'Conflict carbon' heats up debate over REDD+

As the World Bank moves forward with plans to pay developing countries to reduce and avoid carbon emissions by preserving forests (REDD+), advocates for local communities and indigenous groups are warning the rules developed to guide payment schemes do not do enough to protect the people who live in or use forests. Given the lack of legal clarity over land tenure and rights in many countries, the current framework may lead to disputes over who owns the rights to the carbon stored in forests. “It remains to be seen whether the REDD+ process and the Carbon Fund will turn out to be the biggest forest, carbon, and land heist in history, or whether it will support indigenous and local communities who are alone, without aid, protecting forests and pushing back with great risk to personal life and livelihood against vested interests,” said Penny Davies, program officer at the Ford Foundation and former forestry adviser to the U.K. Department for International Development, during a conference on the issue in Washington, D.C. During the day-long conference hosted by the Rights and Resources Initiative, World Bank officials, indigenous rights advocates and representatives from civil society discussed the implications of recent international agreements on REDD+ activities, among them the new rules from the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility that outlines how countries should implement REDD+ projects. This set of rules — known as the “methodological framework” — was approved by the concerned governments in December, after consulting with civil society and the private sector. The framework represents the first time an international organization has told countries how they should design and implement REDD+ programs that can then be sold as credits, unlocking up to $390 million in payments from the Carbon Fund. While the idea of paying for conservation is not particularly controversial — or new — some advocacy groups think the World Bank could end up creating a “new asset class” and a scramble for forest resources to the detriment of local communities, and the framework will likely be unable to provide the type of safeguards that would ensure local people benefit. READ: Balancing development goals to fix Southeast Asia's 'haze' Framework ‘over-engineered’? As often happens in international development, weak governance in many of the countries where REDD+ would operate creates risks of unintended consequences for the programs, like eruption of conflicts and exploitation of resources — including carbon — due to unclear legislation over land rights. While those issues have been on the REDD+ agenda for years, the are becoming more urgent as programs are closer to becoming operational in the near future. Charles di Leva, chief counsel for the World Bank’s environmental and international law unit, pointed out that the framework was built on the U.N. safeguards for REDD+ developed in Cancun in 2010 and adopted last year in Warsaw. In addition, he said, any programs that seek funding from the facility would also need to meet the World Bank’s general social and environmental safeguards and require consultation with affected communities. "I don't think we should worry about whether the methodological framework is over-engineered or not, there are some just basic principles about development that we need to adhere to," he said. "I think there are enough safeguards built into the system that I think it can work, if its done right, if the right people do the job correctly." When it came to specifics, advocates encouraged the World Bank to adopt stricter, time-bound standards for countries participating in the facility to demonstrate progress on land tenure issues as well as grievance mechanisms that would enable communities to address problems before projects are approved. There is a sense of increasing urgency on all sides of the debate, especially with climate change as an added factor. While many at the dialogue agreed that REDD+ and the Carbon Fund both represent an important opportunity for addressing global warming, it was tempered by a fear that in the rush to make REDD+ operational, major risks are being swept under the rug. Read more development aid news online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders — emailed to you FREE every business day.