It is estimated that the COP 17, taking place here from November 28^th to December 9^th, will emit approximately 76.919 tons of CO2 equivalent to the atmosphere, according to the Department of Environmental Affairs of South Africa. This calculation is based on the estimated 25,000 delegates , NGO members and other visitors attending the COP.

International flights will have the largest impact on the overall carbon footprint. Other items took into account are: accommodation, electricity and water expenditures, food and information packs.

However, delegates and visitors will be able to reduce their carbon emissions through a voluntary offset mechanism called CEBA (Community Ecosystem-Based Adaptation Initiative), by buying carbon credits at www.durbanceba.org . Each credit costs 100 Rands (approximately USD12).

The funds will be used to support more than 42 initiatives hold by the eThtekwini Municipality, to which the city of Durban belongs. One of these projects is the Buffersdraai Landfill Reforestation Plan. It involves the community by providing them with skills to collect seeds from local tree species, grow them, and then resell them to the government. “Tree-preneurs” get from 5 to 10 Rands for each small tree, depending on its size, in credits to buy food, school stuff or building materials.

“My life improved after I joined this plantation program in 2008”, said Ziningi, mother of five children, who lives in the surroundings of Durban. “At the beginning, people didn’t believe they could get paid on that, but I began planting trees and that helped me not only to buy food, but also bricks for my house, and to pay for my driver’s license,” said Ziningi. Now she drives the bus that gets people to the tree nursery of the program, and she is a coach for other participants of the project.

Tree seedlings take several months to grow, and each producer can grow as many trees as he or she (most of them are women) has room at home. The goal of the program is to reforest land destroyed or converted to sugar cane plantations. The new forest is aimed at mitigating climate change in the city and providing job opportunities.

This project began in 2008 as part of the “Greening Durban Program,” to offset the 2010 soccer World Cup’s  carbon footprint.  Until today, the Municipalityhas  invested 13 million rand.

Other projects focus on adaptation to climate change, such as the Durban Central Beach Front Dune Rehabilitation. “The objective is to protect dunes and sand in the coastal zone”, explained Sean O’ Donoghue, climate protection manager at eThekwini Municipality. Dunes are important to manage wind-blown sand, and to protect the beaches and the infrastructure of this very touristic city. The municipality invested 6 million Rands to launch it.

The money would also fund research in smallholder production systems and markets, management and conservation of forest and tree resources, landscape management of forested areas for environmental services, biodiversity conservation and livelihoods, and impacts of trade and investment on forests and people.

Launching the programme on Dec. 4 during CIFOR’s fifth annual Forest Day, part of the on-going climate change conference here, Vice President of Sustainable Development at the World Bank, Rachel Kyte, said that the research programme on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry aims to revamp efforts to reduce deforestation and forest degradation and expand the use of trees on farms. The programme is the brainchild of a consortium of world renowned agricultural research institutions under the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), including the Forest Day organizers, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

“The initiative focuses on the critical importance of forests as natural ‘carbon sinks’ that can help slow the pace of climate change and the need to conserve forest biodiversity,” she said, adding that improved management of forests and trees can play a wider role in reducing risks for smallholder farmers and improving the wellbeing of forest- dependent communities, particularly women and disadvantaged groups.

Already, USD90 million has been raised for the programme while the rest would be secured through fund-raising activities.

The programme comes at a time when deforestation and forest degradation are accelerating climate change and threatening the wellbeing of millions of poor people around the world.

“Under these circumstances, we urgently need a strong  and sustained effort focusing on forest management and governance, given the crucial role of forests in confronting some of the most important challenges of our time: climate change, poverty and food security,” said Frances Seymour, CIFOR director general. She added that without addressing deforestation and forest degradation, the world risks the further impoverishment of millions of poor people who depend on forests and trees for their livelihoods.

“On the other hand we will continue to witness continued carbon emissions from forest destruction and degradation that are a significant source of greenhouse gases, and loss of ecosystem services crucial to sustained agricultural activity,” she stressed.

Implementation of the programme will involve the collaboration of four of the world’s leading research centers. They are the Kenya- based World Agroforestry Centre, CIFOR based in Indonesia, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) based in Colombia and Biodiversity International in Italy.  “These will be the focal points of project implementation but  we will work with universities and research institutions  in the various countries when it comes to the practical implementation of the project,” Kyte told CCMP fellows in a separate interview.

In Tanzania, The University of Dar es Salaam through the Institute of Resource Assessment (IRA) has been conducting various researches on adaptation and mitigation particularly for small farmers in the rural communities. The Sokoine University of Agriculture based in Morogoro , Tanzania has also been conducting research in these areas, also involving the rural poor in their activities. These two universities are likely to benefit most from the programme.

Asked on the dissemination of the findings, the CGIAR Chair explained that information on research findings would be timely disseminated. “Our aim is to help communities cope with effects of climate change. This means once we get findings we will disseminate them so that they are put into use by small farmers, so that they may take adaptation measure and reduce poverty,” she said.

