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Enabling Conditions
and communities, transparency is key and both parties need to recognize
their mistakes in their approaches, methodologies and results.
Transparency can help establish where you are in the MRV process, what data
you have and how you collected it. When this happens, people can come
forward and offer help improve the data rather than the government
needing to go to the community and ask for their collaboration. By doing so
you are making them part of the process. Governments should
acknowledge that data collection for REDD+ is complex and should ask for
the help of other organizations and communities when needed. In this
way, everyone is on the same page.
2. Collecting oficial information where indigenous people have
control over their territory. In
Guyana, the Amerindians have titles over their land, and in the case of the
Rupununi District the land is totally controlled by the community. In this
situation it is necessary to integrate the community in the ield data
collection process rather than bringing in technicians from the government to
do so.
3. Land tenure and boundary delimitation.
It is important to deine who is doing what and where. In
Guyana, the government has found this to be a contentious issue in some
communities, and this has been a challenge for the government in how
to deine territorial boundaries throughout the entire area. Knowing
where communities use resources can empower them in their negotiations
with the government.
4. Relationship between the communi- ties and the government.
Monitoring forests is important for the govern-
ment and for communities. While the government needs to report on carbon
emissions for REDD+, communities need to focus on their livelihoods, and
both are interlinked. Communities are often the best ones to monitor forests;
carbon data is not more important than community needs and should not
be separated from safeguards.
5. Different priorities between govern- ment and community about what
needs to be recorded. Community
MRV or other types of forest moni- toring are beneicial for both govern-
ment and communities. For REDD+ mitigation and adaptation action it is
important to monitor carbon, but there are other elements that commu-
nities would like to monitor that it is more related to their needs e.g
medicinal plants, food, etc. A solution is to set up a system for the govern-
ment and the community that allows both to move in the right direction to
achieve the same goals. MRV should be linked to mitigation action and
impact monitoring, not just carbon quantiication. The use of data and
analysis should be useful both for the government and the communities.
6. Integrating MRV at the community level with the national efforts.
In Peru, the government made progress
on deining an initial carbon stock map using existing information at the
project and programme levels. However, there is no political will to
incorporate communities into this national accounting. There is a need to
develop a joint agenda so that communities can validate information
that is collected by the government.
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Enabling Conditions
LINKING LOCAL AND NATIONAL MONITORING SYSTEMS
Community forest monitoring is an essential process that should be put in
place in forest countries that are engaged in REDD+. However, there can be gaps
between what is recorded at the local level by the communities and the national
reporting needs for MRV to the United Nations andor other donors. There are
several challenges and enabling condi- tions that need to be in place at the policy
and institutional levels for CMRV to be useful for REDD+. The key enabling
conditions that were considered are:
1. Adequate institutional frameworks.
