anthropology climate

Tracking the Fault Lines of Pro-Poor CarbonForestry

Stephanie Paladino

Stephanie Paladino is with Mero Lek AppliedResearch, Athens, GA

Correspondence: Stephanie Paladino, Mero Lek Applied Research,PO Box 973, Athens, GA 30603, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest deg-radation (REDD) has been given a principal role in post-Kyoto, climate change agreements. Resulting markets andmechanisms for carbon forestry offsets could generate con-siderable global revenues for both forest conservation andsustainable rural development; or they may impose politicaland economic pressures on forest governance that threatenindigenous and rural peoples’ rights. Some inherent chal-lenges to developing carbon forestry projects that supportrural peoples’ welfare are reviewed. The experience of ScolelTe’, a carbon forestry project for Mexican indigenousfarmers, suggests how projects can be adapted for small-holder provision of carbon services on benign terms andstill meet the demands of carbon markets. However, carbonsales alone have not supported investments in knowledgedevelopment, institutional learning, and strategic farmerparticipation needed for significant political or economicchange. This supports critiques that policies based oneconomic valuations of environmental services are unlikelyto support social and equity objectives. [forest gover-nance, REDD, carbon markets, indigenous, rural poor,agroforestry]

Carbon: The New ForestGovernance Regime?

The world’s forests are continually in the cross-hairs of competing interests and changing policiesthat rarely seem to resolve to any of the parties’ fullsatisfaction. Forests serve, to varying degrees, as sitesof commercially extractable resources; sustenance andidentity for indigenous and other rural people; and de

facto or official alternatives to land reform. They arezones of geopolitical strategic importance; refuge forthe marginalized, the illicit, and the subversive; andsome of the last bastions of ecosystems critical toglobal biological and geophysical processes.

Often, the tugs-of-war around forests haveresulted in violence, coercion, and displacement ofpeople or livelihoods. Unfortunately, the plans, policyframeworks, and laws that govern forests have oftenlived a more vigorous life on paper than they have inthe field, at worst exacerbating conflicts of interests, atbest allowing some degree of business-as-usual to becarried out on the ground, to the detriments offorests, forest-dependent people, biodiversity, andecosystems.

Since the latter half of the twentieth century, therights of indigenous, natural resource-dependent, andother marginalized groups have increasingly beenrecognized in international agreements and nationallaws, and incorporated into the operations of multi-lateral development banks (Alcorn 2010; World Bank2005) and donor organizations.1 Recognition of theintertwined fates of forests (and other ecosystems)and the people who live in and around themhas become almost canon in environmental anddevelopment policy, and has been one of the forcesleading toward more decentralized, adaptive, andcommunity-based forms of forest management withina framework of overarching conservation and sustain-able development goals (Agrawal et al. 2008).

Nevertheless, through all the permutationsof conservation paradigms that have influencedforest and environmental governance during recentdecades, indigenous, rural, and other marginalized,resource-dependent people have too often foundthemselves the recipients and objects of policy, ratherthan seated at the table that defines it. In the state ofChiapas, Mexico, for instance, Maya communitiesliving in the Lacandon rain forest region have expe-rienced, within the space of a single generation, aversion of virtually every conservation and develop-ment paradigm that has come down the pike from

Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAFÉ) Vol. 33, Issue 2 pp. 117–132, ISSN 2153-9553, eISSN 2153-9561. © 2011 by the AmericanAnthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.2153-9561.2011.01059.x

“above” and “outside.” This has almost always comeat the risk of some threat to livelihood, community,identity, or political determination, and has rarelyresulted in enduring material or political benefit(Paladino 2005).

Maya reactions to these successive paradigms ormodels have spanned the spectrum from a relativelyapolitical, tolerant opportunism to outright rejectionand political resistance. At the former end of thespectrum, communities have adapted each time to thelatest vocabularies, concepts, and institutional formatsthat appear, sometimes concurrently and in competi-tion with each other, while looking for ways to inserttheir own language and interests onto the agenda(Paladino 2005). At the other end of the spectrum,more politicized Maya have rejected policies that theysee as, at best, maintaining indigenous communitiesin a marginalized status, and at worst, literally dis-possessing them of home, livelihood, community,identity, and basic human rights.2

Now, an emerging environmental governanceparadigm is poised to become another significantfactor in how the constellations of rights, benefits, andresponsibilities are arrayed around forests and otherlands important to rural and indigenous people. Inthis article, I look at a prominent approach to climatechange mitigation, a variant of payment for environ-mental services (PES), in which emitters of green-house gases, particularly carbon dioxide, compensatefor their emissions by financing the establishment orpreservation of vegetative cover that removes carbonfrom the air and stores it in above- and below-groundbiomass. Under varying voluntary (e.g., ChicagoClimate Exchange) or compliance (e.g., EuropeanUnion Emissions Trading Scheme) arrangements,credits for the amount of carbon stored can then becounted toward the emissions reductions goals ofindividuals, businesses, organizations, and nations.With the recent United Nations Framework Conven-tion on Climate Change (UNFCCC) positioning ofcarbon forestry as one of its central climate mitigationtools (UNFCCC 2010), a substantial amount of politi-cal, institutional, economic, and technical weight hasbeen thrown behind the implementation of this para-digm in some form worldwide. This, in turn, offers tolay yet another set of expectations, economic valua-tions, and pressures over those already playing out inforest and rural landscapes. I briefly summarize somekey concerns that have arisen about the implicationsof this paradigm for indigenous and poor, rural

people, particularly in reference to the UNFCCC strat-egy, although they apply to other variants of thepayment for carbon capture model. Based on fieldresearch conducted in 2007 through 2009, I then takethe example of a carbon forestry and agroforestryproject in Chiapas, Mexico that was explicitlydesigned to be pro-poor and supportive of rural, sus-tainable development, and use it to make observa-tions about the challenges to “social” or pro-poorcarbon projects.

