Tropical countries that seek a share of billions of dollars of climate finance in return for protecting their forests risk creating strategies that fail to bring social and environmental benefits, according to a report released Thursday by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). The report draws on the work of Forest Governance Learning Group (FGLG) teams in ten nations in Africa and Asia to promote fair and sustainable decision making about forests.

It highlights success stories at the national level, in which FGLG teams have influenced policy processes to promote outcomes that benefit forest-dependent communities who have been marginalised.

On the international stage, the FGLG teams have focused on how their countries are preparing for
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, REDD , a system being developed to reward countries that maintain or increase their forest to limit emissions of greenhouse gases from deforestation.

FGLG teams in Ghana, Indonesia, Mozambique, Tanzania and Vietnam report that national plans for REDD  could do more harm than good.

In many countries, top-down, government-led plans for REDD  been have been rushed through and focus more on how to count carbon stored in trees than on how to actually implement a system that brings real benefits for communities, biodiversity and the climate.

“REDD remains forestry’s best hope yet but it must be built from the bottom up,” said James Mayers, head of IIED’s Natural Resources Group and co-author of the FGLG report.

“Strategies are difficult to turn around once they head off in the wrong direction - and the costs of bad strategy for forests are extremely high. To realise justice in the forests, policymakers must turn REDD on its head and put control of the forests into local hands,” Mayers pointed out.

The FGLG teams bring together representatives of communities, governments, civil society organisations, businesses and the media, to explore the drivers of poor forest governance and to influence policy-making.

FGLG teams operate in Cameroon, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Vietnam. For each country, the report describes successes from the past year and plans for activities between now and 2013.

The project has been steered by IIED since it began, in 2003, and has been funded by the UK and Dutch governments and the European Commission.

Having started up in 2010, FGLG-Tanzania has found its feet in 2011 as its framework plan to 2013 concentrates on two main outputs: forest rights and small forest enterprise; and REDD.

According to the IIED report, the team contributed to a detailed evidence-based study, commissioned by the government, to assess the difference between the timber exported from Tanzania and that imported into China.

The country’s ‘Mama Misitu’ (Kiswahili language for ‘Mother Forests’) forest
governance awareness campaign picked up on the challenges revealed by this research and worked to show government the level of leakage involved, and to show government and communities how to pursue legal trade.

On REDD, the team has been working out how best to contribute to establish effective connection between the local and the national, addressing the common problems and challenges.

As an increasingly strong ‘governance arm’ of the Tanzania Forest Working Group, it has been tackling REDD governance issues and stepping up its interactions with government, the private sector and universities.

In 2011, FGLG-Tanzania is focused on further work on cross-border timber and the drivers and outcomes of timber trade between East Africa and China. It expects to develop further films, policy briefs, media outreach opportunities and comics.

In addition, the team aims to track and network on governance issues amongst the big REDD projects, as well as the smaller and alternative REDD pilots and voluntary carbon
projects, to look at the implications of illegal timber trade for REDD and to produce related briefs and presentations.

Pana 26/08/2011