Q&A session

DAY2Session 3Session 3 – Thinking from Broader Perspectives: Landscape Approach – Q&A Session(Forestry Agency, Mr. Satoshi Akahori) Let me ask you a question, Ms. Lee. You talked about
Ethiopia and also the Carbon Fund case studies. When it comes to livestock and the agricultural
productivity improvement, does that lead to the improvement of livelihoods? I believe it does. Doesit link to the landscape approach to improve or to reduce the deforestation? Maybe there is somedilemma. If you have any good case studies, please let us know.
I would like to ask Dr. Verchot about the land-use and also the factors related to the land use
such as organizations, drivers, regulations and laws, and analysis. Also, you showed us a model of thelandscape approach. In the end you said that things are very complicated in the real field. Talking
about the practical applications in the future, if you have any thoughts, please let us know as well.
(Independent Consultant, Ms. Donna Lee)If I understood your question, you are asking about

whether or not improving agriculture would improve livelihoods in Ethiopia, and if there are any casestudies, and maybe a little bit more about tackling these drivers of deforestation.
I had the opportunity to visit one of the really important forest ecosystems in Ethiopia. It iscalled the Bale Mountains, and that is where they really are starting this REDD+ program in Oromia.
It was very interesting. We visited the farmers that surrounded the forest and talked to them to try tounderstand why it was that deforestation was happening. What was fascinating to me is that theproblems in Ethiopia are not just about land policy. It is clear that agriculture was part of the issue,
but when we talk about landscape approaches, even there, maybe we are being too narrow. What washappening in the Bale eco-region was that there was a drought in the Hararghe region. There was a lotof immigration into the area. The expansion in agriculture was not just from the local communities,
but it was this internal displacement that was occurring within the country. In addition to that, part ofit was family planning policies. The families in and around the area, the farmers, they did not haveaccess to things like birth control, so they had many children. When you have many children, as thosechildren have children, they need a farm; they need a place to expand to provide themselves analternative livelihood.
The issues around deforestation are really complex.

I think Dr. Verchot was right. If you

are not dealing with the underlying problems, and it is agriculture but it is also a lot of other humandynamics that are happening, then you are not going to be able to protect the forests. That said, what
was interesting to me is that the farmers in and around those communities knew exactly what needed tobe done in order to protect the forests. They had experience with participatory forest management.
They knew exactly what the problems were. They knew that they needed new types of livestock; theyneeded to crossbreed with cows from the Netherlands that are more productive. For me it was really alearning experience. On some ways we can do fancy models, but at the end of the day these local

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communities actually know what they need. It seems as though that is the starting point. What isdifficult about landscape approaches is that, in order to get them what they needed, you need to havethat cooperation with these different ministries.

The Agricultural Ministry provides extension

programs that can provide the new types of seeds, the new types of livestock that they can use in orderto reduce that pressure on the forests.
It is a really interesting case, the Bio Carbon Fund trying to tackle Ethiopia. There are these
multiple drivers, and they try to do this coordinated program that deals with grazing; deals withimproving agricultural yields; intensifies participatory forest management; does clean cook stoves; all at
one time, and at the same time measures emissions reductions. It could be quite interesting. I hopethat it becomes a case study in the future that we can look at.
(CIFOR, Dr. Louis V. Verchot)

I will pick up on some of those themes. Drivers of deforestation areoften outside the forest sector. Clearly there is a need to address the underlying causes of those drivers.
Agricultural improvement is often touted as one of the major solutions to reducing deforestation, but
agricultural improvement by itself, without some improvement in governance, is often destructive.
As you increase returns to land, and as you increase returns to labor, you create incentives toexpand agriculture. If you do not have governance that enforces some sort of zoning, you cannot
protect your forest. It has to be improving the livelihoods and the productivity of people locally, butalso improving governance and the ability of governments to negotiate the different services thatsociety needs out of its landscapes.
I talked a lot about complexity, but I also said that we cannot let the complexity paralyze us.
We have been making progress in developing countries. We need to build on strengths that individual
countries have, and what countries have been able to achieve, to move forward from the unsustainabletypes of practices that we see in some places today to more sustainable practices. We do have modelsof that.

We certainly have seen improvement in many places.

