Opportunities, gaps and challenges

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3.5 Opportunities, gaps and challenges

Forests have been widely recognized, nationally and regionally, as a key part of mitigation and adaptation responses. Social forestry in particular offers a unique opportunity to contribute to climate change mitigation, improve local livelihoods and enhance the resilience of forest communities to climate change at the same time. However, climate change is likely to place greater demands on social forestry systems and communities. Forest management systems may need to become more innovative and develop new ways of managing forest resources sustainably under more challenging climatic conditions. Community forest managers will need to manage and adapt to the impacts of climate variability and change on their forests. This may include enhancing landscape connectivity, reducing forest fragmentation, restoring forests on sloping land Broadhead et al., 2009 and modifying or developing new forest management practices to respond to changing risks, such as increased risk of forest fires, pests, insects and diseases. As mentioned earlier, many of the forests allocated to local people through community or social forestry programmes are degraded forests. As they regenerate, they have the potential to sequester large amounts of carbon and make a valuable contribution to climate change mitigation. However, degraded forests also have low levels of productivity in the early stages of regeneration, and the economic or livelihood benefits they provide may be limited. The incentives for local people to participate in social forestry activities in the absence of immediate financial returns may be low Poffenberger, 2006; Nguyen et al., 2009a, Broadhead and Izquierdo, 2010; Tint et al., 2011; Blomley et al., 2010; Dahal et al., 2010. Moreover, the extent that degraded forests are able to contribute to building local people’s resilience to climate change is also likely to be limited – until the forests attain higher levels of health and productivity. In the context of forests, global climate change mitigation goals may not always be compatible with adaptation goals and the basic needs of local communities. Stringent restrictions on forest access and use rights of local communities in the interests of mitigation could impact negatively on local livelihoods and climate change resilience. Without the provision of viable alternatives for forest users, such strategies are likely to be largely ineffective and may lead to “leakage”. In the future, an important challenge for social forestry in the ASEAN region will be balancing these various – and sometimes conflicting – goals of sustainable forest management: sequestering and storing carbon and conserving forest resources and ecosystem services in the face of more challenging conditions while at the same time meeting local livelihood needs and enhancing local resilience to climate change. Box 10: Bamboo wall in Samut Sakhon, Thailand Samut Sakhon Province is located in the inner Gulf of Thailand, where sea-level rise and coastal erosion are impacting upon traditional coastal livelihoods. In response to these challenges, one community has developed its own “bamboo wall” to reduce the impacts from coastal erosion and strong sea waves. The bamboo wall promotes soil sedimentation along the coastline, and this in turn helps to expand the potential area for growing mangroves. This remarkable adaptive strategy has been taken up by other local communities and has even been mainstreamed into government action plans to address coastal erosion. 33 34 35 This chapter presents a detailed overview of each of the eight focus countries, summarizing data and trends relating to social forestry and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Updated national data: Cambodia