Enhancing forest livelihoods in Uganda to advance REDD+Livelihood-enhancing initiatives in the Mount Elgon and Agoro Agu landscapes are offering innovative, rights-based incentives for communities to engage in REDD+.

Improving livelihoods as a mechanism for successful long-term REDD+ actionFor many forest-dependent communities in Uganda and around the world, REDD+ is about more than sequestering carbon to mitigate climate change. The food, water, medicine, fuel and spiritual value derived from forests are often the primary motivation for communities to protect natural resources and use them in sustainable ways.

Moreover, the ways in which forests and other natural resources are valued vary—even within a single community—according to gender, age or wealth level. In Uganda, women have historically faced barriers to land ownership; landless community members often do not participate in forest management processes; and land conflicts among community elites are on the rise as land value increases. These factors often make it complicated to bring stakeholders together to promote sustainable forest management.

Uganda

No. 11, August 2016

Understanding these dynamics, and how communities rely on forests is a critical first step in setting up equitable REDD+ benefit sharing mechanisms that provide incentives to communities to reduce deforestation and forest degradation.

Engaging forest-dependent communities with the right incentives IUCN is working with a range of partners in Uganda’s Mount Elgon and Agoro Agu landscapes to identify, assess and deploy several livelihood-enhancing options that support sustainable forest management including:

● wood energy production solutions (e.g. firewood, charcoal);

● sustainable production of forest products, both timber (e.g. charcoal, firewood) and non-timber (e.g. honey, fruits, medicinal plants, vegetables);

● erosion protection and management measures;

● afforestation and reforestation; ● agroforestry; ● small-scale irrigation techniques; and ● sustainable management of riverbanks.

To achieve these livelihood-enhancing options, IUCN is supporting three community and landscape-level mechanisms that are providing channels for funding and frameworks for incentivising community engagement.

● In the Mount Elgon landscape in Eastern Uganda, the Community Environment Conservation Fund (CECF) supports villages to identify areas that require restoration interventions. Once these areas are identified, villages develop environmental action plans and the farmers implementing these plans are given access to micro-credits. The CECF provides incentives to reduce over-exploitation and degradation of natural resources by using approaches that define drivers of natural resource degradation, and provide livelihood-enhancing incentives to address these drivers.

● Also in Mount Elgon, a community co-operative carbon offset scheme in Mbale, Manafwa and Bududa districts, managed under ECOTRUST’s Trees for Global Benefit programme (TGB) encourages small-scale farmers to adopt tree planting as a livelihood

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A woman in the Mt. Elgon landscape lifts a basket to reveal planted trees in her garden. Photo: George Akwah / IUCN

strategy supported by income from the sale of carbon sequestration credits. TGB started in 2003 with 33 farmers, and has grown to include more than 4,600 farmers covering 4,887 hectares, with carbon trading now worth US$ 1.2 million annually.

● In the Agoro Agu landscape in Northern Uganda, collaborative forest management (CFM) arrangements promoted by the country’s National Forestry Authority (NFA) offer poor, forest-dependent communities an opportunity to help manage and conserve forest reserves in exchange for agreed-upon benefits, including firewood and medicinal herb collection, beekeeping within the reserve and gathering fruits and vegetables.

Livelihoods are enhanced and groundwork is laid for equitable REDD+ benefit sharing Options for sustainable livelihoods in the Mount Elgon and Agoro Agu landscapes are being deployed at the local level as economic and business incentives for community engagement. These tested models are also informing Uganda’s national REDD+ process and related natural resources management strategies.

Working with the CECF in the Mount Elgon landscape, IUCN and partners are piloting various approaches to enable farmers and households make the most of this micro-credit mechanism. As one of the initial steps, poor communities have started engaging in new livelihood activities including beekeeping and producing non-timber forest products, which can be developed as important sources of cash and non-cash incomes. Communities and landowners have benefited from practical training on simple and affordable small-scale irrigation techniques. A number of households have adopted these techniques, as evidenced by sustained crop yields, even during long dry spells. Erosion protection and management measures (e.g. constructing contour trenches and stabilisingthem with grass and shrubs) have also been promoted to enable landowners maximise crop production.

In terms of stakeholder engagement, IUCN has worked through the CECF to engage community participation by using innovative communication channels, including local leaders as spokespeople. Hosting small, women-only meetings and committees has created a space where women feel more comfortable to share information about their forest use and livelihood needs.

