Assessing the Claims of Participatory Measurement,Reporting and Verification (PMRV) in Achieving REDD+ Outcomes: A Systematic Review

Participation of local communities in the Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of forest changes has been promoted as a strategy that lowers the cost of MRV and increases their engagement with REDD+. This systematic review of literature assessed the claims of participatory MRV (PMRV) in achieving REDD+ outcomes. We identified 29 PMRV publications that consisted of 20 peer-reviewed and 9 non peer-reviewed publications, with 14 publications being empirically based studies. The evidence supporting PMRV claims was categorized into empirical finding, citation or assumption. Our analysis of the empirical studies showed that PMRV projects were conducted in 17 countries in three tropical continents and across various forest and land tenure types. Most of these projects tested the feasibility of participatory measurement or monitoring, which limited the participation of local communities to data gathering. PMRV claims of providing accurate local biomass measurements and lowering MRV cost were well-supported with empirical evidence. Claims that PMRV supports REDD+ social outcomes that affect local communities directly, such as increased environmental awareness and equity in benefit sharing, were supported with less empirical evidence than REDD+ technical outcomes. This may be due to the difficulties in measuring social outcomes and the slow progress in the development and implementation of REDD+ components outside of experimental research contexts. Although lessons from other monitoring contexts have been used to support PMRV claims, they are only applicable when the enabling conditions can be replicated in REDD+ contexts. There is a need for more empirical evidence to support PMRV claims on achieving REDD+ social outcomes, which may be addressed with more opportunities and rigorous methods for assessing REDD+ social outcomes. Integrating future PMRV studies into local REDD+ implementations may help create those opportunities, while increasing the participation of local communities as local REDD+ stakeholders. Further development and testing of participatory reporting framework are required to integrate PMRV data with the national database. Publication of empirical PMRV studies is encouraged to guide when, where and how PMRV should be implemented.     

Getting the Data Flowing: Lessons Learned from Existing Reporting Systems in the Forestry Sector in Indonesia for REDD+ MRV

In the context of REDD+, Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) is one way to manage forest change information. A national carbon and non-carbon database will be used in REDD+ to negotiate compensation schemes with the international community. Much of this data will be collected at the local level, thus a reporting system that can integrate these locally collected data into the national database is crucial. In this paper we compare and draw lessons from three existing local to national reporting systems that include the participation of local communities: 1) the government extension services, 2) the government owned forestry company, and 3) a private logging company in Indonesia, and provide recommendations for REDD+ reporting systems. The results suggest that the main desired conditions for effective data flow are: benefits to motivate local participation, based on contributions to reporting activities; simple data format and reporting procedures to allow local participation in the reporting process, and to support data aggregation at the national level; a facilitator to mediate data aggregation at the village level to ensure data consistency, completeness and accuracy; and a transparent and clear data flow. Under these conditions, continuous, accountable and consistent data flow from the local level will reach the national level where it can be fully utilized.     

What Is a “Community Perception” of REDD+? A Systematic Review of How Perceptions of REDD+ Have Been Elicited and Reported in the Literature

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) is expected to generate co-benefits and safeguard the interests of people who live in the forested regions where emissions are reduced. Participatory measurement, reporting and verification (PMRV) is one way to ensure that the interests of local people are represented in REDD+. In order to design and use PMRV systems to monitor co-benefits and safeguards, we need to obtain input on how local people perceive REDD+. In the literature, this is widely discussed as “community perceptions of REDD+.” We systematically reviewed this literature to understand how these perceptions have been assessed, focusing specifically on how individual perceptions have been sampled and aggregated into “community perceptions.” Using Google Scholar, we identified 19 publications that reported community perceptions of REDD+, including perceptions of its design, implementation, impacts, relationship with land tenure, and both interest and actual participation by local people. These perceptions were elicited through surveys of probability samples of the local population and interviews with purposively selected community representatives. Many authors did not provide sufficient information on their methods to interpret the reported community perceptions. For example, there was often insufficient detail on the selection of respondents or sampling methods. Authors also reported perceptions by unquantified magnitudes (e.g., “most people”, “the majority”) that were difficult to assess or compare across cases. Given this situation in the scholarly literature, we expect that there are even more severe problems in the voluminous gray literature on REDD+ not indexed by Google Scholar. We suggest that readers need to be cognizant of these issues and that publication outlets should establish guidelines for better reporting, requiring information on the reference population, sampling methods, and methods used to aggregate individual responses into “community perceptions.”     