We have seen decreases indeforestation in Brazil. There has been a decrease and a subsequent increase in deforestation inIndonesia. If we can begin to harness some of the things that have been pushing us in the positive
direction and reinforce those, we can make incremental progress. We are not going to solve theseproblems in a day. They were not created in a day. They are not going to be solved in a day.

Thecomplexity should not paralyze us, but we should not be ignorant of it either.
(Forestry Agency, Mr. Satoshi Akahori)I think that Ms. Lee has shared with us on the situation. Theanswer that was just made I think, the professor and expert from Laos said the same thing. I think that
not only the forestry, but the governance as well as the land utilization would have to be done well.
Otherwise, things will not function accordingly. Therefore, I think it is quite in line with what they
have said.

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I would like to open the floor for some questions.

DAY2Session 3

Maybe we could entertain some otherquestions first, and then have the panelists answer them altogether.
(Q1: Ministry of Environment, Cambodia, Mr. Hong Heng)

I have two questions. My question is toMs. Lee. First question: I would like you to clarify the role of project that links local community tonational government in your previous presentation. You mentioned about the role of projects that are
more involvement from local community and the link to the government policy. Second question: how
do private sectors get involved with a sustainable landscape approach?
(Q2: UNU, Dr. Richard Rastall) My question is about examples you gave about REDD+. Is theimprovement more because of enforcement of legislation? How much of this actually was influenced
by REDD+? I am not sure there is any link with REDD+. Even this year actually increased
forestation in Brazil for the first time. How much is from the success that you show in some of thecases can be explained by REDD+, or by other factors. If you look at the legislation in many
countries, if you want to actually control deforestation, basically enforce some of those legislations; help
the countries to enforce, provide technology, or other means. I would like to understand how much
REDD+ has actually explained some of those successes.
(Q3: FFPRI, Dr. Takeshi Toma) I learned about the landscape approach. In that context, I think that,for monitoring, it is not necessary to focus on the forest. Because we are using satellite remote sensing,it is better to monitor whole land-use changes rather than the specific changes of forest. What do you
think about that?
(Q4: UN-REDD, FAO, Dr. Maria Sanz-Sanchez) We have been talking for years in the context ofLULUCF.

I wonder what could be different in the context of a landscape approach.

Whatinnovation needs to be brought into the previous discussions that are being done on LULUCF, mostly
by developed countries, to move towards this landscape approach?
(Independent, Consultant Ms. Donna Lee) There is a linkage between the first presentation that I gave
about scaling up from projects to the national strategies, and this issue of landscape approaches. In mylimited experience, it seems as though we have spent a lot of money and effort at the national levelfocusing on measurement and monitoring and understanding land-use change, but not very much on
what we actually need to do in order to reduce emissions.
I was working with a country last year that: spent over $50 million to use fancy remote sensing
techniques like LIDAR to try to get very precise measurements of land-cover change; spending a lot ofmoney on carbon assessments to get good emission factors.

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know what they were planning to do to actually reduce emissions. In the REDD+ strategy, they had
200 actions that they thought might be useful things to do, but they had not actually prioritized orthought, “Given our resources, given our capacity, what are the five things that we can do to reallyreduce emissions?”
This is where there is activity on the ground where these projects really are looking at how wecan actually reduce emissions. What are the things that we can do that are sustainable; that provide
alternative livelihoods, that are beneficial to local communities; that help us reduce poverty; that can bepart of our economic development; that is integrated into a broader sustainable development for ourcountry; that therefore will be something that does not go away in three years, but something that has
traction and will stay for the long term? That is where these projects I think really can inform anational strategy, but we just do not see that happening enough. There are these really great projects
on the grounds that are helping local communities. They are just not connecting back up to nationalstrategies in helping to inform them. For me, that is the strongest linkage that we should be making.
On the question about the private sector, it is a really good one. How can we involve theprivate sector? If we look at the amount of investment flows from, say big agribusiness, they far
outweigh anything that official development assistance can provide. How is it exactly that we canengage private sector, and how does the BioCarbon Fund, for example, plan to engage them? There
are a few companies that are really interested in this issue. They are not interested because of
corporate social responsibility; they are interested because they really see their future business being
affected by this scarcity of land to produce the raw materials that they need to make their consumer
products.
I think they see themselves playing a role in these types of new landscape approaches, which
is new for them, because, again, before they would only deal with their supply-chain driving it all the way
down to the farm level, but not think about the broader issues of governance and land tenure. I think
the way in which they can get involved to have to do with things, like offtake agreements.

