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Protecting and restoring forests is one of the cheapest and most effective options for mitigating the carbon emissions heating Earth.
Since the third UN climate change summit, held in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, different mechanisms have been trialed to raise money and help countries reduce deforestation and restore degraded forests. First there was Koyoto’s clean development mechanism, then the UN-REDD program initiated at COP13 in Bali in 2008. Voluntary carbon market schemes came into effect after COP21 in Paris in 2015, but all met with limited success.
In some cases, these schemes interfered with communities that have tended and nurtured forests for generations, restricting their access to the forest for fuel, grazing, and food. Meanwhile, deforestation has proceeded under the aegis of global markets hungry for beef, palm oil, and other commodities.
The world is far off track to reduce deforestation to zero by 2030, or meet its target of restoring over 350 million hectares.
At the current climate talks, COP28 in Dubai, Brazil has proposed a “tropical forests forever fund” with an outlay of US$250 billion, which would pay countries to conserve or expand their forests. But how can the world be confident that the result will be different this time?
The work of one academic, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, can tell us why previous efforts to restore forests have failed—and what a more effective approach might look like.
Bundles of rights
Nearly 295 million people in developing countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America live on land that has been identified as ripe for forest restoration. The right to extract timber or plant trees ultimately lies with the state in these places, so it is up to the state to set targets for increasing tree coverage or how much carbon the land stores, regardless of how it affects the communities living there.
Over 73% (about 3 billion hectares) of global forested land is under state control. One of the arguments for allowing governments to retain ownership of these forests, including the right to manage them, is the notion of the “tragedy of the commons”: in the absence of an all-powerful governing entity, people will overuse shared resources.
In fact, Ostrom’s work on the commons in forests, fishing grounds and grazing pastures shows that communities tend to protect and sustainably use common resources—provided they have rights, tenure, and the ability to decide rules for managing them.
A recent study examined forest commons in 15 tropical countries, where governments own the forest but have allowed local communities informal or customary rights of use and management. The authors noted that these forest commons had a high variety of tree species and offered enough fodder and fuel wood to sustain livelihoods in the local community. The wealth of biomass in these forests indicated a lot of carbon was also being stored.