How Are Local People Driving and Affected by Forest Cover Change? Opportunities for Local Participation in REDD+ Measurement,Reporting and Verification

Deforestation and forest degradation are complex and dynamic processes that vary from place to place. They are driven by multiple causes. Local communities are, to some extent, driving and also affected by some of these processes. Can their knowledge aid and add to place-specific assessment and monitoring of Deforestation and forest Degradation (DD) drivers? Our research was conducted in seven villages across three provinces of Indonesia (Papua, West Kalimantan and Central Java). Household surveys and focus group discussions were used to investigate how local community knowledge of DD drivers contributes to place-specific assessment and monitoring of DD drivers. We analyzed the link between drivers and local livelihoods to see how attempts to address deforestation and forest degradation might affect local communities and how this link might influence their participation in climate change mitigation measures such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and Measuring, Reporting and Verifying (MRV) activities. We found that local knowledge is fundamental to capturing the variety of drivers particularly in countries like Indonesia where forest and socio-economic conditions are diverse. Better understanding of drivers and their importance for local livelihoods will not only contribute to a more locally appropriate design of REDD+ and monitoring systems but will also foster local participation.     

Exploring the Links between Post-Industrial Landscape History and Ecology through Participatory Methods

There is increasing recognition of the importance for local biodiversity of post-mining sites, many of which lie near communities that have suffered significant social and economic deprivation as the result of mine closures. However, no studies to date have actively used the knowledge of local communities to relate the history and treatment of post-mining sites to their current ecological status. We report a study of two post-mining sites in the Yorkshire coalfield of the UK in which the local community were involved in developing site histories and assessing plant and invertebrate species composition. Site histories developed using participatory GIS revealed that the sites had a mixture of areas of spontaneous succession and technical reclamation, and identified that both planned management interventions and informal activities influenced habitat heterogeneity and ecological diversity. Two groups of informal activity were identified as being of particular importance. Firstly, there has been active protection by the community of flower-rich habitats of conservation value (e.g. calcareous grassland) and distinctive plant species (e.g. orchids) which has also provided important foraging resources for butterfly and bumblebee species. Secondly, disturbance by activities such as use of motorbikes, informal camping, and cutting of trees and shrubs for fuel, as well as planned management interventions such as spreading of brick rubble, has provided habitat for plant species of open waste ground and locally uncommon invertebrate species which require patches of bare ground. This study demonstrates the importance of informal, and often unrecorded, activities by the local community in providing diverse habitats and increased biodiversity within a post-mining site, and shows that active engagement with the local community and use of local knowledge can enhance ecological interpretation of such sites and provide a stronger basis for successful future management.     

Financing and current capacity for REDD+ readiness and monitoring,measurement, reporting and verification in the Congo Basin

This paper provides the first critical analysis of the financing and current capacity for REDD+ readiness in the Congo Basin, with a particular focus on the REDD+ component of national forest monitoring and measurement, reporting and verification (M&MRV). We focus on three areas of analysis: (i) general financing for REDD+ readiness especially M&MRV; (ii) capacity and information for REDD+ implementation and M&MRV; (iii) prospects and challenges for REDD+ and M&MRV readiness in terms of financing and capacity. For the first area of analysis, a REDD+ and M&MRV readiness financing database was created based on the information from the REDD+ voluntary database and Internet searches. For the second area of analysis, a qualitative approach to data collection was adopted (semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, surveys and observations). All 10 countries were visited between 2010 and 2012. We find that: (i) a significant amount of REDD+ financing flows into the Congo Basin (±US$550 million or almost half of the REDD+ financing for the African continent); (ii) across countries, there is an important disequilibrium in terms of REDD+ and M&MRV readiness financing, political engagement, comprehension and capacity, which also appears to be a key barrier to countries receiving equal resources; (iii) most financing appears to go to smaller scale (subnational) REDD+ projects; (iv) four distinct country groups in terms of REDD+ readiness and M&MRV status are identified; and (v) the Congo Basin has a distinct opportunity to have a specific REDD+ financing window for large-scale and more targeted national REDD+ programmes through a specific fund for the region.     