Carbon Forestry and the Poor withinUNFCCC and REDD+

Forests are estimated to capture and store over 75percent of the world’s above- and below-groundcarbon dioxide (Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange [IPCC] 2007). At the same time, deforestationand degradation of standing forests is estimated to beresponsible for up to 17 percent of greenhouse gasemissions (IPCC 2007). Despite this critical role offorests in mitigating global climate change, earlierpost-Kyoto, global climate negotiations through theUNFCCC found it problematic to allow the conserva-tion of existing forest carbon stocks to be countedagainst emissions reductions targets, in large part dueto the question of “additionality,” as the aim is toincrease the net amount of global carbon stocks overwhat would have existed without intervention. Theonly carbon forestry activities supported were thoseinvolving afforestation and reforestation (A/R)through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)(Bamsley 2009).

Nevertheless, the importance of reducing emis-sions derived from deforestation and forest degrada-tion, commonly referred to by the acronym REDD,remained part of the UNFCCC deliberative process, inpart pushed by nations for whom these activities formthe principal sources of carbon emissions and offerthe greatest potential for participation in carbonoffsets. By December 2010, at the 16th Conference ofthe Parties meeting in Cancun, Mexico, what is nowbeing called REDD+ was accepted as a central part ofthe global climate change framework to be establishedin 2012. A “plus” added to the REDD acronym indi-cates that activities that improve and expand existingforest carbon stocks, including sustainable forestry,could also be included in the strategy (UNFCCC2010). In addition, the acronym “REDD++” has arisenas a way of expanding the focus beyond just forests to

Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAFÉ) 118 Vol. 33, No. 2 December 2011

include agricultural and pastoral practices, such asagroforestry, that add and store significant above- andbelow-ground carbon storage capacity.

Thus, the preservation and expansion of existingforest carbon stocks has been given a central place inglobal climate policy as one of the principal strategiesfor reducing atmospheric carbon. As Angelsen andAtmadja (2008:1) note, REDD is:

commonly seen as a significant, quick and win-win way to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emis-sions; significant because one-fifth of global GHGemissions come from deforestation and forestdegradation (DD); cheap because much of the DDis only marginally profitable, so, reducing GHGemissions from forests would be cheaper thanmost other mitigation measures; quick becauselarge reductions in GHG emissions can beachieved with “stroke of the pen” reforms andother measures not dependent on technologicalinnovations; and win-win because the potentiallylarge financial transfers and better governancecan benefit the poor in developing countries andprovide other environmental gains on top of envi-ronmental benefits.

The promise of “co-benefits,” that is, that not onlycarbon storage, but additional environmental, social,and economic objectives could be achieved throughcarbon forestry and with the carbon financing gener-ated, is both one of the more potentially positive andmore controversial aspects of this approach. From amore positive perspective are hopes that carbonprojects and carbon revenues, if handled properly,could both directly and indirectly strengthen therights and welfare of forest-dependent people. Intheory, carbon revenues could help support theowners and users of forests—indigenous and otherrural people—in such things as improving capacity tomonitor, manage, and protect forests, in improvingsustainable, forest-based livelihoods, or in developingeconomic options beyond forests (Brown et al. 2008;Fincke 2010; Sommerville 2011).

Indirectly, if nations undertake the kinds of“readiness” activities encouraged as preparation forREDD+ projects, they could clarify and resolve out-standing tenure issues of rural people and reformpolicies and laws that present obstacles to their par-ticipation in forest-conserving and other sustainablelivelihood activities. Additionally, they could invest in

processes of capacity-building and inclusive decision-making that bring rural people into more strategicREDD+, and ultimately, other governance roles(Schwarte and Mohammed 2011; Sommerville 2011).To the extent that carbon projects help keep forest andother ecosystems intact, they may also serve to pre-serve biodiversity and other environmental services(such as water and nutrient cycling, flood and soilerosion prevention, etc.) that can affect the welfare ofrural people (Bamsley 2009).

From more critical perspectives, however, the dis-cussions around REDD+ raise red flags about thepotential risks to the rural poor and indigenous. Mostof these derive from the political and material realitiesof these populations, and how these position them inrelation to the technical, financial, administrative, andpolitical terrain of carbon forestry as it is being carvedout in this context. Many of the points of tensionrevolve around the following elements considerednecessary for land use-based carbon projects, not justthose that are forestry-based (Bass et al. 2000; Jindalet al. 2008; Perez et al. 2007; Tschakert 2007):

• carbon permanence, that is, pressures to assure thatthe carbon stocks and emission reductionsfinanced, created, or protected are enduring;

• carbon cost efficiency, that is, pressures to achieve themost carbon storage or emissions reduction for theprice;

• carbon financing, that is, where it comes from, howit is structured and administered, how carbon valueis assigned; and

• complex technical and administrative systems for cal-culating carbon baselines and additionality, and forcarbon accounting across time and multiple politi-cal scales.

In broad strokes, the need for carbon permanencecreates a point of tension with indigenous and ruralpeoples’ often complex, insecure, informal, conflict-ing, and invisible (to the state) rights to carbon-providing lands and resources. This, in turn, caninterfere with their ability to benefit as providers ofcarbon services, as well as make it easier for morepowerful interests, including the state, elites, inves-tors, or other rural people with secure tenure, todisplace them. In the context of international REDD+discussions, tenure issues are acknowledged as criti-cal to the protection of rural and indigenous people’srights, as well as to the creation of a secure carboninvestment climate (Schwarte and Mohammed 2011;UN-REDD 2010; Diaz et al. 2011; Alcorn 2010). Among


the red flags raised are that nations may not haveeither the resources or the political will to undertakecareful processes of tenure reform or alternatively,that in the rush to receive REDD+ funds, they will doan inadequate job that fails to protect, or worse, stripsindigenous and rural people’s of their rights (Bamsley2009; Sommerville 2011).

It is precisely a key concern of indigenous andsmall farmer advocacy organizations that the REDD+framework offers a too effective vehicle for state,multilateral, conservation, or corporate interests toco-opt and displace indigenous and rural people’srights to land and natural resources.3 Precedents foractual or potential disruption of rights related tocarbon projects already exist, reinforcing the serious-ness of these concerns. Examples include a project inEcuador, where liens placed on land titles as protec-tions against carbon default put participants at risk oflosing their land (Wunder and Alban 2008); and astart-up REDD++ project in the Comunidad Lacan-dona, Chiapas, Mexico, where only formal rightsholders in the indigenous, common property territoryare receiving carbon payments for communal forest,while probably two-thirds of the total adult popula-tion is excluded (Teratol, Comunidad Lacandona resi-dent, pers. comm., 2011).