Presenting the results of a case study on implementation of ecosystem adaption in the rural communities of western Tanzania, Dr Elizabeth Gray from The Nature Conservancy said that many communities in Tanzania have adequate information on climate change, “but their efforts to adapt are hampered by lack of accurate data and finance.”

In this edition of Radio Netherlands Worldwide show Africa in Progress, four African climate change experts discuss why it is important for us to protect our trees and what would happen if we continue cut down our forest cover in Africa.

Redd: problems and prospects

The year 2012 is also when commitments end to reduce greenhouse gases that cause global warming under the Kyoto Protocol. Negotiators are meeting in Cancun to decide the future of the UN climate system, but few expect a dramatic outcome from these talks.

However, one Mayan is more interested in the climate talks than Mayan prophecy.

“I never saw the movie,” laughed Elias Becituk. “But, we [Mayans] like to give out numbers. We predicted [that] it would happen in 2000 or some other year, but nothing.

“What we really expect is that [negotiators at the] Cancun [climate talks] come up with a plan to save this earth.”

THE MAYAN FOREST

For the last decade, Elias and 250 members of Ejuido Felipe Carrilo
Puerto [Felipe Carrilo Puerto community] inherited the job to guard
their last intact 47,000 hectares of Mayan jungle in Yucatan Peninsula based on a communal system.

The community has mapped out their area into zones:  protected areas, ‘milpa’ or agriculture, beekeeping, non-timber forest product areas, and eco-tourism.

“It took them two years to map out all their areas and then start the system to work. So, this is their own strategy, their own effort,” said Sebastian Proust, an activist from local NGO, U’yooche. “All decisions must be planned out and approved by the members of the community. If there are any violations, there can be severe penalties.”

The biggest challenge for the Mayan jungle, he said, was that the
forest does not exist in the minds of the outside world.

“People can recognize Amazon forests or Indonesian forests or
American forests, but, nobody knows about Mayan jungle. It does not
exists. If it does not exist then it can disappear,” he said. “We
put up a huge banner on the road before the climate talks venues,
urging people to ‘pay attention’ to Mayan jungle.

“Cancun is not all about beaches. We have forests here.”

The deforestation rate in Mexico is 1.36 percent per year. However, in
the Yucatan Peninsula, especially on community forests areas, it is only  0.24 percent.

“As you can see, the deforestation rate is low in areas where people
manage their own forests,” said Sebastian. “These people know
what they’re doing [to preserve forests], you don’t need to teach them.”

But the Mayan’s forests are not without threats. One of the biggest “is government development itself and law enforcement,” said Sebastian. “There is a law stating that Mayan jungle is not for sale, but, you can check on the internet. There are offers for a piece of jungle, either for housing or for golf courses.”

One section of the community forest now being rehabilitated with natural forest regeneration was cleared more than a decade ago for a government program to plant citrus trees. (The promised tree seedlings never arrived, but the forest was gone, Sebastian said.)

Elias said that the Mayans themselves have made many changes for the sake of the forest. For the past five years, the Ejuido Felipe Carrilo Puerto has changed their way of managing the forests by reducing the area used for traditional farming.

REDD and Mayan People

Aside from implementing forest management, the community has a
special interest in a forest protection mechanism being negotiated at the Cancun talks. The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation [REDD] system would compensate developing countries for protecting their forests, which help store carbon that would otherwise enter the atmosphere and warm the earth.

The Ejuido Felipe Carrilo Puerto is a pioneer on the Yucatan Peninsula in REDD, starting its first REDD project in 2009 by counting how much carbon is stored in their forest.

With only simple equipment, the community started out their activities by inventorying trees in the forests and measuring the weight of sample trees.

“It was a very difficult process at that time because nobody here knew how to count carbon,” said Sebastian. “These people know how to preserve forests but not to count them.”

To measure carbon, he added, they needed to cut down around 80 trees and weigh them. Not just the trunks, but also the branches and the leaves.

“We are trying to count the carbon, meaning its biomass, which usually weighs half of the whole tree.”

Elias said that their carbon would be certified  in January 2011,
which will allow them to sell credits on the voluntary carbon markets.

“I don’t know how many carbon credits that we could obtain from our
forests but we will be compensated $12.50 [per ton] by the buyer,” he
said adding that the buyer came from Canada. “I know that REDD is
about compensation so what’s wrong with protecting the forests and getting some money out of it. I’m pretty much satisfied with REDD even though we still don’t have the money yet.”

“If you want to invest in REDD,” said Sebastian. “You should do it with these people.”

The San Antonio Tuk community forest, a three-hour drive south on the Yucatan peninsula from UN climate talks in Cancun, is just one of Mexico’s many communal land trusts, or ejiros. Created on the back of the Mexican revolution a century ago, they account for a staggering 70 percent of the country’s 64 million hectares of forest cover.

Environmental NGOs say the ejiros would be perfect for preserving forests under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Land Degradation (REDD) regime now under negotiation at the UN climate talks, a scheme to pay tropical countries to keep forests standing.

