(Image: Andrzej Krauze)

SATELLITE images of the Amazon rainforest are startling. Islands of green are surrounded by brown areas of land cleared for farming. In places, the brown advances, year by year. But in others, the forest holds firm. Why the difference? Mostly, the surviving green areas belong to local tribes.

Brazil’s Kayapo, for instance, control 10.6 million hectares along the Xingu river in the south-eastern Amazon, an area often called the “arc of deforestation”. They held back the invasion that engulfed areas close by, often violently repelling loggers, gold miners, cattle ranchers and soya farmers. The Kayapo have kept deforestation rates “close to zero”, according to Daniel Nepstad, a long-time Amazon researcher now at the Earth Innovation Institute in San Francisco.

In these critical frontier zones, the assumption was that government protection could best halt the onslaught. But there is growing evidence that indigenous peoples often provide a stronger bulwark than state decree. The 300 or so indigenous territories created in the Brazilian Amazon since 1980 are now widely held to have played a key role in a dramatic decline in rates of deforestation there.


Similar effects have been documented in many other parts of the world. Forest dwellers are typically seen as forest destroyers. But the opposite is often the case, says David Bray of Florida International University.

Bray has spent a lifetime studying Mexico, where rural communities have long-standing ownership of 60 per cent of the country’s forests, and have logged them for timber to sell. This may sound like a recipe for disaster, yet he says that deforestation rates in community-owned forests have been “generally lower than in regions dominated by protected areas”.

One example is in the Yucatan region, where communities outperformed the local Calakmul Biosphere Reserve 200-fold.

Why? Because, Bray says, “communities with rights to resources conserve those resources; communities without rights have no reason to conserve… and deforestation will ensue”. Andrew Steer, the head of the Washington DC-based environment group the World Resources Institute, agrees: “If you want to stop deforestation, give legal rights to communities.”

Some environmentalists pay lip service to this new conservation narrative. But too often, forest communities face growing efforts by outsiders to grab their land in the name of conservation.

Forest communities too often face growing efforts by outsiders to grab land in the name of conservation

The latest threat will probably be a global agreement on climate change in Paris later this year, which is expected to formalise a mechanism called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), already being piloted.

Under REDD, large areas of forests are to be protected as “carbon sinks”. It works by allowing those claiming to protect REDD forests to gain carbon “credits”, representing the carbon locked up in the forest that would otherwise have been lost to the atmosphere as trees are chopped down or burned. The credits can then be sold to offset industrial emissions elsewhere.

Large areas deemed at risk of deforestation are earmarked for REDD protection in tropical countries as diverse as Indonesia, Cambodia, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Solomon Islands. It is becoming clearer that forest communities are best placed to do conservation – especially in frontier zones next to heavily degraded forest, where the biggest carbon savings can be made. So you might expect communities to be in the forefront for owning, managing and profiting from REDD schemes. But so far it hasn’t turned out that way.

For most, the legal, logistical and scientific barriers are too high. And their governments, sniffing revenues, are not generally supportive of community proposals.

Instead, most pilot REDD projects have been set up by governments with international environment groups and corporations, often in countries with a poor record on land rights for forest communities. Such projects amount to “green grab”.

A prime example, one of the largest of a series of planned World Bank pilot REDD projects, is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here, according to forest researcher Aili Pyhala of the University of Helsinki, Finland, forest cover is strongly correlated with community control, and the main threat is from government-backed logging and mining. The REDD project is intended to cover 120,000 square kilometres of forest spanning the entire province of Mai-Ndombe – an area almost the size of England.

The World Bank is due to approve the scheme later this year. But most of the 1.8 million local inhabitants haven’t heard about it yet, says Simon Counsell of the Rainforest Foundation UK – even though it threatens their traditional livelihoods of hunting, gathering and forest farming, and ignores their history of successfully managing the forest.

Grabbing such land in the name of conservation risks triggering conflicts that destroy forests. “By conferring new value on forest lands, REDD could create incentives for government and commercial interests to actively deny or passively ignore the rights of indigenous and other forest-dependent communities to access and control forest resources,” warns Frances Seymour, former director of the Center for International Forestry Research.

We are used to thinking of the rights of forest communities and the need to conserve forests as competing imperatives. But the good news is that conservation and human rights can and do go together. To deny forest communities territorial rights is bad for them, but also bad for maintaining the forests.

The benefits of a more people-based approach to conservation could be huge.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Green grab, red light”