Another point of tension with carbon permanenceis that poor rural people often need to manage land tomeet multiple and changing objectives (e.g., socialobligations, subsistence, cash income), manage risks,and adapt land management regimes as opportunitiesor needs (e.g., crop failures, market changes, healthcrises) arise. Carbon projects that restrict or removethis adaptability could put rural people at risk, par-ticularly if carbon cash flows are insufficient to replaceother livelihoods.

Pressures to achieve carbon cost-efficiency tendto mitigate for choosing larger units of land managedprimarily or exclusively for carbon, in contrast withthe multiple-objective management styles of the ruralpoor. Negotiating projects with many smallholders,with populations that speak different languages andhave low levels of formal education, little institutionalcapacity or weak group representation, and are expe-riencing political instability or have dispersed,difficult-to-access land units increases what are calledthe transaction costs of carbon projects4 (Bass et al.2000; Jindal et al. 2008; Tschakert 2007). REDD+country plans being developed include provisions forensuring stakeholder participation and capacity-

building (UNFCCC 2010) but how this is done, howearly or late in the REDD+ design process it occurs,and whether the costs of these activities can becovered by funds external to carbon projects (such asthe REDD+ “readiness” funds) or must be subsumedby the carbon projects themselves will likely affect thewillingness of national governments, investors, andfinancers to develop projects with these populations.Transaction costs, if deducted from carbon pricescould also diminish the amount of carbon revenuethat ultimately reaches rural carbon service providers.

How REDD+ carbon projects will be financed, forexample, whether from private or public sectorsources, carbon markets or dedicated funds, internalcountry or external funds, is uncertain and will likelyinvolve a mixture of sources and types probablytailored to each country’s situation (Dutschke et al.2008). How carbon financing ends up being struc-tured will affect its volatility, volume, longevity, andthe political commitments behind it. Different struc-tures will involve the insertion of different arrays offinancial instruments and actors that can include gov-ernments, multilateral agencies, donors, lenders,brokers, speculators, resellers, and regulators, eachwith their own sets of interests, incentives, andrespective impacts on and subtractions from carbonrevenues and prices (Brown et al. 2008; Diaz et al.2011; McAffee in review). These factors will likelyinfluence whether the funds generated are sufficientto cover the higher transaction costs of working withthe rural poor, and raise questions about the poor’sability to influence the terms of carbon trade involvedand the formulas used for assigning value to carbon.Extending McAfee’s (in review) metaphor that carbonhas been presented as the latest “miracle tropicalcrop” to raise up the poor, the poor are likely to facethe same challenges to inserting themselves into thecarbon commodity chain on favorable terms as theyhave with any other commodity to date.

The technical requirements of land use-based,carbon mitigation include methodologies for estab-lishing the baselines from which emission reductionsand carbon stock additions are calculated, as well asfor estimating the amount of carbon stored in differenttypes of vegetation cover and land uses. Thesecalculations can be very site-specific and are affectedby factors such as soil, climate, species, and plantdensity (Montoya et al. 1995), although efforts areunderway to develop more generalized and less costlyways to accomplish this. Carbon projects also require


transparent, enduring, and credible systems forcarbon accounting, that is, monitoring carbon stocks,tracking them, and verifying them across the lifetimeof projects. Such systems need to tie each carbonpurchase by a specific actor to the actual amounts ofcarbon storage in specific units of land by specific landmanagers. They also need to have mechanisms forhow to respond to failures to deliver carbon quantitiesthat have been purchased. Within the UNFCCCREDD+ process, fundamental questions about wherecarbon accounting responsibilities should fall, at thelevel of nation or individual project, and how base-lines should be calculated are still being worked out(Angelsen and Atmadja 2008). How this gets resolvedwill likely create other pressures on the carbon andfinancial performance of projects, and could result inprioritizing projects that are more carbon cost-efficientover projects that are more conducive to rural people’sparticipation. How much importance will be given torural people’s interests in the technical and adminis-trative aspects, and will funds be dedicated to supporttheir ability to participate?

Sommerville (2011) points out that, currently,country proposals for equity-oriented reforms andsocial safeguards tend to be very output-focused, withlittle specification of the processes for actually achiev-ing them. The “architecture,” as it is referred to in theliterature, of a global scale REDD+ regime is still verymuch under deliberation, with many fundamentalquestions remaining to be resolved (Angelsen andAtmadja 2008). One of the controversial lines ofdebate has, in fact, centered on whether the explicitinclusion of “co-benefits” and social safeguard provi-sions such as “free, prior, and informed consent” forindigenous people (as specified in the United NationsDelaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, orUNDRIP) would interfere with or strengthen theachievement of basic carbon mitigation objectives(Sommerville 2011; UN-REDD Programme 2010). TheCOP-16 meetings in 2010 adopted language that ref-erenced the UNDRIP but established only a need for“full and effective participation” (UNFCCC 2010).

In summary, it seems clear that there are manypotential fault lines in the promise of the UNFCCCREDD+ framework to deliver on “co-benefits” ofsocial equity and sustainable development. To over-come these fault lines will require the political will toinvest resources in field-leveling actions that supportrural and indigenous people’s full participation, aswell as in policy and institutional reforms, such as

tenure, to safeguard their rights. Such undertakingscould put additional pressures on carbon financestreams or require additional financing from othersources. It also involves making difficult decisions onhow to balance the possibility of making fasteradvances toward carbon mitigation goals against theslower work of building equity in participation.Unfortunately, these are very familiar demands,invoked by many previous generations of conserva-tion and development paradigms, and they havealways proven elusive.

Meanwhile, it is clear that many advocates forand representatives of indigenous and rural peopletrust neither this new paradigm nor its architects, northe way the structure has been built, to do any better.While some indigenous groups expect to derive ben-efits from it (Schwarzmann 2009), others have madeclear they see REDD+ as just one more global projectassembled by the many “bigs”—government, busi-ness, finance, and conservation—to dispossess ruralpeople from their rights and resources (Carbon TradeWatch and Indigenous Environment Network n.d.).