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Communities in the Mt. Elgon landscape are engaging in new livelihood activities as well as enhancing crop irrigation techniques. Photo: George Akwah / IUCN

To promote afforestation and reforestation, the TGB in Mount Elgon has changed its policies so that farmers with less than the required minimum of land for tree planting can now join their land together with other farmers, and apply as a group to access carbon benefits. TGB has also put in place mechanisms to provide benefits for non-participants by involving them in tree nursery operations, accessing free firewood from tree pruning and helping in the sale of tree products (e.g. fruits, timber, charcoal and firewood) harvested from TGB farms. In addition, 10 per cent of income from the sale of carbon credits is used to capitalise a fund that supports community-wide projects.

Using an agroforestry approach, TGB has identified suitable tree species for intercropping within banana and coffee farming to prove shade. This is improving farmers’ crop productivity in their plantations. Farmers have also been able to sell sequestered carbon credits from these agroforestry trees.

Options for producing sustainable forest products are also being deployed through CFM initiatives in the Agoro Agu landscape. For example, beekeeping, which can easily be undertaken within the forest reserve, has been promoted; and access has increased to medicinal plants, firewood, fruit and vegetables. IUCN’s Uganda Country Office has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the NFA to enhance coordination between initiatives to improve community benefit-sharing schemes. This includes piloting the integration of a rights-based approach to enhance equitable benefit sharing from sustainable management of Central Forest Reserves.

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Villagers in the Agoro Agu landscape have more options for producing sustainable forest products. Photo: George Akwah / IUCN

New knowledgeThe efforts of IUCN and partners to enable and deploy livelihood-enhancing options have revealed several overarching lessons that should be applied to future work.

● There is a need to engage stakeholders in the planning of landscape strategies, and in identifying and implementing livelihood options. This is essential to ensure a strong basis on which to build a rights-based approach in a given landscape strategy. Stakeholder involvement provides opportunities for linking forestry activities to other existing value chains, which increases access to markets, capacity building and micro-financing, among other multiple benefits.

● Early engagement with local stakeholders should also include capacity-building and awareness-raising initiatives. A needs assessment should be carried out before any capacity building takes place.

● Stakeholder engagement is stronger where communities make a monetary contribution to the fund.

● Groups that have both men and women in leadership have been more successful in implementing project activities.

● For a rights-based approach to be effectively understood and integrated at the community level, it is important to develop and make available a simple set of tools that stakeholders can apply.

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Livestock in the Agoro Agu landscape. Photo: George Akwah / IUCN

WORLD HEADQUARTERSRue Mauverney 281196 Gland, SwitzerlandTel: +41 22 999 0000Fax: +41 22 999 0002www.iucn.org

Further reading ● IUCN (2015). ‘Seeing carbon as the ‘co-benefit’ in REDD+ benefit sharing’. Gland,

Switzerland: IUCN. https://www.iucn.org/content/seeing-carbon-%E2%80%9Cco-benefit%E2%80%9D-redd-benefit-sharing

● Mt. Elgon Stakeholders Forum: http://mtelgonforum.org/

● Mwayafu, D., and Kimbowa, R. (2011) Benefit sharing in the trees for Global Benefit Initiative-Bushenyi District Uganda. REDD-net Case Study. Uganda http://theredddesk.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdf/2011/tgb_case_study_final.pdf

● Nantongo Kalunda, P. (2016) Trees for Global Benefits: 2015 Plan Vivio Report. Kampala, Uganda: Ecotrust http://www.planvivo.org/docs/TGB-annual-report-2015_public.pdf

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Global Forest and Climate Change Programme

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IUCN and REDD+Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) can improve lives, protect forests and biodiversity, and mitigate climate change. Forests serve as natural storage for carbon, and deforestation is the second leading cause of carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. Furthermore, more than one billion people depend on forests for their livelihoods, and tropical primary forests are particularly high in terrestrial biodiversity.

IUCN’s REDD+ work focuses on the integration of rights-based approaches as the foundation for the design and deployment of landscape, sub-national and national climate change mitigation and forest management strategies. A pro-poor orientation delivers tangible environmental, economic, social and cultural benefits to the poor. In this regard, IUCN works with partners and REDD+ stakeholders in tropical countries to ensure that by 2020, national climate change mitigation policies and initiatives have incorporated and are implementing the tenets of right-based approaches and pro-poor principles.

With support from the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) and Germany’s Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB), IUCN is engaged with partners in Cameroon, Ghana, Guatemala, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru and Uganda to pilot and upscale frameworks and mechanisms that support and deliver rights-based and pro-poor outcomes.