Forest Carbon Monitoring and Reporting for REDD+: What Future for Africa?

A climate change mitigation mechanism for emissions reduction from reduced deforestation and forest degradation, plus forest conservation, sustainable management of forest, and enhancement of carbon stocks (REDD+), has received an international political support in the climate change negotiations. The mechanism will require, among others, an unprecedented technical capacity for monitoring, reporting and verification of carbon emissions from the forest sector. A functional monitoring, reporting and verification requires inventories of forest area, carbon stock and changes, both for the construction of forest reference emissions level and compiling the report on the actual emissions, which are essentially lacking in developing countries, particularly in Africa. The purpose of this essay is to contribute to a better understanding of the state and prospects of forest monitoring and reporting in the context of REDD+ in Africa. We argue that monitoring and reporting capacities in Africa fall short of the stringent requirements of the methodological guidance for monitoring, reporting and verification for REDD+, and this may weaken the prospects for successfully implementing REDD+ in the continent. We presented the challenges and prospects in the national forest inventory, remote sensing and reporting infrastructures. A North-South, South-South collaboration as well as governments own investments in monitoring, reporting and verification system could help Africa leapfrog in monitoring and reporting. These could be delivered through negotiations for the transfer of technology, technical capacities, and experiences that exist among developed countries that traditionally compile forest carbon reports in the context of the Kyoto protocol.

Implementing REDD+ at the local level: Assessing the key enablers for credible mitigation and sustainable livelihood outcomes.

Achieving cost-effective mitigation and sustainable livelihoods through reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) depends heavily on the local context within which REDD+ projects are implemented. Studies have focused on how REDD+ can benefit or harm local people, with little attention paid to how people, their assets and institutions can promote or impede REDD+. This paper examines the key local assets necessary for REDD+ to protect forests and support local livelihoods based on evidence from a globally-linked REDD+ project in Kenya. Household interviews (n = 100), focus group discussions (n = 6) and in-depth interviews with government (n = 8) and project stakeholders (n = 14) were undertaken to rank and explain how local assets interact with the project's efforts to protect forests, and the role of State institutions in shaping project-asset interactions. Locally, pro-poor assets such as land tenure and water access had most influence on the project's ability to protect forests. Inclusion of communal forests as part of the REDD+ project entitled local poor peasant farmers to participate in and benefit from the project and so dissuaded them from using protected forests for charcoal production. Water access determined agricultural productivity and intensity of forest use for livelihoods and coping. Even though carbon revenues were distributed equally between social groups and support directed to pro-poor livelihood initiatives, efforts were impeded by State decisions on land that interfered with communal approaches to forest conservation, by strict carbon standards that limited trade-offs between livelihoods and forest protection and by fluctuating carbon prices and buyers that limited funds needed for project operations and local livelihoods. Equitable and pro-poor benefit sharing are necessary but not sufficient for effective REDD+ implementation unless national institutions are reformed and global carbon pricing harmonized with local livelihood needs.

Climate change mitigation and adaptation in the land use sector: from complementarity to synergy.

Currently, mitigation and adaptation measures are handled separately, due to differences in priorities for the measures and segregated planning and implementation policies at international and national levels. There is a growing argument that synergistic approaches to adaptation and mitigation could bring substantial benefits at multiple scales in the land use sector. Nonetheless, efforts to implement synergies between adaptation and mitigation measures are rare due to the weak conceptual framing of the approach and constraining policy issues. In this paper, we explore the attributes of synergy and the necessary enabling conditions and discuss, as an example, experience with the Ngitili system in Tanzania that serves both adaptation and mitigation functions. An in-depth look into the current practices suggests that more emphasis is laid on complementarity-i.e., mitigation projects providing adaptation co-benefits and vice versa rather than on synergy. Unlike complementarity, synergy should emphasize functionally sustainable landscape systems in which adaptation and mitigation are optimized as part of multiple functions. We argue that the current practice of seeking co-benefits (complementarity) is a necessary but insufficient step toward addressing synergy. Moving forward from complementarity will require a paradigm shift from current compartmentalization between mitigation and adaptation to systems thinking at landscape scale. However, enabling policy, institutional, and investment conditions need to be developed at global, national, and local levels to achieve synergistic goals.