Local People Do A Better Job in Saving Tropical Forests

Under the category of SOLUTIONS, a study suggest the way to prevent deforestation of valuable jungle is to give forests back to local people to save them.

The Study is titled:
"Trade-offs and synergies between carbon storage and livelihood benefits from forest commons"
by Ashwini Chhatrea, and Arun Agrawalb

Tracking the fate of 80 forests worldwide over 15 years, concluded
"Transfer of ownership over larger forest commons patches to local communities, coupled with payments for improved carbon storage can contribute to climate change mitigation without adversely affecting local livelihoods."

Give tropical forests back to the people who live in them -- it costs the government next to nothing, and the trees will soak up your carbon for you.

Most tropical forests – from Himalayan hill forests to the Madagascan jungle – are controlled by local and national governments. Forest communities own and manage little more than a tenth. The reputation that locals are trashing their trees – cutting them for timber or burning them to clear land for farming proves untrue according to the authors of this study. In reality the opposite is more true.

Chhatre and Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor compared forest ownership with data on carbon sequestration, which is estimated from the size and number of trees in a forest. Hectare-for-hectare, they found that tropical forest under local management stored more carbon than government-owned forests. There are exceptions, says Chhatre, "but our findings show that we can increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of forests from governments to communities".

One reason may be that locals protect forests best if they own them, because they have a long-term interest in ensuring the forests' survival. While governments, whatever their intentions, usually license destructive logging, or preside over a free-for-all in which everyone grabs what they can because nobody believes the forest will last.

The authors suggest that locals would also make a better job of managing common pastures, coastal fisheries and water supplies. They argue that their findings contradict a long-standing environmental idea, called the "tragedy of the commons", which says that natural resources left to communal control get trashed. In fact, says Agrawal, "communities are perfectly capable of managing their resources sustainably".

The research calls into question UN plans to pay governments to protect forests on a formula for a programme called Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. There is a real fear that REDD will lead to dispossession of local communities governments stake their claim on emissions reduction credits.

Simon Counsell of the Rainforest Foundation UK is not surprised by the findings. "In Brazil and elsewhere, we know the most enduring forests are in indigenous reserves, like that run by the Kayapo in the eastern Amazon – the largest protected forest in the world."

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0905308106