8/4/2019 Andy White From RRI

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/andy-white-from-rri 1/4

 REDD NEWSLETTER 

 Andy White from RRI: “The global market for forest carbon is not going to

establish itself anytime soon”  By Chris Lang, 24th May 2011

 An Interview with Andy White about REDDFormer Coordinator of the Rights and Resources Initiative , Washington DC. 

Lang: Please describe the organization Rights and Resources Initiative and the role RRI plays in the REDD debate. 

 Andy White: RRI is a global coalition of organizations working to encourage forest land tenure and policyreforms and the transformation of the forest economy so that business reflects local development agendasand supports local livelihoods. We work at the country, regional and global levels, collaborating on research,advocacy and convening strategic actors. Our 120 plus Partner and Collaborator organizations are nowdirectly engaged in land and forest policy reforms in close to 20 countries, including the review and designof REDD initiatives in 10 of them. We have a secretariat in Washington DC that leads the global-levelanalysis and advocacy, catalyzes new strategic collaboration and advisory groups, as well as coordinates theInitiative.

Lang: Many observers declared the REDD text that was agreed in Cancun as a success, or at least a step in the right direction. What is your opinion of the agreement on REDD that came out of Cancun?  

 Andy White: The opinion across the RRI Partnership is mixed. We are a diverse coalition and our commondenominator is that we are all convinced that local land rights and livelihoods deserve respect and thatREDD and other conservation initiatives won’t work unless they are respected. We’re all definitely committedto the goal of reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, and achieving that goal in a mannerthat strengthens rights and governance. My own opinion on what happened in Cancun, and I think themajority view, is that the REDD text was major step in the right direction, but that its importance andchance for success were undermined by the lack of an overall agreement. On the other hand, there’s anargument out there that says that without a global treaty and without a global market REDD now has thebreathing room to “get it right” – if it addresses the tenure and governance issues necessary, andgovernments stop encouraging deforestation with policies and subsidies.

Lang: In a recent article in Nature magazine  you wrote that  , “the ensuing experience [i.e. since Cancun] has convinced me that it is time from some mid- course corrections” on REDD. Please explain what experience you are referring to and the sort of corrections you are suggesting. 

 Andy White: REDD is now 3-5 years old, depending on how you count, and I am sure that all involvedhave learned a lot over this time. Norway is convening a meeting in late June, the “REDD-Exchange” to takestock and share views on lessons and directions forward  – a very timely and welcome exercise. My ownsense is that there are at least four major areas of learning and “mid-course correction” – not in order of importance.

The first is that there’s greater recognition that governments, and their industrial logging and agriculturalpolicies, are the greatest cause and instigator of deforestation, and that the original, limited thinking aroundopportunity costs distracted REDD designers from a realistic sense of who makes these decisions and what itwill take for them to change their mind. REDD was misguided by McKinsey’s cost curves and we’re stillextracting ourselves from that trap. This lesson leads to much more attention to changing government

8/4/2019 Andy White From RRI

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/andy-white-from-rri 2/4

 REDD NEWSLETTER 

policy, and recognizing that REDD must deal with politically-embedded vested interests  – far more difficultthan paying a landowner to keep trees.

The second is the growing awareness of what it takes to actually achieve forest conservation and encourage

forest restoration. Brazil and other countries in Latin America have made very clear the effectiveness of conservation by Indigenous Peoples and other forest communities and the key role their tenure reformshave had  – not only in bringing some justice to the forests, but providing a relatively inexpensive way toprevent a lot of emissions. Mexico’s public payment system for the ecological services produced bycommunities, along with their financial and technical support for community forestry is demonstrating howgovernment programs can encourage communities to keep their forests and make money from them. At thesame time, there’s growing evidence from around the world of governments actually encouragingrestoration, long before REDD was created  – either with subsidies or tenure reform  – which give forestowners incentives to plant. Global demand for wood, fibre, and NTFPs are growing, so unless production isincreased outside of natural forests the pressure for conversion will remain great, and so will leakage. REDDwon’t work if protection in one place enables harvesting in another. We’ve got to grow the total stock of forests and global biomass to meet both our ecological and market demands.

