Why Tenure is Key to Fulfilling Climate and Ethical Goals in REDD +

• REDD+ is being established in places where tenure contestation and conflict are common. • Project proponents must pay prior attention to tenure for five reasons: » To create a performance-based reward incentive » To ensure REDD+ interventions do not unduly harm existing rights and livelihoods » To enable and motivate forest custodianship (apart from a performance-based reward) » To provide a legal basis for the exclusion of external claimants » To integrate forest protection effectively into national land-use planning • Considerable challenges in establishing a tenure foundation for REDD+ have emerged. • Policy change on tenure is necessary if REDD+ is to meet its objectives.


REDD+ Safeguards Brief
Organizations establishing REDD+ on the ground ("proponents") must identify the legal local holders of the right to the future stream of REDD+ rewards (e.g. through the sale of forest carbon offset credits).These right holders will bear responsibility for assuring that local forests are kept standing and/or restored.This formal linkage of rights and responsibility is the key performance-based mechanism in REDD+ (Sunderlin et al. 2014a).
As in Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs), REDD+ aims to restrict access to and conversion of a portion of local forests in exchange for livelihood benefits.

Many proponents have not succeeded in establishing a secure tenure foundation for REDD+ A binding global climate change agreement through the UNFCCC would provide a strong motivation for making progress on tenure
Forest tenure arrangements at the landscape level have tended to favor the interests of actors that convert forests to non-forest uses.These arrangements reflect a long legacy of providing privileged access to forest land and resources to powerful actors such as logging, agro-industrial, livestock and mining companies, and of fulfilling state imperatives for economic and infrastructural development (Sunderlin 2011).It is necessary to review and revise these arrangements for reasons of forest conservation, climate change mitigation and equity.Various countries are beginning to address the destructive environmental consequences of this legacy.Examples are Brazil's Forest Code (Tollefson 2011) andRural Environmental Registry (Duchelle et al. 2014), and Indonesia's One Map Policy (UKP4 2013) and the Indonesia Forest Moratorium (Murdiyarso et al. 2011).
CIFOR's research shows that tenure is the number one challenge for proponents, even more so than the (currently) disadvantageous economics of REDD+ (Sunderlin et al. 2014b).This stands to reason not just because proponents are on-site witnesses to the legacy of forest tenure in tropical countries, but also because they are aware of the five key reasons for addressing tenure listed above.The motivations of proponents for addressing tenure are instrumental (means to an end) in the sense that they can only fulfill their environmental objectives if they do so, and also ethical (an end in itself ).
Nevertheless, our research has shown that proponents in many cases have not yet succeeded in establishing a secure tenure foundation for REDD+ (Larson et al. 2012(Larson et al. , 2013;;Sunderlin et al. 2014a;Sills et al. 2014).Among the major obstacles to progress are the persistent power of political and economic interests (both in the private sector and in government) that are tied to the conversion of forests and non-forest uses (Larson et al. 2012).This is even the case in Brazil, where tenure insecurity is pervasive even though proponents can collaborate directly with government on tenure regularization (Duchelle et al. 2014).
Establishing a clear and secure tenure foundation is essential not just for fulfilling the climate change mitigation goals of REDD+, but also, and just as importantly, for protecting the livelihoods and rights of its stakeholders.Although there has been notable progress toward creating this foundation, much remains to be done.
A binding global climate change agreement through the UNFCCC would provide a strong motivation for making progress on tenure.But given the possibility that such an agreement will not be reached soon, and given the long lead time needed for resolving forest tenure issues, it is imperative that countries continue and invigorate current efforts.Such efforts should involve: • forest tenure reform such as the kind being undertaken in Indonesia2 • linkage of forest tenure and environmental compliance mechanisms such as in Brazil • institutionalization of participatory mapping in national land-use decision making • resolution of longstanding contestation between customary and statutory forest land claims • review of existing and planned industrial forest land concessions in light of concurrent plans for forest conservation, afforestation, reforestation, and REDD+ • clarification of rights to forest carbon.