Alternative Architectures? A Pro-PoorCarbon Example in the Voluntary Market:Scolel Te’

Can carbon projects be done in ways that deliveron the promise of a new source of value and revenues

Figure 1.Native tree seedlings await boot owner.

Photo: S. Paladino


for rural development? Can they be done in ways thatstrengthen the rights and resources of rural poorpeople, and advance their welfare and prosperity?Could carbon, under the urgency of climate changemitigation, actually be the generator of a new sourceof pro-poor investment and change?

In tandem with more formal processes such as theUNFCCC, a worldwide, voluntary market in carbonoffsets has been growing and evolving over the pastcouple of decades (Peters-Stanley et al. 2011; Diazet al. 2011). Freer of regulation and costly technicaland administrative requirements such as thoseimposed by the CDM, the voluntary market hasoffered a favorable venue for innovative, pro-poor orsocial carbon projects. As with other global commodi-ties, market niches have developed for carbon offsetswith specialized, environmental, social or other crite-ria. These niches have been supported, in turn, by theemergence of sets of voluntary standards for carbonprojects,5 as well as organizations that provide third-party verification of project practices and carbon reg-istries (Diaz et al. 2011). This has been especiallyimportant in the face of critiques that the voluntarymarket has suffered from inadequate transparencyand accountability, and consequently, fraudulent prac-tices such as the double-counting of carbon credits(Checker 2008; Peters-Stanley et al. 2011). While thevoluntary market is independent of compliancemarkets and trading schemes, the different frame-works substantially inform each other in terms ofmethodologies, definitions, and technical standardsfor performance and accounting. Suppliers often posi-tion themselves to supply various markets, as well asto stay competitive with market share (Diaz et al.2011; Quechulpa, Ambio staff, pers. comm., 2008).

One of the standards for carbon projects withexplicit social and rural development goals is PlanVivo, and its flagship project is Scolel Te’. In the textthat follows, I look at how Scolel Te’, one of thelongest operating, pro-poor carbon projects in theworld, responds to the tensions of articulating carbonforestry projects to the needs and objectives of ruralpeople.

Outline of Scolel Te’Scolel Te’ evolved the approach that ultimately

became the basis of the Plan Vivo model. Operating inthe Mexican states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, Scolel Te’was from its beginning conceived as a pro-poorcarbon project for mostly indigenous campesinos or

smallholder farmers. Never envisioned as a solesource of income for participants, carbon revenueswere instead seen as an income supplement thatcould help subsidize a transition to land use practicesthat restore ecosystem properties and support sustain-able livelihoods. Carbon activities were meant to beintegrated into, rather than supplant, existing sourcesof livelihood (Montoya et al. 1995; Nelson and de Jong2003).

The project began out of the collaboration, in1994, of an indigenous campesino organization repre-senting small coffee growers, Pajal Yakactic, scientistsfrom a Chiapas research and education institution, ElColegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR), and an aca-demic from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.The scientists/academics brought knowledge ofcarbon cycling in forests and a plate of carbon-conserving land use options to the table, while themembers of Pajal conducted a series of vetting exer-cises among members that tailored the concept totheir needs and objectives. Out of this early process, asuite of individually customizable, agroforestrydesigns were chosen as the preferred carbon storageactivities and remain the primary templates employedthrough this day. This makes the project primarilywhat is called an A/R project, in contrast with REDD+projects that focus on maintaining and improvingexisting forest stocks.6 Carbon agroforestry was seenas one of several development activities that PajalYakactic would offer to its members. Pajal initiallyadministered the project, with support from membersof the original academic and technical team. In 1997,the first participants began receiving carbon pay-ments. By 1999, the project began to be administeredindependently of Pajal by Ambio, a nonindigenous,technical services cooperative set up for the purpose,and participation was opened to any smallholderanywhere in the state of Chiapas or nearby areas ofOaxaca. Ongoing technical support is provided byECOSUR. And access to the carbon market was pro-vided for many years by an Edinburgh broker until2008, when Ambio began to take over all marketingresponsibilities.7 To date, the project has 9,645 haenrolled in the program with 2,437 producers; sinceinception, it has sold 470,123 tC.8

Carbon PermanenceThere are several characteristics of the Scolel Te’

project model that help mitigate the tensions betweenthe requirement of carbon permanence and the special


conditions of poor, smallholder farmers, althoughthere are some as yet unaddressed weaknesses. Theseinclude secure land tenure and transferable carbonpayment rights; an individual self-assessment processfor each participant to evaluate the feasibility ofcarbon forestry within existing family resources; agro-forestry models intended to provide some front- andback-end benefits for maintaining tree plantations;and contingency funds that help relocate or replantcarbon stocks in the event of losses or default.

Scolel Te’ does require secure land tenure of theparticipants, which comes in the majority of casesthrough membership in ejidos, a form of communaltenure produced by Mexican land reform. An unex-pected result of the vetting process with early partici-pants was that, despite the presence of communallands and forests in most ejidos, the farmers’ prefer-ence was to engage in the project via what is effec-tively a private property model. That is, the farmerspreferred to carry out carbon projects on the family-managed plots of land to which they have exclusiveuse rights as ejidatarios (formal rights holders in theejido). Each participant signs an agreement andengages with the project individually, although theymay have come to the project via their membership inan organization that has established contact with theproject. The adult offspring who are designated heirsof ejidatarios are also able to enroll in the project.Rights to the trees and outstanding carbon paymentscan be transferred to heirs or new plot owners.9 Therequirement of tenure, however, excludes enrollmentin the project of people who do not have access toland via one of these routes. Some communitymembers in this situation benefit from occasionalwage labor when tree owners need help. I found noevidence that tree plantations caused displacement ofpreexisting use rights to resources on family plots,such as plants, minerals, or animals.

