PART II / CHAPTER 4
BIO-CULTURAL COMMUNITY PROTOCOLS AND REDD
These are our rights
An inventory of national and international laws and
agreements that apply to the community. This will
provide a framework that can be drawn upon to assert
their rights (including relevant aspects of REDD, CBD,
UNDRIP, UNFCCC, etc).
Our views on REDD
What are the benefits they foresee by engaging in REDD?
What are their concerns? Specifically, what information
would the community require to consider a REDDrelated policy measure or project, on which terms would
the community want to engage in REDD and what are
the guarantees they would require? The community
could include the role it would like to play in reducing
deforestation and forest degradation, as well as a
declaration that such activities are not welcome.
This is how we want to be consulted
Setting out the community process for granting FPIC,
including details of the traditional leadership and the
values that will guide their decisions.
5. Reducing Risk, Increasing Certainty
The negotiation of the REDD mechanism is at a stage where
From an investor’s perspective, there are reputational
many details remain undecided. Yet due to the significant
risks associated with funding an initiative that does not
sums of money that REDD will generate and the governance
have the support of the local communities. This applies
challenges in many of the counties in which large forests exist,
both to country donors contributing to a fund and to
it is reasonable to argue that REDD will become a struggle
private companies looking to buy carbon offsets.
between profit on the one hand and environmental and social
BCPs could promote transparency and lead to increased legal
justice on the other. Safeguards are required to ensure that
certainty by promoting the empowered engagement of ILCs
forest-dependent communities whose ways of life have
with the REDD framework, specifically by assisting other
conserved forests are supported instead of further marginalized
stakeholders to engage with them according to their values
by the mechanism. Like other environmental regulatory
and on their terms.
frameworks, the efficacy of REDD will be judged at the
local level. BCPs offer a promising option for forest-
The use of community-based approaches to REDD such as
dependent communities to take a proactive role in determining
BCPs could help ensure the local integrity of international
what REDD will look like on the ground and to assert their
efforts to save forests from degradation that contributes to
rights in what has become a very complex and politically
climate change by rewarding ILCs for conserving their forests
charged environment.
without excluding activities that they people rely upon for
their livelihoods and bio - cultural ways of life.
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