Strengthening local institutions is key to ensuring the involvement of smallholder farmers in payments for environmental service (PES) deals. PRESA worked with Nature Harness Initiatives (NAHI) in Uganda to prepare local stakeholders for participation in carbon PES along River Wambabya in the Albertine Rift, and watershed PES at the Rushebeya-Kanyabaha wetland.

A wetland in Uganda. PHOTO: NAHI

The work involved cataloguing the potential sellers, intermediaries and private-sector buyers of environmental services in the two landscapes. Awareness creation was conducted among potential sellers at community level. These included existing groups and networks of land owners, forest owners, people engaged in forest and wetland-based enterprises, parish wetland management committees and other users of forest and wetland resources.

The potential buyers included Kisiizi Hospital Power Company (at Rushebeya-Kanyabaha) and British American Tobacco and McLeod Russel Uganda( at Wambabya). Dialogue on PES was initiated among the potential buyers and government institutions. At the Wambabya riverine forest system, the two private sector companies have contributed greatly to ecosystem conservation in their areas of operation.
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Who said carbon cannot pay for water? PRESA facilitated the expansion of Ecotrust’s work on Trees for Global benefits to enable farmers growing trees in the River Mobuku watershed in Uganda to access carbon payments. Mobuku River watershed lies at the foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains.

A woodlot of 'Prunus Africana' trees in the Ecotrust Uganda project area. PHOTO: Ecotrust Uganda

Before a carbon project is implemented, a lot of work goes into linking communities with potential carbon buyers. This article is a summary of activities by Ecotrust Uganda and PRESA, in getting farmers into carbon offsetting.

Farmer mobilisation

Several strategies were employed including home visits by Ecotrust field staff and meetings with local leaders in the areas targeted for the carbon project. Community-based officers from Ecotrust disseminated information about the project to local leaders and farmers and invited them for training meetings.

Farmer sensitisation

There were two induction meetings for farmers from the Ruboni Community Development Organisation in Bugoye sub-country and Mobuku Integrated Farmers’ Association in Maliba sub-county. Farmers from the two organizations were sensitized on the procedures of getting involved in carbon offsets. These meetings are critical because project requirements are explained to all those interested in joining the carbon project.
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More and more land in Africa is being cultivated, reducing the area covered by forests, the existing biodiversity, and affecting the water supplies of nearby cities. Could farmers produce the same environmental services as forests if given adequate motivation?

Rewarding communities for environmental services can provide powerful incentives and efficient mechanisms for conservation, while also offering new sources of income to support rural livelihoods. Rewards can come in different forms.

Examples are direct deals between water and hydropower utilities and communities living in catchment areas, and payments for carbon sequestration. The latter involves global systems of trade in terms of carbon credits.

Other rewards create opportunities for economic benefits for farmers. They include the use of certificates and labels in order to access a better market, community-based eco-tourism, conditional tenure rights in areas where land and resource ownership is communal, or specific rights to harvest and sell tree products from public land.
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A scheme to pay people in developing countries for reducing carbon emissions from deforestation is plagued by ‘leakage’ — trees that aren’t cut down in one forest are just cut down in another to provide people with the resources they would have foregone.

A study by an international team of scientists has come up with a way of dealing with leakage. Money set aside for conservation could be used to target the underlying drivers of deforestation – such as local people’s need for food and fuel – so that fewer trees need to be cut down.

For the details of that study, please click here >>.

Can payments for ecosystem services (PES) – including revenues from projects focused on reducing emissions from degradation and deforestation (REDD+) – create new incentives for sustainable land use management in Africa? What are the opportunities? And what risks exist, for whom?

A view of the city of Nairobi.

These questions, and more, will be at the core of a workshop, jointly offered by the World Agroforestry Center and the international Katoomba Group with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The workshop on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) and Reducing Emissions from Degradation and Deforestation (REDD+) runs from 8 to 9 August 2011. Participants will include policy makers, private sector stakeholders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Cameroon, Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.  The content will focus on providing participants with an introduction to PES and REDD+, a set of guidelines for selecting the most promising PES and REDD+ sites, and an overview of how PES can be implemented.

The second workshop, scheduled for 10 to 12 August 2011, and also jointly offered by the World Agroforestry Center and the international Katoomba Group, will train project implementers (mainly NGOs) from Kenya and Uganda on social impact assessment in the design and implementation of PES projects.

We will be posting regular updates on the PRESA website as the event draws closer.

UPDATE – 22 August 2011: Presentations from the workshop are now online.

