There is no one-size-fits-all way to successfully implement forest landscape restoration (FLR). Complex socio-ecological systems present challenges and opportunities that can best be met with a systematic framework for designing, planning, steering, and monitoring FLR projects to meet diverse needs. Project cycle management is an iterative, adaptive, hierarchical framework with recurring consultations among stakeholders that can enhance the likelihood of FLR success.

The ability of the national, subnational and regional carbon markets to maintain a healthy demandsupply balance, and the resulting carbon price stability, at a time when the mandatory Kyoto carbon market has suffered a fatal supply overhang and prolonged price collapse, has focussed attention on the importance of these markets in attracting private investments in climate change mitigation. This paper argues that while all carbon markets have the potential of enhancing profitability and liquidity of private investments in forestry activities and reducing risks, the domestic markets are more likely to succeed where the Kyoto market failed as the controlling national or sub-national governments would have the requisite powers to set, and enforce, adequate caps on emissions and reasonable levels of social and ecological safeguards within their geographies and also respond to crisis that often arise in such markets. Lack of fungibility of carbon credits between these markets may not always prove a disability as when it insulates one market from the spiralling effects of the crises elsewhere due to falling prices and credibility issues. The domestic carbon markets would also have the advantage of low transaction costs and quick and more effective dispute settlement mechanisms on account of their simpler regulatory regimes, uniform legal and business environment and similar work culture across their geographical range. And these domestic markets can also serve smaller neighbouring countries which may not be able to establish their own for logistical reasons by permitting transactions in REDD+ credits generated there through negotiated agreements on monitoring, reporting and verification of both the processes and the outcomes of REDD+ activities.

By the end of Cancun Climate Conference of 2010, the agreements on REDD+ were already adequate for implementation with clear goals, agreement on methodological guidance and social and environmental safeguards, access to technology for monitoring, and a financial commitment of $3.5 billion to kick-start the task. But even after 4 years the progress has been confined to a few pilots, and very small part of the committed finances have been utilized. The ongoing SBSTA deliberations on the Safeguard Information System (SIS) suggests that excessive emphasis over a particular way of monitoring implementation of social and environmental safeguards by some developed territories like European Union, and most accredited Observers, is at least partly responsible for the inertia into which REDD+ has fallen. While there is no evidence to link the demand for fool proof implementation of safeguards with reluctance to part with the committed finances by developed countries, this is certainly the undesirable outcome and it is important to devise a way out of this impasse. At the conceptual level it is difficult to disagree with these demand for perfect safeguards except that the REDD+ is not to be implemented in EU where most land related rights are recorded and recognized and the Courts are capable of deciding expeditiously to the satisfaction of all which is not the case in many REDD+ eligible countries. The paper proposes that setting up watertight safeguards is not the most appropriate response to the possibility of flouting of safeguards due to unacceptable trade-offs in terms of costs and lost opportunities. Instead the quest for perfect safeguards as a pre-condition to begin REDD+ activities should be replaced by adequate safeguards, appropriate to national circumstances, that are improved rapidly as REDD+ implementation proceeds. This, combined with swift punishment for wrongdoings, would reduce the possibility for mischief. The recognition of practical limits placed by national circumstances, along with the need for rapid improvement of these circumstances, should be the centrepiece of a dynamic and effective REDD+ strategy and the SIS should be designed accordingly.

A host of economic, political, social, ecological, religious and aesthetic reasons have anchored forest transitions across the world. Transition results from the relative strengths of causes favoring forest losses and gains and is very context specific. Buddhist emphasis on sacredness of all life forms provided the early emphasis on protection of forests in India. Plague caused the first transition in France wiping out more than one third of its population. The colonization of Americas, and destruction of its forests, provided the second large phase of transition in Europe. Building on earlier works the authors propose that the transitions are led by a combination of one or more of the following factors, namely, acute crisis of availability of forest goods and services, incentives for abandonment of marginal croplands, enhanced agricultural productivity, massive urbanization, globalization, demand displacement, agroforestry intensification, appropriate forest policies, aesthetics, enhanced public awareness and legal imperatives. Popular discourse on REDD places high emphasis on poverty eradication, good governance, low corruption, restoration of land and human rights of indigenous people. These are goals of highest values worthy of being pursued vigorously but there is not much evidence that their successful pursuit would result in reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

Limiting warming to 2°C is critical for avoiding dangerous consequences and adaptive actions are needed to limit damage from climatic changes. There is sharp imbalance in investments in mitigation and adaptation, with the latter attracting barely 5% of the allocated funds. Adaptation is limited not only by restricted access to money and technology, but also by endogenous causes related to willingness to invest in the future, and attitude to risk taking and integration of technology. Models based on paleoecological evidence of early Holocene floral migration can be used for initiating intelligent adaptive actions. Developed countries should concentrate on transformational changes using the latest technologies through their mitigation efforts, rather than crowd out the developing countries from low-cost and low-technology mitigation opportunities in the forestry sector. Confluence of adaptation with mitigation in tropical forests is a challenge yet a possibility, and the UNFCCC mechanisms should actively encourage this overlap.

