REDD-Monitor

The International Institute for Environment and Development published an important new report last week, “Tenure in REDD: Start-Point or Afterthought?“. Written by Lorenzo Cotula and James Mayers, it is a welcome addition to the discussion on REDD.

Like a football match, this is a report of two halves. In the first half, the authors discuss the issues surrounding tenure of land and trees in the context of REDD: “the systems of rights, rules, institutions and processes regulating their access and use”.

The second half consists of seven country studies. The authors note the “often apparent gulf between policy and practice” in looking at the land tenure situation in the seven countries. “The current international drive to explore REDD could do more harm than good,” if it focusses on the letter of the law rather than the practice, Cotular and Mayers write.

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At the October 20-22, 2008 meeting of the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) in Washington DC, the facility’s board approved funding for an additional ten countries to develop plans for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD). This newest round of approvals, which included Cameroon and the Republic of Congo among others from Africa, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region, brings the total number of countries that have access to the Bank’s fund to 25 – ten of them in Africa. But while the governments of forested countries scramble to get at this fresh pot of REDD funds, many outstanding questions remain about who decides who gets the money, how the decisions are made, what the funds will pay for, and who stands to gain.
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A growing number of forestry, conservation and remote sensing experts are questioning the role in the REDD debate being played by the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Research Centre (WHRC). The Centre, which is widely recognised for its high quality research, such as by Dan Nepstad, who has now left the organisation, is a relative newcomer in policy discussions on forestry and climate. But questions have been raised about WHRC’s work in other parts of the world, and about the scientific integrity of some of the organisation’s recent ‘policy’ positions, such as the extent to which industrial logging contributes to forest degradation and climate change.
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