The core of the Plan Vivo process is a planningexercise that each would-be participant conducts toevaluate whether he or she has sufficient land, labor,time, and other resources to support tree plantingwithout displacing other activities or causing familyhardship. The intention is that a farmer will not enrollin the project if it risks boxing him or her into asituation where household security or other demandsconflict with tree raising. The result is a map of eachparticipant’s landholdings, with the chosen plotdesign, species, and planting distances listed. Thisthen becomes the basis of carbon storage calculations,

subsequent annual monitoring exercises, and carbonpayments that are modified if there are substantialchanges in the actual number of trees present. It isunderstood that participants may cut trees for theirown use over the years, and carbon storage calcula-tions for the plot are discounted slightly to reflect thatassumption. When attrition from the project happens,trees already planted have typically been left stand-ing, if unattended. I did not find evidence for attritiondue to a need to convert plots back to some otheruse.10

The project, thus, does tend to select for familieswith a certain minimum of land resources. The par-ticipants I interviewed had landholdings of 3.5 ha to31 ha, with a median of 10 ha.11 The majority of indig-enous participants participate practice swidden agri-culture, with rotation cycles of three to ten years. Thefarmer with 3.5 ha lives in a region where a parcel ofabout half that size is needed to provide a year’ssubsistence crops. He is from a community that usespermanent (non-rotating) plots for crop production,depending on agro-chemicals to maintain fertility.

The agroforestry model employed has been devel-oped with the aim to provide both short-term andlong-term incentives to support tree permanence.Short-term incentives include synergies derived fromcombining trees with other production activities, aswell as from carbon payments that are front-loaded tothe first five years. Native, commercially viable timberspecies are planted within one of three main, indi-vidually customizable schemes: in fallow lands; com-bined with either annual (e.g., corn) or perennial (e.g.,coffee, oranges) crops; and as living fence aroundpastures and production plots. Farmers enroll onehectare to begin with; some have enrolled one to threemore hectares in the program in subsequent years.The agroforestry approach has allowed trees to beincorporated into existing land management practiceswithout displacing subsistence activities or cash crop-ping. Farmers who combine trees with corn cropshave other plots they plan to use for that purposewhen tree competition and shade becomes too great.In most cases, combining trees with other crops hasallowed participants to increase their returns to bothland and labor, a strategy explicitly chosen byfarmers, as the labor for maintaining both “crops” isonly marginally increased by the addition of the trees.In some cases, it appears that carbon payments mayeven help some farmers subsidize the costs of daylabor or inputs for agricultural crops.


The scheduling of carbon payments has evolvedover the project life. Four of the five total paymentsare delivered in the first five years of the project, witha final delayed payment originally planned for thetenth year, and now advanced to the eighth. Thefrontloading of payments reflects early farmer prefer-ences, and helps to subsidize labor costs, if any, thefarmer may incur, typically for land preparation andplanting in the first year. Both project staff andfarmers also describe this arrangement as helping tocement the credibility of the Scolel Te’ project. Formost participants I interviewed, the money waslargely absorbed into household budgets. The pay-ments are typically not large enough to have a sig-nificant impact on the participant’s overall economicstatus, for example, through helping to capitalize neweconomic activities, and there is little evidence thatthey contribute to inequities within communities orfamilies. Depending on the ecological zone and theplot design, in 2008, annual payments ran fromroughly US$70 to US$150 per hectare, with the total ofall payments ranging from US$350 to US$750.

Long-term incentives for tree “permanence” arebuilt around the projection that farmers could sell themature timber species planted after at least 20–25years of growth, and replant behind them. This isenvisaged as a step towards the development of asmallholder, sustainable forestry and forest productsindustry that could provide ongoing economic ben-efits while maintaining long term carbon stocks. Apotential weakness of the model in relation to carbonpermanence, however, is that most plots experience amidterm period when there are no direct, economicbenefits, as coplanted crops are no longer viable butthe trees are not yet at harvestable age. Conceivably,this could present a window of vulnerability shouldthe farmer come under pressure to fill that benefitgap, that is, to derive immediate economic benefitfrom that land. Shade crops, such as coffee, are likelyantidotes to this problem, but crops appropriate to thedifferent micro-climates of the project need to befound, and some farmers are experimenting withlivestock grazing once the trees are big enough totolerate it.

Another potential weakness is that there is littleprecedent in the region for sustainable smallholderforestry on such small plots. The ability to deliver onthis part of the project design will require meetingsome potentially challenging permitting require-ments, as well as developing appropriate technical,

organizational, and business skills among farmers.The project has not yet invested in addressing theseneeds, nor in helping farmers find economic optionsfor the middle phase of agroforestry plots. Neverthe-less, deforestation in the region has been especiallyrapid during the past half century, and most of thesecommunities depend heavily on wood for cookingand construction. The participants I interviewedanticipated that, apart from creating new timber res-ervoirs to serve family needs in the face of vastlydiminished sources of local wood, the trees will haveeconomic value for local sale in the future. Many ofthem talk of the trees as fulfilling a role that cattlehave often played: a resource that requires little careand can be converted to cash as necessary. Many alsodescribe a profound satisfaction, even love, fromhaving the trees, and speak of them as one of the fewa legacies, as a campesino, that they can leave to heirs.

Participants sign an agreement with the project tomaintain trees on the plot for a targeted period of 100years—a period derived from international protocolsfor carbon permanence. Clearly a stretch of timebeyond the control of any one person, the project setsaside a percentage of carbon revenues in buffer fundsto help finance the start-up of new plots to meetcarbon commitments in the event that participants ortheir heirs decide to discontinue the activity. A bufferis also maintained to help participants replant in theevent of losses due to fire or other unforeseen events.The agreement with farmers is not legally binding, sothe project has no ability to sanction participants,other than to cease further carbon payments. In fact,farmers who sign up but do not follow through areoften maintained on the rolls for some years (withoutpayments or being counted toward carbon credits) incase their circumstances change.

Carbon Cost-EfficiencyThese procedural and administrative adaptations,

plus the trade-offs made between maximum carbonimpact and the multiobjective land uses of campesi-nos, confirm that carbon cost-efficiency is an issuewith which smallholder carbon projects mustcontend—with some provisos.

