welcomes carbon offsets generated from livestock, forestry and urban forestry projects. But market participants see opportunities for more land-based offsets – emissions reductions generated via agriculture and forestry projects – to be added to the system, including avoided grassland conversion, wetland restoration, composting, rangelands and rice cultivation projects.

“Needless to say this is an interesting time for carbon markets and land-based offsets,” Belinda Morris, Program Officer, Climate and Land Use Subprogram, The Packard Foundation, said at the Navigating the American Carbon World conference in San Francisco last month.

For a more in-depth look at potential land-based carbon offsets that could be included in California’s cap-and-trade program, please visit the Forest Carbon Portal.

April 9, 2014 | The Yurok tribe has seen first-hand the devastation that deforestation wreaks on trees and plant and animal species living on its tribal lands. Now, with a big stamp of approval from California regulators, the tribe is hoping to tap into the carbon markets to help reverse these devastating trends.

The California Air Resources Board (ARB) on Wednesday announced that the Yurok Tribe/Forest Carbon Partners CKGG Improved Forest Management Project was the first to be issued offsets under its compliance forestry protocol. The improved forest management (IFM) project will guarantee long-term forest protection, improve forest habitat diversity, provide benefits to salmon and steelhead populations, and generate revenues for the Yurok Tribe. IFM projects are those in which existing forest areas are managed to increase carbon storage and/or to reduce carbon losses from harvesting or other silvicultural treatments.

“We have lost many of our old trees to deforestation, and numerous native plant and animal species, especially deer and elk, are struggling because of it,” said Thomas P. O’Rourke, Sr., Chairman of the Yurok Tribe. “This forest carbon project enables the Tribe to help transition these acres back into a tribally managed natural forest system where wildlife and cultural resources like tanoak acorns, huckleberry, and hundreds of medicinal plants will thrive.”

The ARB’s compliance protocol was developed based on a version originally created by the Climate Action Reserve (CAR), which acted as the Offset Project Registry for the Yurok project.

Click here to continue reading on the Forest Carbon Portal.

4 March 2014 | Mike Korchinsky goes way back with Christian del Valle and Sylvain Goupille, now the heads of the Althelia Climate Fund, back to their days on the carbon desk at BNP Paribas. Wildlife Works, a developer of reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) projects that operates the Kasigau Corridor REDD+ projects, had an agreement with the French bank to provide development services for up to $50 million worth of projects.

When the two left BNP Paribas and launched the Althelia Climate Fund in 2011, Korchinsky continued to engage with del Valle and Goupille in the hopes of becoming the first developer to receive financing for a sustainable land use and conservation project from the new fund. Those conversations culminated in last month’s announcement that Althelia will make a $10 million investment in the Taita Hills project, which will cover most of the forest area in the Kenyan wilderness outside of Tsavo National Park, one of the largest national parks in the world, and home to elephants, rhinos, lions, leopards, and hippos.

Gloria Gonzalez: How is the project similar or different from your previous projects in Kenya?

Mike Korchinsky: The program will generate REDD+ carbon offsets from protection of the forest and savannah. The one difference between this project and our current Kasigau project is that Wildlife Works has developed an avoided conversion of grasslands system methodology in the last year and that allows us to look at a landscape in its entirety, not just at forests.

The other focus for Althelia is to really magnify the influence of alternative revenue streams in the development of the conservation program. They’re interested in more aggressively pursuing commercialization of agricultural intensification programs or sustainable charcoal programs in the area so that the program can benefit from parallel revenue streams to the carbon revenue stream. That’s always been part of Wildlife Works’ approach, but Althelia is interested in accelerating those activities with specific investments…

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