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Norwegian University of Life Sciences/Connor J Community members on contested land, park boundary marker Photo: Norwegian University of Life Sciences/Connor J. Cavanagh Suggested Citation: Cavanagh CJ, Freeman OE. 2017. Paying for carbon at Mount Elgon: two contrasting approaches at a transboundary park in East Africa. In: Namirembe S, Leimona B, van Noordwijk M, Minang P, eds. Co- investment in ecosystem services: global lessons from payment and incentive schemes. Nairobi: World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF). Chapter 28 | 1 CHAPTER 28 Paying for carbon at Mount Elgon: two contrasting approaches at a transboundary park in East Africa Connor J Cavanagh and Olivia E Freeman Highlights • We compare and contrast delivery of community benefits under two approaches to PES. • UWA-FACE provided employment; MERECP negotiated CRMAs and revolving funds. • By 2004 more than 44% of UWA-FACE forest units were compromised by encroachment. • MERECP’s community revolving funds have been met with mixed success. • Both market and fund-based PES approaches require locally-relevant benefit sharing. 28.1 Introduction Across East Africa and beyond, resource management authorities have begun to experiment with various payment for ecosystem service (PES) mechanisms for strengthening the governance of protected areas. Perhaps the most widespread of these are payment for carbon sequestration and avoided deforestation initiatives, in which finances are disbursed to forest users or managers via either trust funds or voluntary markets. Though often identified as a ‘triple win’ solution for biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and socioeconomic development, such potential benefits of course will only be realized if these initiatives are sustainably designed, effectively governed, and attentive to local perceptions of social and environmental justice. In this chapter, we compare and contrast two such schemes, focusing on their benefit-sharing structures at protected areas on Mount Elgon: namely, the Uganda Wildlife Authority-Forest Absorbing Carbon Emissions (UWA-FACE) project and the transboundary Mount Elgon Regional Ecosystem Conservation Programme (MERECP). For each, we focus on the delivery mechanisms of benefits to local communities through the respective project/programme’s structure. Whereas the UWA-FACE project reportedly involved the sale of carbon offsets derived from forest plantations on Mount Elgon via contractual transfers and voluntary markets, MERECP involves fund-based payments for sustainable ecosystem management and avoided deforestation to the communities living adjacent to protected areas on the mountain. While Mount Elgon is located in both Uganda and Kenya, we primarily focus here on project activities in Uganda in the interest of analytical clarity and concision. In comparing and contrasting the underlying principles and provisional effects of these initiatives’ benefit- sharing schemes, we aim to extract a series of insights for the sustainable implementation of protected area-based PES schemes in East Africa. In doing so, we also aim to contribute to a refined theory of change for achieving desirable pro-poor and socio-environmentally just outcomes from conservation and development initiatives through the delivery of benefits to local communities. Chapter 28 | 1 28.2 Background and Study Area At approximately 4,321 meters above sea level, Mount Elgon is one of the largest inactive volcanoes in East Africa. The mountain straddles the border between Uganda and Kenya, and its forests serve as an important watershed for more than two million people in the surrounding region. In 2009, Mount Elgon was recognized as a UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve in acknowledgement of its rare afromontane flora and fauna, as well as its practical and cultural significance to surrounding communities. In Uganda, the Mount Elgon Forest Reserve was upgraded to a national park in 1992-3 with funding from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad)’s Mount Elgon Conservation and Development Project (MECDP), as well as from country-level programmes initiated by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the European Community1,2. The Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), charged with managing the park, has since taken a strong paramilitary enforcement management approach3,4,5. Despite this, the status of the national park does allow for some consumptive extraction by certain communities living adjacent to the park through collaborative agreements6 7,8. However, the scope and content of these agreements is largely not negotiated with communities, and agreements do not extend to parishes close to the park – but not bordering it – who have traditionally also depended on forest