Each of the basic agroforestry systems employedis estimated to capture different amounts of carbonover the designated time period, according to vari-ables such as climate, soil, tree species, and plantingdensity. By incorporating multiple objectives, such asfood crop production, into plot management, some


carbon storage trade-offs are made relative to landmanaged exclusively for that purpose. However, thereis growing evidence that agroforestry plots are under-valued for carbon impact as the calculation method-ologies used, generally and by Ambio, have not takeninto account the significant amounts of soil carboncreated and conserved over baseline conditions. Thenet impact is particularly significant if the baseline isa swidden cornfield where fire was used to clearvegetation, which is the prevailing practice in much ofthe region (Roncal-Garcia et al. 2008; Soto-Pinto et al.2010). Soil carbon may thus be an important, source ofcarbon revenue for smallholders and rural peopleacross many landscapes, including grasslands (Neely2009; Perez et al. 2007). Project staff has begun lookingtoward incorporating more sophisticated calculationsof total system carbon impact as a way to betterdocument carbon performance of the systems, and asa result, increase market price, a strategy that wouldbe supported by the global acceptance of REDD+approaches.

In the communities where Ambio has developedprojects that support the conservation and improve-ment of communally-owned forests, project staff findsthat transaction costs, as might be expected, are lower.Staff consider that being able to engage in a highervolume of REDD-based projects like these might helpcover the higher costs of the projects with individualfarmers. Thus, an ancillary benefit of internationalacceptance of REDD+ toward climate mitigationmight be that the increased funding or market forprojects focused on standing forests could, effectively,help subsidize the continuation of agroforestryprojects that adapt to smallholders and the poor, if thetwo goals can be linked institutionally and financially.

Carbon FinancingIn 1997, the project was registered with the United

States Initiative for Joint Implementation of theUNFCCC (Corbera 2005), and a large purchase by theInternational Automobile Federation Foundation,responsible for Formula One and other car racingcompetitions, got the activities underway. A trustfund for receiving funds from buyers and disbursingpayments to farmers was set up, initially managed bymembers of Pajal Yakactic and the academic team. By1999, the fund was separated from the campesinoorganization, along with the overall project’s admin-istration. Ambio, a local nongovernmental, non-indigenous organization constituted as a technical

services cooperative, became responsible for adminis-tering both the trust fund and field activities. Withthis shift, also, came a redirection of energies awayfrom varied development activities and to the opera-tion of a carbon agroforestry project.

For roughly half the project’s life, average carbonprices hovered between US$10 and US$13 per tonneof carbon; by 2005, carbon prices began to reach therange of US$16.50–US$28.05 (Ambio 2008). Through2007, two-thirds of the income from carbon sales wenttoward farmer payments, including the contingencybuffer funds, with the rest supporting administrativeand operating costs. During this period, Scolel Te’ wasable to run almost exclusively on the basis of carbonsales, although outside projects taken on from time totime by Ambio staff contributed to office and relatedexpenses.

During those years, the project’s interactions withbuyers were mediated by a broker based in Edin-burgh. By 2008, Ambio began taking over marketingfunctions, working on developing a national marketfor its carbon and expanding the scope of its opera-tions, as described in the next section. It also hadreceived, at that time, more purchases than it was ableto immediately place with farmers, in part due tobacklogs in monitoring and administration tasks withexisting participants. By contrast, the next two yearssaw a notable drop in carbon sales. At this juncture,Ambio found it needed to seek funding sources inde-pendent of carbon sales in order to help finance theadditional administrative, marketing, recruitment,participant training, and technical demands beingplaced on the project. As part of an effort to regainsome ground in supporting a broader development-oriented agenda, it also received outside funding tosupport activities such as an improved efficiencywood stove project for participants’ families. Facedwith expanding commitments and fluctuating carbonsales, payment amounts to farmers were maintainedat the same levels, but operating costs drew higherpercentages from carbon sales and other fundingsources (Ambio 2009; Ambio 2010).

The project’s reliance for most of its life almostexclusively on income from carbon sales has had itspros and cons. On the one hand, the relatively short“commodity chain,” with few intermediaries, mayhave allowed the project to retain more of the carbonsales income toward project activities—a boon to ahigh transaction cost project like this. The affiliationwith a local research institution, ECOSUR, meant that


many of the costs associated with developing dataand methodologies from which to calculate carbonadvances were covered by outside funds. Some coststo the project were effectively reduced by the fact thatfarmers carry out several roles in the field aspects ofthe project, such as annual plot monitoring, and seedcollection.

On the other hand, the reliance on carbon salesproved limiting to the number of activities theproject could engage in. Activities that might havesupported the original, broader, development-oriented goals—such as farmer capacity-building,livelihood strengthening, skills-building, and organi-zational development for smallholder sustainableforestry—were largely left by the wayside, in partbecause it would have required seeking additionalfunding outside that of carbon sales.

An additional challenge related to carbon financ-ing has had to do with volatility in market prices.Carbon prices had been relatively steady for much ofthe project’s life, establishing several years of prece-dent for consistent payment amounts to farmers.Once carbon prices started fluctuating in the late2000s, project staff began to face the problem of howto adapt farmer payments so that equity across par-ticipants is maintained. For a social equity-orientedproject operating in a political climate of entrenchedcampesino distrust of government and NGO projects,significant differences in payment parity amongfarmers could pose serious challenges to project legiti-macy and credibility.

Technical and Administrative DemandsEarly participants in the project, as well as

researchers and staff, tend to describe two phases inthe institutional development of the project; frommy research, I add a third. Each of these has hadimplications for the extent to which the project hasbeen able to realize non-carbon, social goals of theproject.

The first phase was while the Scolel Te’ projectwas under the wing of the campesino organization,Pajal Yakactic. During this phase, through the late1990s, farmers, first in collaboration with academicsand then more independently, were centrally involvedin the strategic direction as well as administration ofthe project. This is when the carbon agroforestryactivities were considered as merely one activity inthe pro-development portfolio of Pajal (Corbera 2005;Nelson and de Jong 2003).

