A fundamental component of initiatives to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+); will be the development of robust and cost-effective measuring, reporting, and verification (MRV) instruments for national forest monitoring and safeguard information systems. It is increasingly recognized that community-based monitoring (CBM) offers a positive model for greater participation and engagement of indigenous and forest-dependent communities within a REDD+ framework. Yet plans for CBM within REDD+ MRV systems remain limited, and there are currently relatively few concrete examples of CBM informing national forest monitoring systems. This paper outlines findings from a community MRV project with Amerindian communities in the North Rupununi, Guyana; and demonstrates that a CBM approach can enable key REDD+ requirements: in understanding local deforestation drivers and measuring carbon stocks; and for providing information on safeguards through social and environmental assessments. In addition, the authors discuss community capacity-building on smartphone technology for monitoring as a challenging yet viable pathway for scaling the use and adoption of indigenous knowledge and local skills for REDD+ programs.
Background: It is essential that systems for measuring changes in carbon stocks for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) projects are accurate, reliable and lowcost. Widely used systems involving classifying optical satellite data can underestimate degradation, and by classifying the landscape ignore the natural heterogeneity of biomass. Aims: To assess the ability of repeat L-band radar to detect areas of small increases or decreases in aboveground biomass (AGB) across a Miombo woodland landscape. Methods: ALOS PALSAR L-band cross-polarised (HV) radar data from 2007 and 2009 were used to create maps of AGB, calibrated using 58 field plots. The change in AGB was assessed for land parcels with known landcover histories: (i) 500 ha of new agroforestry; (ii) 9500 ha of protected (REDD) areas; and (iii) 23 ha of land where degradation occurred between 2007 and 2009. Results: Increases in AGB were detected in both the agroforestry and REDD areas (0.4 and 1.1 Mg C ha-1 year-1 respectively); while the degraded areas showed a decrease of 3 Mg C ha-1 year-1. Conclusions: PALSAR data can be used to detect losses and gains in AGB in woodland ecosystems. However further work is needed to precisely quantify the uncertainties in the change estimates, and the extent of false-positive and false-negative change detections that would result from using such a system.
This book should not be read as a book about water, or at least, not only about water. Rather . water provides an excellent lense through which some of the contradictory and often unequal dynamics that shape social interactions can be interpreted and explained.
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