resources.9 During Uganda’s post-independence period and the turbulent regimes of – consecutively – Milton Obote, Idi Amin, and Milton Obote, some 25,000 hectares of the forest reserve on the Ugandan side were settled or otherwise encroached upon by local communities. In particular, this was facilitated by Amin’s 1975 Land Reform Decree and related “economic war”, which had the effect of encouraging rural populations to expand agricultural cultivation into forests in order to compensate for currency hyperinflation and the state’s mismanagement of the national economy more broadly4. In 1992, a Dutch NGO, the FACE Foundationa, approached the Ugandan government with an offer to finance the reforestation of these 25,000 hectares. This was on the condition that FACE would retain the rights to the carbon sequestered in these new plantations, and that UWA would maintain the boundaries of the new plantations for an initial period of 99 years. Although external auditors expected the project to sequester 3.73 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent between 1994 and 2034, reforestation activities declined in 2003-4 as a result of conflicts with local communities.4,10 MERECP is the successor to MECDP11,12,13. Initially and jointly financed by Norway and Sweden from 2005 to 2009, MERECP was re-designed for a second phase between 2009 to 201114. In contrast to its predecessor, MERECP is transboundary in scope, and is anchored in the East African Community’s Lake Victoria Basin Commission (LVBC). Unlike UWA-FACE, MERECP aims to facilitate “sustainable use of shared natural resources benefiting livelihoods and mitigating and adapting to anticipated climate change impacts in the Mt Elgon trans-boundary ecosystem of the East African Community (EAC)”14. It has been designed to do so through four natural resources co-management models. Two of the four models include payment schemes for adopting sustainable resource management activities, community revolving funds (CRFs) and deforestation avoidance14. Our focus in this chapter is based on the MERECP’s CRFs model, and in particular on benefit delivery in Uganda. a The FACE Foundation has since rebranded itself as ‘Face the Future’ 2 | Paying for carbon at Mount Elgon: two contrasting approaches at a transboundary park in East Africa 28.3 Project Design, Approaches to Ecosystem Service Valuation, and Delivery of Benefits to Communities While both UWA-FACE and MERECP seek to enhance carbon sequestration through forest conservation at Mount Elgon, they differ substantially in the precise nature of the mechanisms through which this is to be achieved (Table 1). This is particularly acute in relation to each initiative’s approach to the valuation of ecosystem services and delivery of benefits to communities. First, UWA-FACE generated its carbon offsets through the attempted restoration of the above- mentioned 25,000 hectares of encroached land at Mount Elgon National Park in Uganda. Some of the resulting offsets were then also reportedly sold onward via a number of third- party brokers10,15,16. However, as a result of this project model – which was implicitly based on the reforestation of ‘encroached’ and therefore contested state land – the eviction of large numbers of local residents constituted a necessary precondition for the project’s implementation4,31. Despite concerns related to human rights abuses10,17,18, both the project and forest management at Mount Elgon National Park were able to successfully complete numerous SGS Agrocontrol and Qualifor audits. In turn, this resulted in Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification19,20. While the initial project design did not include an explicit focus on equity or the protection of vulnerable groups21,22, SGS auditors have (somewhat controversially) deemed the project to be in conformance with FSC principles related to community relations and indigenous peoples’ rights.b By contrast, MERECP offers payments for enhanced ecosystem services including avoided deforestation via a community fund-based rather than a state-centric or market-based approach. This built upon IUCN’s experiences with MECDP, which acknowledged the need to support the diversification of highly forest-dependent livelihoods among rapidly growing populations adjacent to Mount Elgon National Park12. Unlike UWA-FACE, MERECP includes an explicit focus on equity and benefit sharing in its objectives, with the establishment of CRFs and other benefit-sharing mechanisms being key outputs of the programme. CRFs grant community-based organizations (CBOs) in both countries up to 10,000 USD to be loaned to members for the adoption of activities to diversify local livelihoods away from forest dependence. The aim of the CRFs is that the fund will grow over time as a result of reinvestment
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