The third is that the global market for forest carbon is not going to establish itself anytime soon (in areasonable scale or regulated manner), and perhaps never will. This was the “big idea” that would bring inthe private money to make REDD work at a global scale. It has collapsed both because of the lack of demand (without globally significant caps – from either the US or Cancun – there’ll be no globally significanttrade) and because, as the Munden report makes clear, there is just too much uncertainty around thecommodity itself for the market to take it seriously. All this means that there is clearly more action needed inthe short and near term to help establish and finance public payment schemes and national-level funds. Theupshot is that national REDD strategies should not be oriented to setting up the scientific and institutionalinfrastructure for carbon counting and trading  – not investing nearly so much in the MRV systems andcarbon-focused market machinery. Rather they need to be analyzing and dealing with their drivers of deforestation, investing in tenure and governance reforms, and helping governments set up the nationalpayment schemes to get money to communities for conservation and restoration. This too costs money, and

is far from fully funded.

Fourth, the booming global demand for food, bioenergy, and fibre, and the ensuing land-grab, has remindedus that REDD is a relatively small fish in a big, and dangerous pond, and for REDD to work it’s got to verycleverly leverage change in those larger sectors. The notion that REDD will make “forests worth more alivethan dead” is wishful thinking in most cases, and worse, builds upon the misguided notion that money andfinance is the solution, and that policy measures will not work and should not even be considered. The valueof forest land and the prices of all of the other commodities that forest lands can produce keeps going up  – and with increasingly scarce land and water available there’s no indication that this trend will end soon. Todecrease emissions in forests we need to address the agricultural drivers, and that again comes down togovernment policy – since it is still governments that claim ownership over most of the forests that are beingcleared and degraded. It’s not likely that R EDD can compete on the open market  – so again, unless the

forest owners want to keep forests, and unless the governments want to help them do that with supportiveregulations – then REDD won’t work. 

The tragedy in all of this is that underneath all of these complicated arguments, sophisticated plans andcomplex international arrangements – the early evidence from the REDD strategies being developed aroundthe world is that the most obvious and perhaps cheapest ways to reduce emissions (the goal of REDDprograms) are usually either overlooked or discarded. And that is  – no surprise coming from me  – suspending the industrial concessions for logging and conversion for agriculture and launching the tenureand governance reforms that will put forests into the hands of people who really own them and most oftenwant to keep them forested. It’s doubly disappointing that the tenure reforms are also required for attractingprivate investment deemed necessary to achieve REDD at scale and running public payment schemes  – sounless the reforms happen even those options won’t become available to us in the future. All this said, it’s

critical to keep in mind that there are exceptions to this general picture  – Brazil and Mexico for examplehave made great gains in securing tenure and have the institutional bases for protection, sustainable useand investment.

8/4/2019 Andy White From RRI

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/andy-white-from-rri 3/4

 REDD NEWSLETTER 

Overall, we’ve learned that REDD isn’t quick, easy, or cheap, as it’s conventionally conceived at least – butthat doesn’t mean it’s bad, or finished. It has generated mo re consultation and understanding than hasprobably ever happened in the forest sector and a much stronger role by Indigenous Peoples and othercommunities in shaping forest policy at the country and global level than ever before. Of course there’s also

been abuse by unscrupulous carbon sharks, and opportunistic profiteering by some private firms, and that’slikely to continue, but the possibility for great, and positive, impact remains  – if we jointly review theexperience and make some mid-course corrections. I am looking forward to learning the opinions andlessons from others at the upcoming meeting in Oslo.

Lang: What is RRI’s position on carbon trading and the carbon markets?  

 Andy White: We don’t have a position as a Coalition. Some of our members are more positive than others. All recognize the risks and agree that it’s got to work for communities to be effective and that tenure reformis essential to its success.

Lang: The recent report by the  Munden Project  highlights serious problems that are emerging with establishing carbon markets to trade REDD credits or forest carbon offsets, such as lack of clearly defined property rights, asymmetry of information, large transaction costs and the difficulties of measuring how much carbon is stored in forests. Given these problems why many organizations continue to promote carbon markets as a way of financing REDD?  

 Andy White: The carbon market is a seductively simple mechanism that promised to solve lots of big,complicated problems, and do so in a way that would bring “wins” to the North, who were looking for acheap way out, and “wins” to the South, who were looking for investments. It’s attractiveness and durabilityis in part due to its elegance: saving, or making, money for everyone while reducing emissions in aquantifiable manner, but also, in part because an entire industry has grown up around it now, high-tech CO2measurement, private consultancies and conservation NGOs who now have a vested interest in making it

work, such as VCS Association and others.