The difference is stark between Cancun and the forest village of San Antonio Tuk. Cancun is a tourist playground where mangrove forests have long made way for dozens of air-conditioned hotels, one of which is the gigantic Moon Palace, host to the climate conference.

The contrast exemplifies the threat facing Mexico’s forests. “It’s not logging or fires that are the biggest threats to our forests, but development in the tourism, mining and agricultural sectors,” says Sergio Madrid Zubirán of the Consejo Civil Mexicana para la Silvicultura Sostenible, a network of NGOs that work on forests.

The Consejo supports four forest projects which it hopes will benefit from a future REDD scheme by sequestering carbon and protecting trees. San Antonia Tuk lies in one of the larger zones, a 70,000-hectare community forest in the heavily deforested state of Quintana Roo, home to 54 Mayan communities.

LOCAL PARTICIPATION IN REDD?

In Mexico, conservationists are divided on whether to protect forests by keeping people out of them, or by appointing indigenous people like the Mayan forest dwellers as official forest custodians. Some REDD proposals on the table take an ambivalent approach to the participation of indigenous communities, with some nations reluctant to use the scheme as a way of empowering local ethnic groups.

“It’s the people who live in the forest that know best how to preserve it,” counters Zubirán. “A non-touch strategy won’t work because nobody accrues benefits from conserving the forest. If we involve local communities, we win much more.”

Community member and biologist Marco Antonio explains that the project was launched with the aim of giving economic support to the keepers of the forest. “Over 40 groups of land owners deliver essential environmental services for which they receive an incentive from the central government,” he says.

This concept, in which forest people get paid for safeguarding, for instance, the water supply used by downstream communities, is rapidly gaining ground. “For our stewardship, the government gives us 326 pesos ($26 US) per hectare per year,” says Cante Chuc who runs a privately owned network that mediates between communities and project funders.

That number doesn’t seem much, but with hundreds of hectares per community member, it provides an additional income, while the trend of deforestation has been halted, says the Consejo’s spokesperson, Iván Zúñiga Pérez-Tejada.

The project is supported by a $200,000 grant from HSBC Bank, the Ford Foundation and the Consejo.

The Mexican NGO hopes to complete a baseline survey of carbon sequestration in the forest in June next year, and has an eye on how it could benefit from a REDD agreement at the Cancun climate talks.

The Consejo argues that many of the tricky issues associated with REDD – such as ensuring loss of forests doesn’t occur in other ways, verifying how much extra carbon is stored as a result, and making sure that carbon isn’t simply released later – could be solved by putting the Mayan forest communities in charge of monitoring schemes, because they have used the forest sustainably for centuries.

“A well-organised community is the most effective remedy against illegal logging,” argues Zubirán.

FORESTS FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS

Catalina Briceño Lopez, a sinewy 69-year old, was one of the first Maya to arrive in the area. “I came here at 15 with my husband who was one of the founders of San Antonio Tuk,” she says.

She recalls a pristine forest where no one lived. “It is important to pass on this sense of conserving the forest for next generations. I have a piece of land, and when my children and grandchildren come to visit me, I teach them about how to live from the forest without over exploiting it,” she says.

“It is a beautiful thing to preserve the environment, I am very excited about this (project).”

Don Santos Ilichois, 64, carves out an environmentally sustainable living by harvesting gum (known as chicle) for the chewing gum industry. A packet of “organic tropical forest chewing gum” sells for as much as 2 euros in European supermarkets.

While most Westerners his age are reaching for their slippers, Don Santos straps on a pair of spikes and readies himself to climb an 800-year-old chicle tree. A couple metres above ground, he hacks diagonal lines into the ancient forest giant.

“The gum will run down the tree through these lines where we can collect it,” he says. “It will not kill the tree.”

Wiping the sweat off his tough, sun-hardened face, he explains it takes several hours to work the entire length of a tree like this. In one day, he can harvest about 1.5 kg of gum from a tree, with 1 kg of gum fetching about 55 pesos ($4).

“We hope that with an agreement on forests (at the U.N. talks), we can keep on using the trees in our traditional ways,” he says. But the future of REDD – hailed only a few weeks back as one of the few likely successes from Cancun – seems uncertain.

The Japanese government reiterated last week it will not join a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol after the initial period expires next year, injecting a sense of pessimism into the negotiations.

The death of the Kyoto Protocol would jeopardise the carbon offsetting initiatives it has given birth to, including the Clean Development Mechanism. And any subsequent collapse of budding carbon markets around the world could pull the rug from under a hard-fought REDD deal before it even gets off the ground.

“Projects on the ground are looking for a signal that REDD is coming and that long-term sustainable finance will be available,” said Davyth Stewart of Global Witness, a London-based NGO that advocates for the fair use of natural resources.

“Without a REDD deal here in Cancun, some of those projects will be forced to search for funding elsewhere, including multilateral development banks and the private sector, where they will be subject to different or minimal international common standards.”