Mewujudkan REDD+: strategi nasional dan berbagai pilihan kebijakan

Abstract

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and enhancing forest carbon stocks in developing countries (REDD+) started as a global initiative. Much of the initial debate has focussed on the global REDD+ architecture and how REDD+ can be included in a post-2012 climate agreement. But the debates and the focus of actions have now increasingly moved to national and local levels. More than 40 countries are developing national REDD+ strategies and policies, and hundreds of REDD+ projects have been initiated across the tropics. This book wants to inform these national and local processes, by asking some basic questions: How are participating countries going to reduce emissions and increase carbon stocks that they hope to be paid for through global mechanisms? What new institutions, processes, policies, and projects are needed? What are the options in these areas, and how do they compare? This book seeks to answer these questions by examining what REDD+ at the national level might look like in four areas: institutions and processes to build the REDD+ framework, broad policy reforms to enable REDD+ implementation, sectoral policies to change incentives, and demonstration activities to test and learn from different approaches. There are no ‘one size fits all’ recommendations. Most chapters present a menu of options and discuss their merits in terms of their climate effectiveness, cost efficiency and equity outcomes, in addition to their generation of co-benefits: biodiversity and other environmental services, poverty reduction and sustainable livelihoods, governance and rights, and climate change adaptation. We label these the 3E+ criteria. A core idea behind underlying REDD+ is to make performance-based payments, that is, to pay forest owners and users to reduce emissions and increase removals. Such payments for environmental (or ecosystem) services (PES) has its merits: it provides strong incentives directly to forest owners and users to manage forests better and clear less forestland. PES will fully compensate carbon rights holders that find forest conservation more lucrative than the alternatives. They simply sell forest carbon credits and less cattle, coffee, cocoa or charcoal. Although various PES systems for forest conservation have been running for some time, there are barriers for wide application. Land tenure and carbon rights must be clearly defined, yet most deforestation hotspots are characterized by unclear and contested land rights. Forest carbon must be monitored regularly at the scale where payments are made. Institutional and governance structures must be established to manage payments and information, and to link local PES systems to national (or global) REDD+ systems. Credible reference levels, reflecting what would have happened without REDD+ interventions, must be established. While PES might be the national REDD+ instrument of choice in the medium-long term, and should be encouraged as a transparent and equitable conservation strategy, it is unlikely to be the main REDD+ policy instrument within most countries in the short term. Effective implementation of REDD+ therefore calls for a broader set of policies. These include institutional reforms in the areas of governance, tenure, decentralisation, and community forest management (CFM). Agricultural policies can limit the demand for new agricultural land. Energy policies can limit the pressure on forest degradation caused by woodfuel harvesting, while reduced impact logging (RIL) practices can limit the harmful impacts of timber extraction. Setting up protected areas (PAs) has proved effective in conserving forest, and – although being far from perfect – support for PAs should be considered as part of any comprehensive national REDD+ strategy. Fortunately, we have several decades of experience and research from implementing many such policies. A major purpose of this book is to put these policy lessons on the table. There are certainly new elements in REDD+ compared to past efforts to manage forest; two of the most important ones the potential magnitude of the additional funding and the emphasis on performance based measures. But, most planned national policies to be implemented are comparable to measures tried in the past – often with disappointing outcomes. Thus a key challenge will be to build on this experience without repeating the mistakes of the past.