Readings on REDD and Rights & Tenure

In many tropical countries, the majority of forest land is the property of the state. Indigenous People and other forest-dependent communities commonly do not have secure legal tenure of the lands they occupy. REDD represents a potential new stream of income linked to the ownership of forested lands. By conferring new value on forests, REDD could create greater incentives for governments and commercial interests to deny the rights of forest dwellers. It therefore has the potential to exacerbate the issue of legal tenure and increase the vulnerability of forest-dependent communities. Forest carbon rights may be decoupled from forest management or ownership rights, blocking communities' abilities to benefit from carbon programmes. In addition, REDD benefits may be captured by elites, due to inadequate forest governance sys

Conversely though, if well designed and implemented REDD has the potential to improve the livelihoods of forest-dependent people. It could prompt governments to clarify and formalise land tenure, enabling forest communities to benefit from payments and incentives for forest conservation. REDD offers new income streams for investment in services in rural areas, such as health, education and water sanitation, or as direct revenue to forest dwellers themselves.

Whether REDD benefits or disenfranchises indigenous and forest-dependent communities depends on the details of the agreements that are finally negotiated. This may occur on a country by country basis. However, there are a number of international legal instruments relevant to REDD that could underpin a rights-based approach to REDD design and implementation. Most prominently, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires states to grant legal title to indigenous people's customary lands. If the international REDD regime were to be aligned with this declaration, it would guard against the risk that states could expropriate indigenous people's lands in order to capture REDD revenues. Of course, many further issues would remain, for instance around the rights of forest-dependent communities that are not technically considered indigenous.

The readings in this section provide in-depth coverage of the issues around tenure, human rights, and a rights-based approach to REDD.