Sequestering Livelihoods: REDD+, Autonomy and Adaptation on a Colombian Forest Frontier

REDD+, or Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation “Plus”, is a set of activities around the world aimed at providing financial incentives to individuals, communities, jurisdictions, and nations to protect their forests and thereby mitigate climate change. The concept was initially developed within the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2005, and has since been integrated into the UNFCCC agreements, multilateral and bilateral aid agreements, voluntary and compliance carbon markets, and the integrated conservation and development work of many NGOs. REDD+ has evolved over time, such that today, there are thousands of activities taking place that fall under the broad rubric of REDD+ in several forms, including project REDD+, jurisdictional REDD+ and national REDD+.REDD+ activities are gaining attention from the growing field of companies, jurisdictions, and countries setting net neutrality goals to meet over the next thirty years. Most of these organizations plan to achieve net neutrality by “offsetting” a portion of their carbon emissions with purchases of carbon credits (also known as “verified carbon units”) through programs like REDD+. Understanding REDD+’s impacts on forest cover and forest communities is critical for assessing whether REDD+ is likely to achieve its climate change mitigation goals. This dissertation responds to this need by assessing REDD+ projects along the Pacific Coast of Colombia. It relies on mixed social research methods of ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and household surveys focused on two communities established around neighboring rivers – one that participated in USAID’s “BIOREDD+” program, and one that started talks with USAID and ultimately declined to participate. The dissertation explores the consequences of the project’s implementation in community-titled Afrodescendant territories. The project unfolded within the broader context of these communities’ struggles for autonomy, internal governance, and reliable livelihoods, even as they were buffeted by waves of violence around them. The field research took place between 2015 and 2018, just after the formal BIOREDD+ project had concluded. Contrary to fears from some global REDD+ observers that REDD+ programs might lead to forced evictions of forest-dependent people from their lands to make way for conservation, BIOREDD+ had a relatively small footprint in the project community. The livelihood projects that USAID and its contractors brought in to provide alternatives to local timber harvesting had little lasting effect and largely failed to include those most dependent on timber harvesting. Selective timber harvesting, while relatively constrained in scale due to limits of capital, weather, and forest accessibility, maintained a steady pace throughout the initial project period, from 2012-2015. No project activities were implemented to actively restrict this harvesting. Nevertheless, the demands of BIOREDD+ distracted community leaders from more core duties of governing and forced them to prioritize the goals and logistical concerns of BIOREDD+ in their interactions with the community. REDD+ demands on leaders were greater than those of many other integrated conservation and development projects because of the risks and technical complexity of REDD+. Surveys revealed that, in the community participating in REDD+, community members had less trust in, and participated less in, community governing bodies and other community projects than in the neighboring community that had opted out of the program. This was attributable not only to REDD+, but also to the preceding conservation and development projects that had dominated internal governance activities since the community received title to its territory in the late 1990s. This weak community governance allowed outsiders to take advantage of natural resources in the territory, undermining the goals of REDD+. Despite the apparent lack of reduction in deforestation and degradation associated with BIOREDD+, millions of verified carbon units were credited to the projects. This surprising result is attributable primarily to the reference areas used in the program – that is, the larger areas beyond the project zones used to develop baseline deforestation rates against which change in the project communities would be compared. Those reference areas had greater historical levels of deforestation than the project area. Based on conversations with project contractors and technical experts, it became apparent that hiring the right technical experts to design and run the models used to develop project baselines in BIOREDD+ turned out to be more critical to generating carbon credits than anything happening in the Colombian Pacific region. The credits created through the BIOREDD+ program have been purchased by petroleum and coal companies to offset their carbon emissions and thereby avoid paying the country’s carbon tax. Despite the sale of the carbon credits, the community has not yet received any of the funds owed them, a decade after the start of BIOREDD+. There is a possibility that the communities participating in the BIOREDD+ project will receive these funds from carbon credit sales in the future, and might use them to reduce deforestation. These potential impacts could not be assessed, however, since no funding had been received at the time of this dissertation’s publication. This research suggests, however, that there is a risk that as demand for carbon credits increases, REDD+ credits will continue to be created and sold for offsetting real fossil fuel emissions despite a failure to reverse deforestation trends. An additional surprising finding from this work is that certain requirements for REDD+ programs to validate project additionality – that is, the assurance that any changes in deforestation are a result of the project, and would not have occurred in the absence of the project – may not only have little effect, but may also be counterproductive. Increasing the technical complexity of these projects, whether in an attempt to make them more rigorous, or primarily to suggest to carbon credit verifiers and purchasers that they are more rigorous, has local consequences. These complexities are more demanding for community leaders to manage. They also lead to elevated costs to pay for technical experts and dozens of accompanying technical studies, which means that the communities participating in the projects get a smaller cut of the sale of the credits generated. These additional requirements may achieve little in the end, given that REDD+ crediting will always depend heavily on the baselines and reference areas, which are inherently a subjective construction. This work contributes to a growing body of research on the implications of a shift toward neoliberal, market-based conservation by illuminating several aspects of the incentive structures inherent in voluntary carbon markets. The first is that the rules of these markets are set by the same groups who stand to benefit from the rules. The technical nature of the rules makes it difficult for anyone without substantial technical training to evaluate them or to determine how well they are being followed. The more complex the technocrats make these rules, the greater the opportunities they create for themselves. Moreover, the more removed the calculated emission reductions are from the project activities, such as in the case of REDD+, where trees left uncut in remote regions are translated into carbon credits, the more space there is for technocrats to manipulate the results of these calculations to their benefit. In addition, the ever-higher transaction costs of these projects call into question the efficiency value of using a market mechanism to reduce deforestation. Second, there is no actor along the supply chain of credits that has an incentive to slow the creation of these credits. The primary threat to those constructing carbon markets and the credits transacted on them would be the collapse of the whole carbon credit market. Yet given that these actors are all benefitting from the market, and that the costs of the market’s failure to transact credits that represent real reductions in emissions is borne by the masses – namely, all those affected by climate change – there is little likelihood of market collapse. As these same carbon market actors push to have carbon markets integrated into state, national and international policies, these risks may spread beyond the voluntary carbon market to weaken the primary levers that countries have for making strides against climate change: reducing emissions within their national borders through command and control policies. Though this research showed that the BIOREDD+ projects did not present an acute risk to forest communities, this may be attributable to the particular characteristics of USAID being the project developer, as USAID has a primary mission of aiding these communities and was not driven by a profit motive. As carbon credits become more in-demand under new net neutrality goals, businesses looking to benefit from developing REDD+ projects, and not aid donors, will become the dominant participants in this arena. This will not only reduce further the percentage of benefits that communities receive from the projects, but may put them at greater risk of being forced to take actions against the will of some or many in the community. This presents the potential not only for human rights abuses, but for furthering internal conflict within forest communities, eroding the foundation of social relations on which forest governance is built.

Advisor: Brashares, Justin S
Fortmann, Louise