managed forestry

Paging through a back issue of Earth Island Journal (Winter 2007), I came across an interesting project in the State of Queretaro, Mexico. The Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve of a million acres includes human settlements and agricultural activity within its boundaries. Poverty and slash-and-burn agriculture go hand in hand here, and Bosque Sustenable - a civil society organisation specialising in sustainable forestry - wanted to use Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism to reforest marginal and exhausted agricultural land and address poverty among the reserve's 100,000 inhabitants.

What they found was several barriers to entering the CDM market:

They included the lack of capital for developing projects, the lack of forest management skills among local landholders, and the high cost of emission reductions certification, which resulted in money going into the hands of foreign consultants rather than to local people.

So they turned to the voluntary carbon market with the program of Carbon Sequestration for Sustainable Forestry aimed at organisations, businesses and individuals that would voluntarily contribute to the fight against global warming, the reduction of poverty and conservation of biodiversity.

The debate about using forestry for carbon offsets is in full swing (here and here), but by addressing a number of challenges intelligently, as in this project, a targetted approach with very clear goals seems to be a worthwhile effort. By using managed forestry to increase the value of land, they are preserving old-growth forests within the reserve that would otherwise be burnt, releasing their carbon store. The new forests themselves are a form of monoculture, but they help maintain biodiversity elsewhere. Small-scale landholder-managed plantations provide jobs, and when the trees reach maturity they are harvested for uses that do not release carbon to the atmosphere.

This approach also addresses the challenges posed by a diverse pattern of land ownership. Participants include private and communal landowners, as well as landholders with a record of possession from the local government. As a commitment to investors, the participants sign contracts committing to manage their plantations for carbon sequestration for 30 years. Community organisers and forestry experts organise the landowners into associations and provide them with training in everything from silvicultural techniques to business management.

The first sale of carbon credits under this project was to the UN Foundation, which used the methodology of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative and tools provided by the World Resources Institute to calculate its carbon emissions from electricity consumption, and air travel, at its Washington, DC and New York Offices.