The second phase began with the separation ofthe project from Pajal and its placement under theindependent administration of Ambio. From about1999 onward, the project refocused itself, purposefullyor by default, on the task of developing the organi-zational procedures, tracking systems, technical meth-odologies, field methods, and banking system forreceiving carbon sales and placing them with ruralsmallholders. There was little precedent to guide theway for what they were doing, and much was learnedin the school of hard knocks. To all accounts, thelearning curve did not have a lot of time to flatten out:farmer and carbon buyer demand increased; formalprocesses such as the UNFCCC continued to evolvethe standards of practice; to stay competitive in thegrowing voluntary market where other players wereentering the “social” carbon niche, project procedureshad to adapt, including obtaining third-party verifi-cation of the project’s methodologies and practices.Capacity-building and institutional development wasprimarily internal and focused on project administra-tion staff. Farmer skills-building focused mainly onthe nuts-and-bolts of field implementation andproblem-solving. Locally-nominated farmers, actingas community and regional técnicos (“technicians”)helped carry out and coordinate the first stage ofannual monitoring, served as communication con-duits between project staff and participants, andattended meetings and training related to silvicultureand monitoring. During most of this time, the projectran mostly off of carbon revenues. And during thistime, few noncarbon-related activities were pursued.

The third phase began around 2007. The nationaland international profile of Scolel Te’ was high, as oneof the few and longest running pro-poor carbonprojects. Carbon forestry, especially REDD+, became anew focus of international policy, as well as of stateand national level efforts to establish payment forenvironmental services programs. Demands weremade on project staff to serve in policy processes.Ambio took over Scolel Te’s marketing and promo-tional responsibilities, and was still modifying proce-dures and practices, such as its database systems andfield monitoring methodologies, to meet the recom-mendations of third-party verifiers. Backlogs incarbon payments and in the placement of new carbonsales with farmers began to occur. In partnership withother non-governmental organizations and newfunding sources, Ambio began a new phase of expan-sion of Scolel Te’ to communities in a region of the


state where it had not worked before.12 And, ironi-cally, Ambio was increasingly being pressed to docu-ment its social impacts.

At this stage, it was clear that carbon sales alonewould not suffice to support the increasing institu-tional demands on Ambio, let alone activities thatmight increase Scolel Te’s impact on rural poverty orsustainable development, and it began seekingoutside funds. At the same time, Ambio began toincrease the roles of farmer participants. It beganpaying part-time salaries to regional técnicos to takeon more formal responsibilities in the project, suchas in farmer recruitment, training and skills devel-opment, and field monitoring. Meetings in different

field locations were held to foster learning, exchange,and initiative among participants within and acrossregions of the state and with participants in theneighboring state of Oaxaca. Training events wereheld so that farmers could gain skills and take moreactive roles in silviculture, tree nursery management,and seed collection. Most of these new farmersupport activities were financed by grants fromoutside sources, as were many of the growinginstitutional and administrative demands beingexperienced.

The project has gone from 677 farmers enrolled in2007 to 2437 in 2010 (Ambio 2010). Non-carbonrevenue has continued to be critical to supporting

Figure 2.Carbon Certificate Issued to New York Mayor Bloomberg

(reproduced by permission of Ambio).


Ambio’s ability to handle the increasingly complexdemands of running Scolel Te’.

Conclusions

The example of Scolel Te’, as well as sister projectsbeing developed along the Plan Vivo lines,13 suggestthat there is an array of techniques that can be usedto adapt carbon forestry and carbon farming so thatthe rural poor can participate with minimal negativeeconomic or social impacts, and some economic andcapacity-building benefits. The Scolel Te’ agroforestryexample, however, is tailored to the specific situationsof indigenous smallholders who have tenure and aminimum amount of land with which to participate.Other lessons can certainly be derived from theproject’s increasing work with communal forests onejido lands, but this is not explored here.

One of the critiques of the project is that itsoriginal development-oriented focus came to be sub-sumed by a narrower focus on carbon, and thatfarmers were no longer strategic participants. Yet theproject has achieved a remarkable record of longevityfor a highly politicized region where most conserva-tion and development projects fall prey to local andnational politics, constantly changing programs andparadigms, and poor delivery of promised results.Ironically, this longevity may be in large part becausethe project did invest intensely in creating a reliable,credible mechanism that could articulate the verydifferent objectives and interests of rural people withthose of the global carbon market. Perhaps because ofthis investment in internal development, the projecthas been largely able to deliver on what it offers, evenif the reach of its offer became much more modestonce it was separated from the campesino organiza-tion. That, in itself, is a real achievement.

Nevertheless, one of the lessons taken is that justthe demands of achieving this level of institutionallearning has required considerable time and effortand in the end, more financial support than carbonsales alone could supply. It seems clear that a com-mitment to building the capacity for locally run andbeneficial carbon activities requires the dedication ofextra funds, and even more so for populations whohave little experience with the languages, technolo-gies, and concepts involved. It is hard to imagine howcarbon sales alone could also support more transfor-mative activities that seek to actually change thestatus of the rural poor.

Some strategies might help direct higher portionsof carbon finance towards rural dwellers. One is tocontinue to expand ideas of what constitutes effectiveland-based carbon storage, to include the differentkinds of working landscapes that the rural poorinhabit. Valuing reduced emissions from lost soilcarbon as well as increased soil carbon storageachieved by many agricultural and pastoral practicesmight help increase carbon projects and pricesdirected to the poor.

Another option is to look at how to raise the valuegiven to “social” carbon. Lessons might be taken—proand con—from other efforts by the rural poor to insertthemselves into commodity production on positiveterms, for example, in the fair trade sector. What hasbeen successful in the efforts of coffee producers, forinstance, to gain more control over the terms of trade,and how does the complexity of navigating carbonmarkets compare with that of agricultural commoditymarkets?

In a similar vein, what are the possibilities forreducing the costs of “social” carbon? Are there largerunits through which poor producers could pool theirefforts and reduce the transaction costs even if theyare working from individual plots? Could such unitsallow for the participation of people without tenure toparticipate?

