By Janette Bulkan
(This is the fifth in a 10-part series intended to look at some of the issues surrounding Guyana’s bid for funds from the World Bank-administered Forest Carbon Partnership Fund (FCPF) and from Norway, and for the President’s Low Carbon Development Strategy.)
The last few articles in this series have covered some of the international processes for carbon trading in the context of managing climate change. The processes range from the tightly regulated Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to Brazil’s Amazon Fund. The CDM rules, devised essentially for industrial contexts where assessment and monitoring is relatively simple, have been almost insurmountable barriers for forest situations. Carbon trading with forests being managed to provide additional sequestration of carbon has been more successful under the voluntary schemes, because rules are less demanding and more flexible. Guyana could have participated in voluntary projects from some years ago. At one time it appeared that Iwokrama might become involved but low potential for extra carbon sequestration, above that provided by natural forest growth, plus the lack of baseline data, discouraged the traders.
Brazil’s Amazon Fund is a voluntary scheme for Avoided Deforestation (AD) outside the scope of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), whereby donors can compensate communities which have lived by cutting and burning trees at the forest frontier, farming for a year or two and then moving on as the forest frontier recedes.
The Fund would pay these farmers to change to a different livelihood, not based on annual forest burning. The Fund has no explicit link to changes in carbon stocks. This situation is not comparable with the rotational agriculture of the Amerindians in southern Guyana, where farming takes place in the secondary forest on the edge of the savanna. Here the farmers return to the same patches after a fallow period of several years but do not generally fell primary forest.
The Amazon Fund is not the same as Brazil’s REDD proposal of February 2007 which does involve assessment of emissions from deforestation, during a reference period (historical) and during the crediting period. REDD is the acronym for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, one of several approaches to be negotiated at the 15th Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC at Copenhagen in December 2009.
All the schemes, even Brazil’s Avoided Deforestation (AD), require countries to assess their standing stocks and their losses of forest. In its present state of development, Brazil’s AD seems to require only measures of forest area, not carbon content. With high resolution satellite-based sensors, detection of recent clearance of tropical rainforest is not difficult, even if the area is covered by cloud. In spite of having frequent cloud cover, Guyana has (or had) images from aerial photographs dating back to 1950 and since 1972 it has had satellite-based imagery, of which Landsat is the best known, with cloud-penetrating radar more recently.
National forest area
The Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) has estimated the national forest cover in versions of proposals made to the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Fund (FCPF). The GFC has given four estimates so far, related to our total surface area (land and water) of 21.5 million hectares (Mha), of which 19.7 million ha are on land –
75 per cent of 21.5 Mha land = 16.1Mha of forest (Quick Assessment Paper for FCPF, revised May 2009, page 4);
80 per cent of land = c.16 Mha of forest (R-PLAN for FCPF, component 4, revised June 1, 2009, page 56);
83.7 per cent of 21.5 Mha land = 18.0Mha of forest (Quick Assessment Paper for FCPF, February 2009, page 4);
85 per cent of the country = 18.5 Mha of forest (R-PLAN for FCPF, all versions, page 2).
No explanation has been given by the GFC for the variety of estimates in less than six months, ranging from 16 to 18.5 Mha. Why is the uncertainty about areas important? Because that 2.5 Mha discrepancy could contain tradable carbon. President Jagdeo’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS – June 2009, footnote 8 on page 8) cautiously says “Guyana’s rainforest covers an area in excess of 15 million hectares”.
Who owns or administers these forests? The GFC administers the State Forest area on behalf of the citizens of Guyana. The GFC’s Forest Sector Information Report for calendar year 2008, the latest data available on the GFC website, totals the State Forests as just under 13.7 Mha but the GFC claims 13.8 Mha in the R-PLANs for the FCPF, a discrepancy equivalent to a medium-sized Timber Sales Agreement logging concession of 130,000 ha.
Amerindian areas
The LCDS estimates (page 43) that forests on titled Amerindian Village Lands cover about 1.7 Mha out of the 2.8 Mha of such lands (14 per cent of Guyana’s land area, LCDS page 5). There are now 97 communities with title and demarcated lands, leaving 42 communities still without title out of the current total of 139 communities (Minister of Amerindian Affairs Pauline Sukhai in SN, December 09 2008). That is an increase of 11 Amerindian communities since the 128 recorded by the Amerindian Lands Commission during 1966-69. Successive post-independence governments of Guyana have not yet complied with the legal obligation in the independence agreement with the UK to provide title to the communities for the lands which they occupied and used at the moment of independence; there are still 128-97 = 31 communities to be titled. How does this lack of official tenure affect the position of these communities in relation to the LCDS?
And what about the extensions to titled Amerindian Village Lands, requests made for extra land for cultivation because of demographic increases? While some of these have been granted, others have not. How do these latter communities stand in relation to the LCDS?
Why is the uncertainty important, about the numbers of Amerindian communities and areas of land claimed by or titled to Amerindian communities? Not only because of the quantification for the Economic Value to the Nation in the LCDS; the McKinsey calculations used in the LCDS excluded titled Amerindian lands, but what about the claimed lands?
Perhaps more important is the ownership of the carbon in the forests. While the Mining Act 1989 (no.20 of 1989) is clear that Amerindians have no intrinsic rights to sub-surface minerals, on titled Amerindian Village Lands the communities own the forests and thus the trees and thus the carbon in the trees.
It would thus be quite legal for any one or several or all titled communities to negotiate voluntary carbon sequestration agreements with carbon emitters, as happens in several tropical countries. Brazil and Indonesia positively encourage communities to participate in such trading. Why not Guyana? The architecture of REDD is still under discussion in the UNFCCC context, and a diversity of trials and pilot projects is encouraged.
There is indeed the precedent of Iwokrama negotiating with Canopy Capital for “Measuring and then placing a value in the market place on eco-services of Iwokrama to humanity such as rainfall and biodiversity; [and] Using income from the ecosystem services to help make Iwokrama financially independent of institutional donors by 2010 in accordance with the IIC Business Plan and Iwokrama’s research obligation” (http://canopycapital.co.uk/ about/index.html).
If there are 18.5 Mha of forest in Guyana, 13.8 Mha in State Forest and 1.7 Mha in Amerindian Village Lands, who owns or administers the balance of 3.0 Mha?
In the next article, I will look at the volume components of the forest carbon budget for Guyana.