Welcome Speech

By Dr. Yam Malla, Executive Director

RECOFTC – The Center for People and Forests

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. I am honored to stand here today to welcome you all to the First Regional Forum for People and Forests.

Over the coming three days, we will be discussing important issues that affect the lives, and livelihoods of millions of poor people in the Asia-Pacific region. A brief look at the program shows that most presenters and panels will focus on experience gained in rewarding local people for providing environmental services, with a particular focus on climate change mitigation.

I openly admit that I find it hard to keep up with the latest developments in climate change mitigation and how it relates to forests and forestry. From RED (with one “D”), we have moved to the “double-D”, which has now progressed to REDD-plus. I will leave it to others to sort out the differences of the various REDD-mechanisms.

Instead, I intend to take you on a brief journey to Nepal to illustrate what we have learned from community forestry.

In Nepal, as well as in many other countries in both the developed and the developing world, local farmers have managed their forests for centuries as part of their overall livelihoods strategy. As farming areas expanded the pressure on forests increased. While forests were affected to some extent, they still remained part of the local landscape.

The close relationship between local people and their forests came to an abrupt end in 1957, when forests were nationalized. In other words, villagers lost the rights to a resource that they believed to be theirs. The result of this change in tenure was disastrous. Forests became an open access resource and deforestation and forest degradation became widespread. Drastic action was needed.

A 1975 conference concluded that the Department of Forests had been ignoring the forests of Nepal’s middle-hills. The Department began to look for ways to address the issue without overextending its already meager budget. The solution, openly supported by the donor community, was “community forestry”. In 1989, the Government of Nepal amended its national forest policy, making it possible to hand over forests to communities, or more specifically to forest user groups.

By March this year, 1.25 million hectares of forest are being managed by close to 14,500 forest user groups. 35 percent of Nepal’s forests are thus in the hands of 33 percent of Nepal’s total population. While challenges remain, there’s no doubt that community forestry has made significant contributions to rural livelihoods.

I have purposefully told you that forests were handed over to local communities. This is not entirely correct. As you can see in this 1968 photograph, what were termed forests were in fact in many cases forestlands with little tree cover. This is no different to what we find in many countries in our region where local people are being mobilized to rehabilitate degraded forestlands. Forestlands that still carry good-quality forests often remain in the hands of the state.

So what can local communities actually do with such denuded areas? Most of them are poor. They have an urgent need to benefit from the forests, but lack the time and resources to embark on what looks to be a massive rehabilitation project.

But as we can see here, in Nepal they did manage to turn scrubland into forests. Today, forest user groups generate more than 11 million US dollars annually. This amount, ladies and gentlemen, is greater than the total revenue that the Department of Forests generates from government managed forest land.

Here in these two pictures you can see not only a massive increase in forest, but also an increase in houses and people. While conventional wisdom tells us that population pressure leads to deforestation, the opposite has happened in many places in Nepal.

This success can be attributed to millions of poor local people, supported by many non-government organizations, donor-funded projects and the Department of Forest. But without this level of support, what we see today in Nepal would simply not have been possible. Forests would not contribute to the same extent to the livelihoods of local people and sustainable development in the rural areas. Forest user groups would be in a much weaker position to grow trees, rehabilitate forests and ultimately manage them sustainably.

Forest user groups are aware that they are not only producing important forest products. They also provide a range of environmental services. Their efforts contribute to the regulation of water flows and biodiversity conservation. And here I come to the theme of our conference, they can perhaps unknowingly, also fix carbon in their forests and forest soils. From the pictures I’ve shown you it’s clear that communities can fix carbon.

Support to community forestry remains vital. Yet, we cannot expect bilateral and multilateral donors to continue to provide financial assistance indefinitely. Instead, might forest carbon financing offer a real opportunity to sustain and expand the achievements made over the last 30 years?

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that you recognize the contributions local people can make to forests and forestry. They, like us, need ways to make a decent living. Underestimating and indeed undervaluing their efforts, their knowledge and their skills will make it impossible to turn the opportunities carbon financing might offer into reality.

I do not want to downplay the risks involved in any of the currently discussed financing schemes. I am fully aware that a number of constraints have to be overcome before forest destruction can be reduced and perhaps even reversed. Forest carbon financing is not a silver bullet, nor a panacea to the problems that confront us. However, I believe it can only be effective if we engage local people, strengthen their rights, improve systems of governance and distribute benefits more equitably. Above all we must strive to market carbon that is socially and ethically just.

I hope that our deliberations over the next three days will recognize the contributions community forestry has and will continue to make to forest management all over our region.

However, success is not uniform and many challenges remain. Let us focus on the successes in our discussions and seek for ways to engage local people more effectively in climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. Unless we do so there is a real risk that our efforts will fail.

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is my great honour to once again welcome you all to the First Regional Forum on People and Forests. I sincerely hope that you leave this room inspired, and that this meeting will pave the way for new ways of financing our forests, which will make a real and lasting difference to the forest dependent people in our region, to the health of our forests, and ultimately for the good of us all.

Thank you.