| PRESA - Pro-poor Rewards for Environmental Services in Africa | Issue No. 3 | October 2009 |
CreditsEditors: Vanessa Meadu and Godfrey Kimega
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Video clips
"Why are rewards for environmental services important in the development of Africa?" Featured LinksRestoring
the functions of watersheds
Tradeoffs, synergies and traps among
ecosystem services in the Lake Victoria basin of East Africa Factors affecting soil loss at plot scale and
sediment yield at catchment scale in a tropical volcanic
agroforestry
landscape Biofuel
Emission Reduction Estimator Scheme (BERES)
Key
activities and guiding principles for linking science and policy for
PRESA
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Welcome to the October 2009 PRESA E-News |
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Greetings once again! The launch of a set of contract design guides marks a major achievement in setting up viable rewards for environmental services (RES) schemes. The guides are the result of collective effort by like-minded organizations which realized that designing contracts for environmental services can be challenging especially when done for the first time. In this newsletter, we introduce you to these guides. There are articles from our partners at two PRESA sites. Gerald Kairu writes from Uganda where a group of farmers are already receiving carbon payments for growing trees. From the upper Tana River catchment in Kenya, Nestry Ndichu reveals how joint action between the Kenyan government and the local community helped restore a dying river. The city of Nairobi played host to one of the biggest conferences on agroforestry in recent times. Rewards for environmental services was a key part of discussions at the World Congress of Agroforestry, with widespread interest from a surprisingly large number of organizations. See the presentations in this edition of the PRESA E-News. We invite anyone engaged in rewards for environmental services within Africa to share their experiences. You can send us information from your operations zone which we can help turn into a story. We also invite you to visit the PRESA website and subscribe for email alerts whenever a story is published. Do have pleasant reading! Vanessa and Godfrey
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Contract design guides now available online
PRESA and partners have produced template contracts to help organizations create legal agreements between buyers and sellers of environmental services. The guides can easily be downloaded from the Katoomba Group website and will soon be available on CD. The guides are a series of templates for payments for environmental services (PES) contracts. There are drafting notes for watershed services, biodiversity services and carbon sequestration and storage. There is also a short guide for building equity into PES contracts. All these are aimed at PES entrepreneurs, PES project managers and local lawyers who may not have much experience in making contracts but have already ascertained the presence of valuable environmental services, sufficient property rights and willing buyers and sellers. “The contents of the CD will help you move a PES concept to an early draft PES agreement which can then be amended to comply with local law,” says lead author Mark Ellis-Jones of CARE International. CARE is among organizations and individuals that worked with PRESA in producing the contract guides. Others are the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Foundation, the World Agroforestry Centre and the Katoomba Group.
Find out where you can download the
guides: |
How carbon funds improve rural livelihoods - the case of UgandaCarbon offsetting in south western and western parts of Uganda is a relatively new approach to mitigate climate change in the region. It is implemented by the Environmental Conservation Trust of Uganda (ECOTRUST) under the Trees for Global Benefit Program, but has received additional support from the Pro-poor Rewards for Environmental Services in Africa (PRESA) project. PRESA’s overall goal is to have “hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers and residents living in the highlands of East and West Africa benefiting from fair and effective agreements between stewards and beneficiaries of ecosystem services.” The carbon offsetting scheme implemented by ECOTRUST is unique in that it targets small scale farmers who, by virtue of their holdings, are poor. In Africa, such initiatives are not common. The benefits accruing from this initiative are both direct and indirect. |
Reviving a dead river in Kenya
The concept employed is the bottom-up approach. The community analyzed the problem through a participatory rural appraisal exercise and the Government of Kenya intervened immediately afterwards with the support of Mount Kenya East Pilot Project on Natural Resources Management (MKEPP-NRM). According to the hydro-meteorological data, the flow of Kapingazi River has improved and it did not dry up during the 2008 - 2009 dry spell. Right now, forest cover is regrowing.
Read more here: http://presa.worldagroforestry.org/blog/2009/10/17/kapingazi-river-flows-again/ |
Harnessing carbon markets for multiple benefitsParticipants to a forum on payments for environmental services have proposed looking beyond carbon markets and using other ecosystem services to encourage small scale farmers adopt sustainable land practices. Various approaches and tools were presented at the technical session to show how a variety of ecosystem services can be bundled, for example REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) with forest carbon markets and eco-labeling of environmentally friendly products. The session titled, “Rewards for the environmental services of Agroforestry” was among events held during the World Congress of Agroforestry in Nairobi, Kenya. Over 1,200 people attended the Congress to participate in rigorous scientific discussions on up-scaling agroforestry to meet development challenges. A full report of the technical session can
be found at: |
PRESA partners at Finnish forestry courseThree PRESA partners went to Finland in August 2009 to attend a course titled, "Environmental Services in Forest Management." By the end of the course on 20th August, the three had acquired new skills in managing environmental services. Gerald Kairu from Ecotrust Uganda, Ndeshi Munisi from the Horticultural Research Institute -Tengeru, Tanzania and Miika Mäkelä from the PRESA office in Nairobi were at the University of Helsinki Summer School with other students from 50 countries worldwide. The Environmental Services Forest Management Course which the PRESA partners were taking had about 20 participants, majority of whom were from Africa. The course included several field trips where participants saw for themselves how Finland manages its forestry resources for economic development.
Gerald, Ndeshi
and Miika have shared the lessons they learnt in the following blog
posting: |
Is your organization ready to begin drafting
contracts for ecosystem services between a
community and a potential buyer?
This story describes how a river that had
dried up was revived through an integrated intervention approach by
four government ministries. The river basin can now support the
people living in
it.
Visit our website for regular updates or sign up to receive an email whenever we update the site.