Lang: In your article in Nature magazine, you state that  , “national and international data show that deforestati on is declining,” and that “South Korea, China, Vietnam and Nepal have increase d their forests in recent years”, based on the forest statistics produced by the FAO. While the situation is somewhat different in each country, in China, for example, the incre ase in the area of plantations explains why the FAO’s figures show an increase in forest area. Certainly China needs to find a way of supplying wood raw material, but that does not make these plantations into forests.

 Andy White: This is a good point. I certainly agree that plantations and natural forests are not the sameand that the FAO statistics are weak for many, if not most, countries. And it is certainly true that many

countries protect their forests and import their wood from other countries, driving deforestation; China and Vietnam are great examples of this (and another example of the global leakage problem for REDD). Butthese issues do not diminish the overall point  – that there are many governments that have decided toprotect their forests and/or plant trees (which sequesters more carbon, and is likely to be better than a fieldof soy) before REDD was ever conceived.

Lang: In your concluding paragraph, in the Nature article, you introduce a new acronym: GREEN – Growing Restoration, Employment and Energy, Now. You explain in the article that there are more than 1 billion hectares of degraded forest  –   that “if restored, could produce more food, wood and bioenergy.”  The statement sounds interesting, but it raises at least two concerns. 

First, is th e word “degraded”. How is deg raded forest defined ? Villagers’ community forest may well be described as degraded – for example by a pulp and paper company looking to convert the land to eucalyptus plantations as  Oji Paper has done in Laos . 

8/4/2019 Andy White From RRI

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/andy-white-from-rri 4/4

 REDD NEWSLETTER 

 Andy White: That’s a good question, and this is an area where civil society and the whole REDD machineryshould be putting more attention. The current debate underway in Indonesia on this very issue is a goodexample of the major implications of different definitions. We need to work on these definitions and developnew standards. These “degraded” areas are already under increasing pressure (as your Oji example

illustrates) from industrial investors, when the first task should be to straighten out the property rights andestablish FPIC as a required standard for all investments so that local people’s rights are respected and theycan make choices that fit their needs and desires.

Lang: Second, bioenergy can mean a range of things, from villagers growing their own fuelwood to thousands of hectares of industrial tree plantations to feed large scale wood chip power plants in Europe.Could you explain further what you mean here?  

 Andy White: Yes, bioenergy does have this range of definitions. All of these could be legitimate land uses  – but it all depends if the particular use and policy is consistent with local people rights and preferences, andthen of course ecological conditions. For example, if land uses focus and respect decision of the poorest toaddress inequality. The world is going to need a lot more energy, even if we conserve and promote otherrenewable aggressively, and all things equal I’d prefer biomass over nuclear – for risk, cost and ecologicalreasons. There are also about 1.5 billion rural people without electricity and biomass-based generation mightbe a good solution for them: bringing not only electricity to their homes but also possibly jobs and additionalincentives to plant and keep trees. So bioenergy will remain part of the answer in some places and weshouldn’t deny local people this opportunity when it makes sense. For me it comes back down to respectinglocal land rights, FPIC, and standards.

Lang:   An article in Science magazine in March 2011  highlights research by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions  (IFRI) Research Program, that shows that when forest users have a formal right to participate in making rules over the management and use of the forest, there is more likelihood that the forest will provide higher livelihood benefits and have higher levels of biodiversity. This seems to support 

RRI’s position on REDD. Could you explain why focusing on the  rights of communities to manage their own natural resources is so important for REDD. 

 Andy White: I addressed this earlier, but let me put it a bit differently here. I think that reforming thepublic domain (lands claimed by governments) is essential in most developing countries  – in the agricultureareas, if not already done, and in collectively-owned and managed forest, dryland and wetland areas.Recognizing and strengthening these collective property rights is essential to advance resource governanceand democratic development – and is also necessary to avoid major conflict, continued social exclusion, etc.This goes far beyond REDD and is not just limited to “communities” and their interests. Of course, webelieve in the primacy of human dignity and rights  – and for these reasons we see recognizing IndigenousPeoples’ and other local community property and civil rights as a necessary first step in this largerdevelopment project.