Please click here for presentations from the PES and REDD workshop.

Click here for presentations from the social impact assessment workshop.

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The UK Department for International Development (DFID) is seeking to recruit leading scientists, academics and researchers in various fields of natural and social sciences to serve as Senior Research Fellows. Their work will be to undertake specific tasks to be agreed in the design and execution of research programmes. Experts and researchers in the private sector and non-governmental organisations are encouraged to apply. For more details, click here.

Still from the United Kingdom, Bangor University is offering ten fully-funded scholarship grants for a Masters of Science in Forestry through distance learning. The scholarships are currently available for entrants in September 2011. Applicants may be nationals of: Bangladesh, Botswana, Cameroon, The Gambia, Ghana, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Get the details by clicking here.

Meanwhile, the United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (UNU-INRA) is issuing a call for papers for an international conference that it wishes to organize. The goal of the conference is to highlight new research and community engagement on sustainable natural resource management and use. The conference will be held on 5 – 8 December 2011 at Accra, Ghana. The deadline for submitting abstracts is 31 July 2011. Download the PDF (only 65KB) for instructions.

Communities engaged in the Trees for Global Benefits carbon project in western Uganda are getting additional income from the medicinal values of a particular tree, but the lucrative benefits are putting the tree in danger, as criminals reap where others have planted.

A debarked Prunus africana tree. PHOTO: Gerald Kairu

The carbon project, implemented by the Environmental Conservation Trust of Uganda (ECOTRUST), uses voluntary carbon standards to link carbon producers (who are farmers and landowners growing trees) with global buyers of carbon credits.

Farmers participating in the Trees for Global Benefits projects are selected using criteria specified in Plan Vivo standards. Plan Vivo is a system for developing community-based payments for environmental service projects and programmes.

If successfully selected, the farmer signs a carbon sales contract and gets paid. However, farmers must draw up a land management plan making use of approved tree species such as Maesopsis eminii, Cordia sp., Khaya sp.and Prunus africana.

The carbon absorption rate (sequestration) of these species is known, making it easier to calculate how much carbon has been sequestered after a given time frame.
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Over 120 African and Asian government negotiators, land managers, representatives of non-government organizations and climate change scientists are meeting this month at regional workshops in Cameroon and Vietnam to enhance their skills and understanding of the REDD+ implementation process.

Participants at a previous workshop organized by IISD and ASB, held in Nairobi, Kenya in 2009.

The workshops are hosted by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and the Alternatives to Slash and Burn Partnership for the Tropical Forest Margins (ASB).

REDD+ after Cancun: moving from negotiation to implementation is the theme of the two-and-a-half day workshops to be held in Douala on May 10 – 12 and Hanoi on May 18 – 20, 2011. They offer a series of expert presentations and in-depth discussions about the REDD+ process.

REDD+ is a climate change mitigation mechanism under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It goes beyond reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) to encompass sustainable management of forests, conservation and enhancement of carbon sinks in developing countries.

The 2010 Cancun agreements emphasized the need for nationally driven plans for effective implementation of REDD+. Given the complexity of the rapidly evolving subject, decision makers and key stakeholders need to be well equipped with the knowledge and skills required to formulate national strategies to ensure success of REDD+.

Click here for more on these workshops.

Spatial analysis is an important tool for gathering information about plant diversity in specific geographic areas around the world.

Monitoring the status of plant species and patterns of distribution enables us to set priority areas for conservation, identifying which species are most at risk and where we have gaps in collections. This vital information helps us tackle global challenges such as food security and climate change.

As part of its capacity building programme, Bioversity International has published a training manual for practitioners who work with biodiversity data and want to develop spatial analysis skills using free Geographic Information System (GIS) tools. The manual is available for download as part of Bioversity’s training materials series.

Read more about this manual here >>.

Nature Harness Initiatives (NAHI) is a Ugandan civil society organisation, working with PRESA to enhance ecosystem conservation while improving people’s income.

NAHI hopes to reverse wetland degradation by facilitating collaborative management plans, and developing one or more PES (payment for ecosystem services) schemes to generate financial resources to help pay for wetland management activities.

PES in Uganda is a relatively new practice, and NAHI has much to learn about how the concepts and principles can be applied.

NAHI and PRESA are conducting research that will lead to workable rewards for environmental service agreements in two landscapes: the Rushebeya-Kanyabaha wetland and the Wambabya riverine forests. Both lie in western Uganda, within the Albertine Rift associate site of the PRESA project.
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