Integrated conservation and development project life cycles in the Annapurna Conservation Area, Nepal: Is development overpowering conservation?

The merits of integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs), which aim to provide development incentives to citizens in return for conservation behaviors, have long been debated in the literature. Some of the most common critiques suggest that conservation activities tend to be strongly overpowered by development activities. We studied this assertion through participant observation and archival analysis of five Conservation Area Management Committees (CAMCs) in the Annapurna Conservation Area (ACA), Nepal. Committee activities were categorized as conservation activities (policy development and conservation implementation), development activities (infrastructure, health care, education, economic development, and sanitation), or activities related to institutional strengthening (administrative development and capacity building activities). Greater longevity of each ICDP was associated with greater conservation activity in relation to development activities. Project life cycles progressed from a focus on development activities in their early stages, through a transitional period of institutional strengthening, and toward a longer-term focus that roughly balanced conservation and development activities. Results suggest that the ICDP concept, as practiced in ACA, has been successful at building capacity for and interest in conservation amongst local communities. However, success has come over a period of nearly a decade, suggesting that prior conclusions about ICDP failures may have been based on unrealistic expectations of the time needed to influence behavioral changes in target populations.     

Promoting Wellness in Alaskan Villages: Integrating Traditional Knowledge and Science of Wild Berries

People draw upon multiple forms of environmental knowledge, from scientific to highly contextual local or traditional forms of knowledge, to interpret problems and gauge risks in complex socio-ecological systems. In collaboration with three remote Alaska Native communities, and using an interdisciplinary, participatory, and mixed methods research approach, we explored traditional ecological knowledge and scientific aspects of wild berries and the broader context of community health and environmental change. Combining site visits, key informant interviews, focus groups, survey questionnaires, portable field bioassays, and laboratory follow-up analyses, our research revealed the importance of local subsistence resources for community wellness. Multiple berry species were found to have powerful bioactive health properties for ameliorating metabolic syndrome as well as importance for community wellness. Communities differed in the degree to which they characterized berries as healthy foods and perceived environmental risks including climate change. Findings suggest the importance of incorporating locally available foods and socio-cultural traditions into community wellness programming. This article also discusses challenges and opportunities associated with transdisciplinary, participatory research with indigenous communities.     

Communicating for conservation: circumventing conflict with communities over domestic dog ownership in north Morocco

Conservationists consider open and direct communication as best practice even when their data conflict with local beliefs. However, ensuring the effective delivery of a controversial message without overtly challenging community identity is difficult. Such a scenario needs high levels of meaningful contact and trust-building dialogue between conservationists and communities as well as innovative means of communicating controversial information. Indirect communication is one such strategy, allowing people to draw their own conclusions about controversial information. We present an example of successful indirect communication of such information in the context of a long-term Barbary macaque community conservation project in Morocco. Dogs in the area kill macaques and domestic livestock in the forest, and local shepherds believed these dogs to be feral. However, our observations identified these dogs as being owned, free-roaming village dogs rather than feral dogs. To impart this controversial information, we developed a dog health programme to communicate our findings and improve the health of domestic dogs to safeguard human and animal health. We administered rabies vaccinations to dogs in three villages and provided their owners with brightly coloured dog collars. After observing collared dogs hunting in the forest, the shepherds realised the dogs had owners. Community participation was high and we vaccinated 242 dogs achieving 60–81% vaccination coverage. An additional benefit of the activity was to successfully convey the message that the conservation team is committed to local people’s welfare as well as to Barbary macaque conservation.     