ADVERTISEMENT RETURN TO ISSUEPREVViewpointNEXTThe REDD Market Should Not End Up a Subprime House of Cards: Introducing a New REDD Architecture for Environmental IntegrityPromode Kant and Shuirong Wu*View Author Information Institute of Green Economy, C-312, Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024, India Research Institute of Forestry Policy and Information,Chinese Academy of Forestry, Wanshoushan, Haidian District, Beijing 100091, ChinaPhone: +86-10-62888322; e-mail: [email protected]Cite this: Environ. Sci. Technol. 2011, 45, 19, 8176–8177Publication Date (Web):September 6, 2011Publication History Received15 August 2011Accepted18 August 2011Revised18 August 2011Published online6 September 2011Published inissue 1 October 2011https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es202841bhttps://doi.org/10.1021/es202841bnewsACS PublicationsCopyright © 2011 American Chemical Society. This publication is available under these Terms of Use. Request reuse permissions This publication is free to access through this site. Learn MoreArticle Views960Altmetric-Citations1LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InRedditEmail PDF (1016 KB) Get e-AlertscloseSUBJECTS:Degradation Get e-Alerts

ADVERTISEMENT RETURN TO ISSUEPREVViewpointNEXTThe Extraordinary Collapse of Jatropha as a Global BiofuelPromode Kant and Shuirong Wu*View Author Information Institute of Green Economy, C-312, Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024, India Chinese Academy of Forestry, Wanshoushan, Haidian District, Beijing 100091, ChinaPhone: +86-10-62888322; e-mail: [email protected]Cite this: Environ. Sci. Technol. 2011, 45, 17, 7114–7115Publication Date (Web):August 2, 2011Publication History Received5 July 2011Accepted15 July 2011Published online2 August 2011Published inissue 1 September 2011https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es201943vhttps://doi.org/10.1021/es201943vnewsACS PublicationsCopyright © 2011 American Chemical Society. This publication is available under these Terms of Use. Request reuse permissions This publication is free to access through this site. Learn MoreArticle Views15001Altmetric-Citations99LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InRedditEmail PDF (1 MB) Get e-AlertscloseSUBJECTS:Genetics,Lipids,Moisture,Plants,Soils Get e-Alerts

This case study presents a forest rehabilitation initiative in the tropical dry forests in northwestern India. This project is undertaken by an Indian Non Government Organisation (NGO), the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), in cooperation with the Forest Department and aims at improving the livelihood of tribal communities. The framework of the project is the Joint Forest Management (JFM) Programme in which forest regeneration and protection is managed jointly by government and people. Various measures are being implemented ranging from actual field work to improving forest stocking and grass vegetation to institutional reorganisation aimed at enhanced access to resources, self-governance and benefit sharing between communities and the government. The study highlights an indirect approach for assessing forest degradation, identification of forest rehabilitation objectives and targets and also illustrates lessons learnt for future forest rehabilitation in dry land forests, particularly with regard to degradation assessment, rehabilitation objectives and investments to bring about social changes required for sustaining the benefits of forest rehabilitation.

The cumulative area under shifting cultivation in the north eastern India is estimated to be 1.73 million ha and the extent of encroachment on forest lands in the Brahmputra valley alone is about 0.26 million ha. There are possibilities of reforestation over 0.6 million ha of lands under shifting cultivation and 0.1 million ha of encroached forest lands through the willing participation of the traditional and current tribal users of these lands provided the economic returns are quick, steady and substantial. Raising tree plantations in these lands for carbon sequestration can result in generating $43.5 million (about Rs 2170 millions) worth of carbon credits annually in addition to the value of forest products at the time of final harvesting. Reforestation under the clean development mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol can, therefore, be an attractive economic opportunity for the region.

The cost of carbon sequestration under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol is far higher than the normal afforestation costs as it includes the opportunity cost of the land and the costs of project formulation, regeneration, maintenance, monitoring, measuremcnt, verification, baseline construction, leakage accounting, accessing markets and the costs incurred in ensuring additionality, biodiversity conservation and the credibility of the certification system. For purposes of reforestation of degraded forests the ecosystem productivity of the bio.geographic zones in which these forests lie also influences the costs to a very high degree. In India the land rentals alone exceed the current tentative price range of carbon. The withdrawal of the USA from the Kyoto Protocol, the very real possibility of trade in 'hot air' and the limitations on the use of carbon credits earned through carbon sequestration under the CDM would make a demand induced price rise for carbonoeredits unlikely. Also, demand for higher volumes of carbon sequestered in forests may also drive the costs up, as greater requirement for land would enbance its rental, notwithstanding the advantages of the economy of scale. The high transaction costs, arising out of the stringent Kyoto conditionalities and monitoring quality expected of the CDM projects, present another formidable barrier to the profitability of such sequestration projects.

Forests have a significant potential of alleviating poverty in the rural areas. The joint forest management (JFM), which is a focused approach to exploit this potential, has achieved only modest success in meeting this objective. This is because the JFM has been confined to NTFP, small timber and firewood that are either in the non-monetized sector of the economy or are restricted to raw material collection with little value addition thus restricting their contribution to income enhancement. There is a possibility of expanding the scope of JFM to include in its fold environmental goods and services like carbon sequestration, replacement of fossil fuel, biodiversity conservation, soil and water conservation and eco-tourism in addition to the conventional forestry products with the participants sharing the economic values attached to these goods and services that they help produce. This would require a whole range of research and development activities necessary to set up the necessary framework. Research is needed on tree selection and rotation, to place economic values on various grades of these goods and services, modes of transfer of economic values to the communities involved in JFM, its apportioning between the constituents of the communities and the commitments from the communities in return. Research is also needed for the development of best forestry practices for different bio-geographic zones and evolving appropriate working plan prescriptions to produce suitable combinations of the targeted environmental goods and services for optimizing economic returns in ecologically sustainable manner. The possibilities of linking these services to the international protocols in the field of conservation of natural resources, global warming, intellectual property rights and world trade have to be explored to take advantage of flow of technology and money from North to South as also ways of setting up equitable market systems for these goods and services.