Climate change mitigation – Esteve Corbera

Troubled Encounters: Payments for Ecosystem Services in Chiapas, Mexico

Before, nobody could tell me what to do with my trees, because each of us is the owner of his parcel. But now, with the PES programme, it is forbidden to cut trees. [The consultant] said it only concerns members of PES working groups, but the ‘comisariado’ says everyone is affected (farmer NOT involved in PES, Chiapas, Mexico).

What if Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) interfere with local collective action institutions and contested leaderships? Would collective action weaken, or it would be reinforced? Would payments translate in new, legitimate leaderships, or reify existing political inequities?

In a joint effort with colleagues at Conservation International, the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development and the University of Antwerp, we have addressed these questions through the lens of collective action theory using a case study from Chiapas, Mexico. Mexico has been a pioneer in the implementation of national PES policy in Latin America, with more than 2.6 million hectares (ha) of the country’s forests under a PES contract in 2014. The community chosen is representative of other socially heterogeneous communities situated in regions characterized by rapid land-use change and which maintain certain degree of collective action to manage their land resources.

We demonstrate that while a majority of the community’s households have engaged in PES through two distinct working groups, a large share of the community forests remains outside PES, and many landowners resist the extension of PES rules to non-targeted forests. We show that this incipient form of fragmented collective action on forest management results from challenged leaderships, and from PES accommodating a history of increasing individuation of the commons. However, it has also ignited social conflict, deepened tenure inequalities, and contributed to the failure of local decision-making institutions, which have not been able to address the contested interests underpinning the fate of community forests.

These findings contribute to highlight the importance of understanding the local institutional context, such as the land tenure regime, collective action processes and local leaderships, to discern why PES is or is not collectively endorsed and how legitimate and enforceable PES goals and rules might be. Overall, the findings demonstrate the limits of PES to achieve lasting conservation outcomes, particularly when parachuted into a context of uneven land tenure, weak collective action and contested leaderships.

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Article: Corbera, E., Costedoat, S., van Hecken, G., Ezzine de Blas, D. (2020) Troubled encounters: Payments for ecosystem services in Chiapas, Mexico. Development and Change, 51(1): 167-195.

Picture by Sébastien Costedoat: Río Negro; the river bordering the studied community.

Climate policies, natural resources and conflict: Implications for development

The journal Climate Policy has published a new special issue focused on climate change policies, natural resources management and conflict, and the linkages of these policies and processes with development in the global South. Guest edited by Dik Roth (Wageningen University), Courtney Work (National Chengchi University) and myself, the special issue encompasses eight articles which engage critically with REDD+, renewable energy, and adaptation and resilience interventions, among others.

The collection reveals that certain hegemonic discourses, practices and structures of power related to development, resource access, and resource use can emerge, persist or even intensify through climate change policies and interventions. The contributions show the ways in which the often-well-intended climate change-informed discourses, policies and practices intersect with ongoing struggles over resources, energy access, land, water and ‘space’, particularly when these are unlikely to have a climatic cause, and to explore how such intersections ignite, fuel or transform (existing) conflicts or social cooperation. The papers also provide robust evidence about the fact that climate change policies alone, even when mainstreamed into other sectoral policy domains, may not be able to turn upside down entrenched power relations, transform governance systems characterized by great inertia, or redress social injustices.

The special issue is open access and can be accessed here: https://tandfonline.com/toc/tcpo20/19/sup1

Picture: A sawmill from CDM-reforestation trees in Cambodia. Copyright Courtney Work.

Conflict in REDD+ – Insights from the CoCooR project

Climate change policies need to become conflict sensitive in order to be effective in its environmental and social-economic goals. In this video, developed by The Netherlands Research Agency (NWO) in the context of the Conflict and Cooperation in the Management of Climate Change (CCMCC) programme, I reflect on the main results of the programme’s funded project “Conflict and cooperation over REDD+ in Mexico, Nepal and Vietnam”, co-led by myself and Dr. Poshendra Satyal at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. The video complements a longer video developed by the project consortium and available here.

A forest transition in central Mexico?

In this new article, published in Restoration Ecology and led by Jordi Honey-Rosés (University of British Columbia), we examine land-use change in central Mexico and we relate such change to agricultural and socio-economic patterns. Recent land cover analysis reveals significant forest recovery around the world, suggesting that some countries may be in a forest transition. However, remotely sensed imagery does not reveal the driving causes of forest recovery, which may be due to active reforestation efforts or natural successional processes (passive reforestation).

Through fieldwork research conducted by ICTA-UAB former MSc student, Marlene Maurer, we aimed to distinguish these two processes in the priority temperate forests surrounding the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve (342,773 ha) in the state of Michoacán. We combined an analysis of remotely sensed imagery with field interviews to examine the mechanisms and drivers of observed forest recovery.

Our analysis of the satellite imagery reveals a net increase of 3,798 ha of forest between 1986 and 2012, yet the rate of recovery is slowing. Interview data suggests that the vast majority of the recovered forests are the result of natural regrowth (passive reforestation), with most of this regrowth observed on previously degraded forest lands. Therefore, we estimate that between 58 and 429 ha have been recovered from active reforestation efforts in the 1986–2012 period. We find that reduced logging and grazing pressures are important drivers of forest recovery, while agricultural abandonment may be less influential than often believed.

These results speak to conservation policy and reforestation programs in different ways. First, they suggest that the cost-effectiveness may be a major constraint to scaling up active reforestation, particularly if the latter represents a small contribution to observed forest regrowth. Second, the findings indicate that previously degraded forest lands should be considered environmental assets in forest restoration programs, given its significant contribution to forest recovery. Last, and most importantly, we think that whenever site, landscape, and social environments allow for passive restoration, forest restoration programs should consider supporting, facilitating, or accelerating natural regrowth instead of active reforestation. Reforestation investments might be wisely spent supporting and maintaining the natural resilience of forests rather than on costly reforestation programs.

Photo copyright: Marlene Maurer.

REDD+ in the spotlight

The CoCooR research project has produced a 17-min video where we disseminate some of the project’s findings and where some other scholars, practitioners and funders share their views about REDD+. Specifically, the video defines REDD+, highlights its main funding sources to date, and a number of experts reflect on the challenges of REDD+ policy design in the global South, and of early action implementation initiatives, as well as the framework’s main achivements to date and its likely future.

We think that the video can be very useful to teach about REDD+, or to foster a discussion about this policy framework with university students and other audiences outside high education and academia. Therefore, if you are interested in REDD+, forest conservation, or in environmental governance and policy more generally, please watch the video and help us disseminate it. Feel free to post comments about it in this blog, or to use the social media to spread the word. The video can be watched in You Tube.