WPA guidance on steps,obstacles and mistakes to avoid in the implementation of community mental health care

This paper provides guidance on the steps, obstacles and mistakes to avoid in the implementation of community mental health care. The document is intended to be of practical use and interest to psychiatrists worldwide regarding the development of community mental health care for adults with mental illness. The main recommendations are presented in relation to: the need for coordinated policies, plans and programmes, the requirement to scale up services for whole populations, the importance of promoting community awareness about mental illness to increase levels of help-seeking, the need to establish effective financial and budgetary provisions to directly support services provided in the community. The paper concludes by setting out a series of lessons learned from the accumulated practice of community mental health care to date worldwide, with a particular focus on the social and governmental measures that are required at the national level, the key steps to take in the organization of the local mental health system, lessons learned by professionals and practitioners, and how to most effectively harness the experience of users, families, and other advocates.     

Opportunities and Challenges for Ecological Restoration within REDD+

The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism has the potential to provide the developing nations with significant funding for forest restoration activities that contribute to climate change mitigation, sustainable management, and carbon‐stock enhancement. In order to stimulate and inform discussion on the role of ecological restoration within REDD+, we outline opportunities for and challenges to using science‐based restoration projects and programs to meet REDD+ goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and storing carbon in forest ecosystems. Now that the REDD+ mechanism, which is not yet operational, has expanded beyond a sole focus on activities that affect carbon budgets to also include those that enhance ecosystem services and deliver other co‐benefits to biodiversity and communities, forest restoration could play an increasingly important role. However, in many nations, there is a lack of practical tools and guidance for implementing effective restoration projects and programs that will sequester carbon and at the same time improve the integrity and resilience of forest ecosystems. Restoration scientists and practitioners should continue to engage with potential REDD+ donors and recipients to ensure that funding is targeted at projects and programs with ecologically sound designs.     

Is a cooperative approach to seaweed farming effectual? An analysis of the seaweed cluster project (SCP), Malaysia

Seaweed (Kappaphycus spp.) farming has been practised in Malaysia since the late 1970s following government policy incentives (training and farming inputs). However, numerous governance, economic, environmental, technological and sociocultural challenges have limited the industry from achieving its full potential. The Seaweed Cluster Project (SCP) was introduced in 2012 to address some of these challenges. We sought to evaluate the effectiveness of the SCP in delivering its central objectives of increasing seaweed production, optimising the farming area, improving seaweed quality and farming efficiency, raising farmers’ income, and reducing the environmental impact of seaweed farming. Community and industry perceptions of the SCP were obtained from seven communities using a mixed-methods approach based on face-to-face semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, household surveys, observation and secondary data. Views on the SCP outcomes were generally negative, including low take-up rates by indigenous people, poor stakeholder participation in decision-making, limited acceptance of new technologies, economic vulnerability, a complex marketing system, and low social cohesion of seaweed farming communities. Positive perceptions included recognition that the SCP confers high social status upon a community, reduces operating costs, and facilitates the production of certified seaweed. The SCP’s problems are linked to poor multi-level governance, weak market mechanisms and unintegrated community development. The study concludes with five recommendations to improve the SCP: promote the participation of indigenous people; legalise existing migrant farmers; strengthen local seaweed cooperative organisations; provide entrepreneurship skills to farmers; and fully integrate stakeholders into decision-making.     

Can Community Members Identify Tropical Tree Species for REDD+ Carbon and Biodiversity Measurements?

Biodiversity conservation is a required co-benefit of REDD+. Biodiversity monitoring is therefore needed, yet in most areas it will be constrained by limitations in the available human professional and financial resources. REDD+ programs that use forest plots for biomass monitoring may be able to take advantage of the same data for detecting changes in the tree diversity, using the richness and abundance of canopy trees as a proxy for biodiversity. If local community members are already assessing the above-ground biomass in a representative network of forest vegetation plots, it may require minimal further effort to collect data on the diversity of trees. We compare community members and trained scientists’ data on tree diversity in permanent vegetation plots in montane forest in Yunnan, China. We show that local community members here can collect tree diversity data of comparable quality to trained botanists, at one third the cost. Without access to herbaria, identification guides or the Internet, community members could provide the ethno-taxonomical names for 95% of 1071 trees in 60 vegetation plots. Moreover, we show that the community-led survey spent 89% of the expenses at village level as opposed to 23% of funds in the monitoring by botanists. In participatory REDD+ programs in areas where community members demonstrate great knowledge of forest trees, community-based collection of tree diversity data can be a cost-effective approach for obtaining tree diversity information.     