In otherwords, within the BioCarbon Fund, if they have a project in a province that is creating oil-palms
sustainably, then you can get companies like Unilever and Nestlé to think about, “Can we actuallyprovide predictability and create these future agreements to offtake that product?” That can be quite
beneficial for a province.
I think they are willing to think about this. Changing a supply chain is actually quite
expensive for them. It is not easy. It is not something that they can just do tomorrow, but I thinkbecause you have some of these companies that are interested in sustainable, predictable, and affordable
future supply, that they are willing to contemplate this; and also to think about how to make theirinvestments consistent with some of the efforts that are happening at the landscape level. It is in very
early days. There are a limited number of companies who are interested in participating in this way,
but I think it is an important part of the puzzle.

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DAY2Session 3(CIFOR, Dr. Louis V. Verchot) Let me pick up on the question about Brazil. I think academics aredebating far and wide as to just how Brazil achieved its emissions reductions. Clearly, Brazil claims it
was all about enforcement and improvement of governance in the region. They are probably right.
That is a big part of why they were able to achieve the emissions reductions. What did REDD+ haveto do with it? Absolutely nothing, and this is why my friend Dr. Arild Angersen, who is Norwegian,thinks that Norway should not have spent the money in Brazil; that the emissions reduction were not
traditional and would have happened anyway.
It is clear that perhaps in Brazil the international REDD+ mechanism itself was not the driver,
but the desire of the Brazilian government to bring rampant deforestation under control and rationalize
land-use in the Amazon was the driver. This has to be the driver in all countries. It should not be
about the international desire for emissions reductions. It should be part of national development
plans to rationalize land-use in the territory of countries themselves to achieve these emissions
reduction.
Brazil has shown how improving governance and improving the rule of law and being able toenforce zoning in areas is essential for achieving emissions reductions. I think there is a lesson there
for countries that do have governance challenges. That is often the case on the forest frontier. Dr.
Toma, you asked about whether we need to focus on forest themselves or whether we need to monitor
for land-use change. Clearly, deforestation happens in predictable patterns. It tends to happen as afront. You deforest from the bottom of the mountain towards the top. You deforest from the roadgoing back. It is generally not a random process. You certainly can be much more efficient by
following frontiers or monitoring more areas of active deforestation and spending more resources there
on your quantification to reduce your uncertainty than if you just take a wall-to-wall approach andmonitor absolutely everything.
Dr. Sanz-Sanchez asked about what is different in the context of a landscape approach. I
think part of it has to do with the difference between AFOLU and REDD+. I think AFOLU is reallyabout emissions reductions in all land uses. Maybe that is where things need to evolve.

There aremany of us working on these issues that would like to see, not just worrying about emissions from theforested parts of landscape, but reducing emissions across all landscapes. I guess we are hoping that
REDD+ is a bit the thin end of a wedge that opens things up so we can get back to some of these
AFOLU issues. If REDD+ can take a different direction than what was taken under the CDM andactually become effective, without all the complexity that was introduced into the CDM, maybe it opens
up the opportunities for AFOLU and addressing emissions from other land uses. Is that not what youare talking about?
(Q4:UN-REDD, FAO, Dr. Maria Sanz-Sanchez) No, because AFOLU is nothing else but all the land

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Session 3components plus the livestock emissions, which is not so much related to the land itself. Indeed, theland-use change and forestry, the LULUCF includes agricultural lands. What we are changing is thename. My question is about what we are evolving in our thinking that will make a difference whenhandling our lands, which would include the land-use change and land-use change in forestry. What isthe difference?
(CIFOR, Dr. Louis V. Verchot) This conference is perhaps one example. REDD+ is seen as thedomain of foresters. What we are saying is that the pressures coming on forestry come from otherparts of the landscape. If we do not understand what those pressures are; if we are not in dialog withthe mining interests; we are not rationalizing how land is allocated between agriculture and other land
uses; we are not going to achieve the emissions reductions. It is trying to take REDD+ out of thedomain of foresters, forestry, and forest ministries, and make those connections that are more
representative of the drivers of what is really causing the emissions.

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