However, fundamental questions remain aboutthe whether such measures merely constitute a tweak-ing of the inner walls of an architecture that is inher-ently unsuited, if not antithetical, to pro-poor carbonundertakings. For one, the rationale that carbon for-estry offsets in developing countries are more cost-effective relative to other mitigation options ispredicated precisely on the relative income poverty ofthe regions and populations in question. To the extentthat the monetary value assigned to such offsets isbased on estimations of opportunity costs that onlytake into account the few, economically viable alter-natives available to poor populations and poor coun-tries (as was the case for early calculations of ScolelTe’ carbon prices), the relative cost advantage existsonly as long as there are underlying income dispari-ties between emitters and offsetters, buyers and pro-ducers. As with other global commodities, except forcarbon buyers or financers with altruistic or image-”greening” motives, the underlying economic ratio-nale is unlikely to generate incentives for assigningextra monetary value (and therefore higher carbonprices) for poverty reduction or rights-strengthening


projects. Pagiola et al. (2005) found that PES projectsclearly favored buyers terms. McAfee (in review)finds similar results and argues that the underlyinglogics of cost- and market-efficiency structure thesetransactions to maintain poverty and direct wealth“upward.”

For another, the structures emerging for REDD+projects within international climate change negotia-tions seem likely to create strong international andnational pressures to meet quantified emissionsreduction goals to which financial inflows areattached. The incentives for achieving stated goals of“full and effective participation” and social safe-guards for affected peoples, on the other hand, remainrelatively weaker and more vaguely specified. Thetensions in this disparity are underscored by ongoingarguments that carbon mitigation may be too urgentto wait for murkier, more elusive processes of socialinclusion and policy reform to take place.

Further, the volume of funding needed to financeREDD+ actions at a scale that could meet intendedemission reduction goals almost certainly requiresthe involvement of the private, financial sector.Though financial institutions and private investorsare already important players in existing carbonmarkets, this has raised the specter of a vaster,unregulated, “carbon capitalism” that manipulatescarbon derivatives and other financial instruments assources of profit in and of themselves, potentiallydistorting prices in ways that have little relation tothe actual value and purpose of carbon offsets inregulating emissions (Chester and Rosewarne 2011;Kassenaar 2009). Far from the classic PES scenario ofa level playing field on which buyers and producerscreate win-win outcomes, the prospect is one offinancial and intermediate actors structuring marketsfor their profit while the percentages of carbonfinances going to rural producers or to processesstrengthening them are diminished (McAfee inreview).

Finally, securing and appropriately directing non-market funding to finance the additional or full costsof pro-indigenous and pro-poor carbon projectsrequires a political will and capacity across politicalscales that has too often been the missing link in somany conservation and development projects. Carbonforestry, especially in developing countries or regions,may be considered “cheap” relative to other mitiga-tion options, but the example of Scolel Te’ and similarprojects suggests that socially sustainable and equi-

table carbon most definitely is not. Whether the forcesgathering under the new paradigm of managingforests for carbon are ready or able to pay for itremains to be seen.

Acknowledgments

Research on Scolel Te’ was sponsored by ElColegio de la Frontera Sur and funded by the ConsejoNacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) ofMexico. It was carried out as part of a larger projectevaluating agroforestry systems for carbon capture,under the direction of Dr. Lorena Soto-Pinto. Researchassistance was provided by José de Jesus Trujillo,Manuel Anzueto, and Florinda López. The collabora-tion of Elsa Esquivel Bazán and Sotero QuechulpaMontalvo (Ambio staff), and Nicolás RodríguezLópez and Fernando López Aguilar (Scolel Te’regional técnicos), as well as many farmer partici-pants, was essential.

Stephanie Paladino is an independent, environ-mental anthropologist whose recent work includesassessing the impacts on Maya farmers of participa-tion in a carbon trading project for El Colegio de laFrontera Sur (ECOSUR), Chiapas, Mexico; and ethno-graphic research on the human consequences of the2010 BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico forImpact Assessment, Inc.

Notes

1. International agreements include the InternationalLabor Organization, the Convention on BiologicalDiversity, and the UN Declaration on the Rights ofIndigenous Peoples. Donor organizations such as CAREand Oxfam programs incoporate rights-basedapproaches.

2. See, for instance, “The Declaration of Patihuitz: DividedWe Become Allies of the Government”, April 5, 2011.http://www.towardfreedom.com/americas/2351-declaration-of-patihuitz-in-chiapas-mexico-divided-we-become-allies-of-the-government. Accessed September4, 2011.

3. See “Communique from the Communities of AmadorHernandez Region, Montes Azules, Lacandon Jungle.http://climate-connections.org/2011/09/05/communique-from-the-communities-of-the-amador-hernandez-region-montes-azules-lacandon-jungle/.Accessed April 9, 2011.


4. Transaction costs include “costs of negotiating, contract-ing, implementing, and monitoring a project” and “ofregistering, verifying, and certifying a project” (Jindalet al. 2008:126).

5. For instance, the Climate, Community and BiodiversityStandards. http://www.climate-standards.org.

6. Scolel Te’ also works with a few ejidos to supportcommunal forests through a REDD+ approach, and hasslowly expanded the number of such communal for-estry contracts.

7. For more detailed accounts of project history, see Nelsonand de Jong 2003, Corbera 2005, and Montoya et al.1995.

8. Figures taken from Plan Vivo website, http://www.planvivo.org/projects/registeredprojects/scolel-te-mexico/. Accessed April 9, 2011.

9. Since 1992, most ejidatarios’ individual plots have been“certificated” through the Programa de Certificación deDerechos Ejidales y Titulación de Solares Urbanos(PROCEDE), facilitating their transfer to non-ejidatariosunder certain conditions. According to project staff andfarmer interviews, transfer of enrolled agroforestry plotsto date has been rare, and then only within the sameejido.

10. Ambio staff could not provide percentages of attrition atthe time of my study because of database system limi-tations. Reasons given by participants and staff forattrition are varied and include expectations that moni-toring of the plantations would be lax (conditioned bya history of government payments to farmers thatdemanded little in return); farmer assessments thatcarbon payments were not worth the effort; and dis-agreements within ejidos, farmer organizations, andbetween project and organizations that had little to dowith the merits of the agroforestry plots themselves.

11. Records of landholding size for all project participantswere not available, but the project staff and farmerparticipants agreed that the range found among inter-viewees was representative of the typical participant.

12. See http://www.planvivo.org/projects/registeredprojects/scolel-te-mexico/ and http://www.ambio.org.mx/site/ for more information.

13. See http://www.planvivo.org/projects.

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