Bee communities in restored prairies are structured by landscape and management,not local floral resources

Restored habitats require long-term management to maintain biodiversity and ensure ecosystem functions. Management strategies are often developed for plant communities, including through seeding and disturbance management, but these actions are taken with a focus on plant dynamics and with little knowledge of the effects on non-plant organisms. Wild bees are often expected to respond to such management actions via their effects on local floral resource availability, but management may also affect bees by altering survival and nesting independently of plant community responses. Working in restoration plantings within a large, actively managed tallgrass prairie preserve, we separated the effects of management and landscape context on bee community abundance and richness from the effects of these covariates on bees mediated through the abundance and richness of the local flowering plant community. We found that bees responded primarily to disturbance management (via bison) and the amount of prairie and forest habitat in the landscape, indicating that across landscapes with relatively abundant flowers and nest-sites, these landscape-level resources are more important than local floral resources for structuring bee communities. In contrast, floral communities responded to restoration age and prescribed burning. Because bees respond to different factors and at a different landscape scale than local plant communities, we conclude that management designed for plants is not sufficient for pollinators. Landscape level restoration may therefore require targeted habitat design and management to successfully restore functionally important animals.     

Paying attention to pigs: negotiating equity and equality in global environmental governance in Suau,Papua New Guinea

The idea of ‘equity’, largely grounded in Western legal tradition, has come to permeate evaluations of what is fair and just within environmental governance programmes. But what constitutes equity in climate change and conservation projects? And does everyone affected by such projects see equity as desirable? Local encounters with global environmental governance interventions in Suau, Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea, provide an entry point to explore these questions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with communities implicated in the Central Suau Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) Pilot Project and in Save the Forest conservation projects, we examine tensions around conceptions of equity and equality between project proponents and local communities, as well as between individuals within those communities. By paying attention to talk about pigs in Suau, and tracing the intersections between reciprocity and trade, we explore how people negotiate equity and equality. We emphasize that this negotiation is central to Suau ideas of fairness. While the REDD+ and Save the Forest projects work to ensure ‘equitable’ distribution of benefits among supposedly equivalent actors, we show how this may actually close down possibilities for negotiation of outcomes that local people consider fair.     

Inferring species roles in metacommunity structure from species co-occurrence networks

A long-standing question in community ecology is what determines the identity of species that coexist across local communities or metacommunity assembly. To shed light upon this question, we used a network approach to analyse the drivers of species co-occurrence patterns. In particular, we focus on the potential roles of body size and trophic status as determinants of metacommunity cohesion because of their link to resource use and dispersal ability. Small-sized individuals at low-trophic levels, and with limited dispersal potential, are expected to form highly linked subgroups, whereas large-size individuals at higher trophic positions, and with good dispersal potential, will foster the spatial coupling of subgroups and the cohesion of the whole metacommunity. By using modularity analysis, we identified six modules of species with similar responses to ecological conditions and high co-occurrence across local communities. Most species either co-occur with species from a single module or are connectors of the whole network. Among the latter are carnivorous species of intermediate body size, which by virtue of their high incidence provide connectivity to otherwise isolated communities playing the role of spatial couplers. Our study also demonstrates that the incorporation of network tools to the analysis of metacommunity ecology can help unveil the mechanisms underlying patterns and processes in metacommunity assembly.     

