Ecobank Malawi Limited recently pledged its continued support to projects aimed at combating the effects of climate change.

The pledge was made at Ntchisi, a district in central Malawi, as the bank made the last payment of a 3 year carbon sequestration tree planting project worth $7,500. The project is implemented by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in cooperation with the Sustainability Science Programme at Harvard University.
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The expansion of agricultural land to meet growing demand for food means that a lot of the water we consume flows from farms rather than from natural forest.

Supporting communities that live in watershed areas is therefore critical to ensuring the continued flow of fresh water to cities, farms and industry. Kenya’s water policy is however silent on how users of water can pay or otherwise compensate watershed communities for land use practices that reduce soil erosion while improving the flow of water.

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The PRESA project began in 2007 from the lessons and experiences of an older, similar project in Asia. That project is called RUPES (Rewarding the Upland Poor for Environmental Services).

Farmers worked together to build terracing and ridging in their coffee farms. PHOTO: Rachman Pasha

Since 2002, RUPES has been working with communities, researchers and policy makers in China, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Philippines and Vietnam.

RUPES sees rewards for environmental services as an approach that can alleviate rural poverty while protecting the natural environment.

An example of RUPES’ work has just been featured in the New Agriculturist magazine. The article describes how RUPES helped coffee farmers at the island of Sumatra get conditional land tenure. In exchange, the farmers are expected to practice soil and water conservation measures that ensure that soil sediments do not clog a local hydroelectric dam.

“We are very happy with this scheme because it gave us a legal certainty in managing our land as well as providing us with additional income from the fruit trees,” enthuses Eddy Purwanto, a community group member.

You can read the article by clicking here.

Connecting the idea of paying developing countries for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions with markets that demand sustainable products could be a step towards a new model of global development while reducing increasing pressures over access to land, says Daniel Nepstad of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute.

The global demand for food is growing faster than supply and has led to a land crisis that puts forests on the frontline of agricultural expansion. The crisis concerns proponents of rural poverty alleviation, food security, forestry, agriculture, water security, and biodiversity alike.

“What’s missing is a shared agenda of change. REDD is an example of how something arises to fix one aspect of the land crisis, while other groups don’t see their agenda addressed. Maybe that’s a mistake we made with REDD, we defined the agenda too narrowly,” said Nepstad in conversation with Center for International Forestry Research scientist Christine Padoch.

The UNFCCC Conference of Parties is developing REDD, a funding mechanism for keeping carbon in forests, as a way to address climate change. In the scheme, developed countries pay developing countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

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Unsustainable land use decisions and agricultural practices by landholders are responsible for watershed degradation. However, landholders have little or no incentive to change their ways by adopting sustainable land use practices.

PRESA researchers at Kapingazi during the survey.

That much is already known.

Little is known about landholder attitudes and preferences related to alternative land management schemes. Which practices do landholders prefer, and why? How much of their land can they set aside in a payments for environmental services (PES) scheme?

A recently published journal paper describes how researchers have adopted market research techniques to answer these questions and more.

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There is growing interest in payments and rewards for environmental services in ensuring that watersheds continue performing their crucial, life-supporting functions.

A meeting at Sasumua where PRESA met the Sasumua Water Resource User Association and the Water Resources Management Authority.

Nowhere is this interest more apparent than at the Sasumua catchment area in Kenya, which alone is responsible for 20% of the fresh water supplied to the capital city, Nairobi. Water from the catchment collects at the Sasumua reservoir, from where it is piped almost 100 kilometres to Nairobi in the south.

At least half of the Sasumua catchment area is under cultivation, hosting a high population growing at 3.5% annually. The average farm size is 2.86 acres. Polluted runoff from small towns and farms results in high rates of sedimentation, high bacterial count and high water treatment costs. The major pollutants are biological and soil materials from agricultural fields, bacteria from human and animal waste, and metallic content from roads and garages.
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Both the academic and the policy debate associate REDD primarily with “positive incentives” in the form of compensatory mechanisms. The simple idea is that farmers will stop slashing forests if they were offered incentives conditional on conservation targets (“carrots”).

The more complex reality, however, is that direct compensation payments can only work where rights to land are clearly defined and effectively controlled. Even in leading REDD candidate countries, such as Brazil, insecure tenure and irregularities prevail in much of the forest land under pressure. Moreover most REDD candidate countries have readily applicable environmental legislation that could reduce the lion’s share of deforestation if effectively enforced.

Command-and-Control (C&C) instruments (“sticks”) are often dismissed as inherently ineffective, but recent experiences in Brazil have shown that regulatory mechanisms combined with political will can make an astonishing difference at fairly low additional implementation costs.

Annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has experienced an unusually sharp drop since it peaked at over 27,000 square kilometers in 2004 – among other reasons, doubtless due to more effective law enforcement. Implementing REDD+ through C&C, would leave the major share of total emission abatement costs – opportunity costs – with land users. This can be convenient from the perspective of public budget planners, especially if C&C comes with fine revenues. Hence, why would REDD recipient countries opt for expensive carrots with limited scope for application if they have handy and less budget intensive C&C measures right at their disposal?

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Payments for environmental services target communities whose economic activities have a direct impact on environmental resources and aims at providing them with incentives for protecting the ecosystem.
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The Kagera River is one of the largest rivers flowing into Lake Victoria, the largest fresh water body in Africa. The natural resources of the Kagera river basin face increasing pressure as a result of population growth, intensification of agriculture and livestock activities and unsustainable land management practices.

A farm in the Kagera River basin. PHOTO: FAO

The Kagera river basin covers an area of 59,700 square kilometres, distributed between Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania. The basin supports some 16.5 million people, the majority in rural areas and depending directly on farming, herding and fishing activities. Most of the inhabitants are very poor and unable to invest in improved resources management.

Refugee movements in recent decades have further increased pressures on resources in the basin, raising actual and potential conflicts between interest groups and across countries.
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Scene from the Ukaguru Mountains, where the Mamiwa Forest Reserve is located. PHOTO: Eastern Arc Mountains Conservation Endowment Fund

Livelihoods of millions in Dar es Salaam, Coast and Morogoro regions are threatened by illegal tree felling in Mamiwa Forest Reserve, which authorities admit they cannot stop.

The illegal mowing down of trees at the reserve, which is a block in the Eastern Arc Mountains, is pioneered by a well coordinated syndicate involving traders, local government leaders and unfaithful villagers, according to investigations conducted by The Guardian newspaper.

Although the logging is done at the reserve, its impact is felt across many areas in Morogoro and the nearby regions of Dar es Salaam and Coast.

“This is a strategic water catchment for many rivers, supplying the precious liquid to many parts in the three regions. So, illegal logging at the reserves does not only affect water supply and climate of Morogoro Region, but many people in other regions as well,” Benedict Mberwa, a forest officer and Anglican Church pastor at Morogoro Diocese told a team of environmentalists and journalists who visited the reserve at Rubeho Ward, Kilosa District last week.

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