Participatory forest monitoring: an assessment of the accuracy of simple cost–effective methods

International forest policies have recently increased the focus on involvement of local communities in forest monitoring and management as a strategy to improve biodiversity conservation efforts and local livelihood in developing countries. However, little is known about feasible methods, costs and accuracy of participatory monitoring schemes in developing countries. This paper examines the costs, accuracy and local reproducibility of three simple cost–effective methods for monitoring forest disturbance by local participants: (1) 20-trees method, (2) Bitterlich gauge method and (3) Disturbance Checklist transect. Using one of these methods the costs of monitoring forest habitats are only between US$ 0.04 and 0.12 ha⁻¹ annually, depending on the methods used, this is significantly cheaper than the costs of traditional scientific methods for biodiversity monitoring. Results indicate that local community members without former scientific training can collect accurate data on habitat loss and forest disturbance after only a few days of introduction to the methods, and thereby contribute with valuable information for natural resource management. The strengths and weaknesses of monitoring done, respectively, by local community members and educated biologists, respectfully, are discussed. It is suggested that these approaches should be seen as supplements to each other rather than substitutes. Finally, it is argued that monitoring schemes in developing countries can be sustained after donor funds have ceased only if the local communities play a central role and clear financially and/or socially incentives for members of the local community are incorporated.     

Predicting the impacts of biological and physical disturbances: Does theoretical ecology hold any answers?

Biological and physical disturbance has had a severe impact on New Zealand's endemic flora and fauna. Along with the lessons of the past, predicting the sensitivity of communities to disturbance in the future may help direct more attention to those communities with a greater need for preservation (i.e., a lower ability to recover from any such disturbances). In theory it is possible to measure the resilience (or local stability) of a community by constructing a matrix to describe that community and then examining its eigenvalues. Local stability characteristics of invertebrate communities in 11 aquatic habitats were examined with respect to differing levels of habitat disturbance. It was predicted that communities in more unstable habitats would be more resilient in order to persist despite more frequent disturbances. All communities had eigenvalues outside the stability criteria, although those in the unstable habitats did have eigenvalues closer to these criteria. The open and/or patchy nature of stream communities may explain why local stability is not a prerequisite for these communities, however examining the local stability of community matrices still remains a potentially useful tool for predicting the effects of physical and biological disturbances.     

“Community Work” in a Climate of Adaptation: Responding to Change in Rural Alaska

We draw on our research experiences with municipal workers in Alaska, where the impacts of climate change are already extensive, to examine adaptation and related concepts, such as resilience and vulnerability, which have become widely used in science and policy formulation for addressing climate change despite also being subject to multiple critiques. We use local people’s experiences with environmental challenges to illustrate limitations of the climate change adaptation paradigm, and offer the additional concept of “community work” — analogous to niche construction — as a counterpart to the adaptive process at the community level. Whereas climate change adaptation insinuates active and purposive change, the reality we have repeatedly encountered is that people in these communities focus not on changing but on building and maintaining capacity and achieving stability: keeping aging and overtaxed infrastructure running while also working toward improving quality of life and services in their communities. We discuss how these findings are congruent with recent calls to better situate climate change adaptation policy in the context of community development, and argue that scientists and policymakers need to understand this context of community work to avoid the pitfalls that potentially accompany the adaptation paradigm.     

Linking Human and Ecosystem Health: The Benefits of Community Involvement in Conservation Groups

This study explored the health, well-being, and social capital benefits gained by community members who are involved in the management of land for conservation in six rural communities across Victoria. A total of 102 people participated in the study (64 males; 38 females) comprising 51 members of a community-based land management group and 51 controls matched by age and gender. Mixed methods were employed, including the use of an adapted version of Buckner’s (1988) Community Cohesion Scale. The results indicate that involvement in the management of land for conservation may contribute to both the health and well-being of members, and to the social capital of the local community. The members of the land management groups rated their general health higher, reported visiting the doctor less often, felt safer in the local community, and utilized the skills that they have acquired in their lifetime more frequently than the control participants. Male members reported the highest level of general health, and the greatest satisfaction with daily activities. Members also reported a greater sense of belonging to the local community and a greater willingness to work toward improving their community than their control counterparts. Of equal importance is evidence that involvement in voluntary conservation work constitutes a means of building social capital in rural communities which may help reduce some of the negative aspects of rural life.