Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees: The Oversight of Defaunation in REDD+ and Global Forest Governance

Abstract

Over the past decade, countries have strived to develop a global governance structure to halt deforestation and forest degradation, by achieving the readiness requirements for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+). Nonetheless, deforestation continues, and seemingly intact forest areas are being degraded. Furthermore, REDD+ may fail to consider the crucial ecosystem functions of forest fauna including seed dispersal and pollination. Throughout the tropics, forest animal populations are depleted by unsustainable hunting to the extent that many forests are increasingly devoid of larger mammals—a condition referred to as empty forests. Large mammals and birds, who often disperse seeds of larger more carbon-rich tree species, are preferentially targeted by hunters and the first to be depleted. Such defaunation has cascading ecosystem effects, changing forest structure and composition with implications for carbon storage capacity. Failure to address defaunation would therefore be a major oversight in REDD+, compromising its long-term viability. We carried out a desktop study reviewing REDD+ documents and national implementation efforts in Colombia, Ecuador, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Indonesia to assess the extent to which they address hunting and acknowledged the ecosystem functions of fauna. We also assessed sub-national REDD+ projects to determine whether they recognized hunting and if and how they incorporated hunting management and wildlife monitoring at the project level. Moreover, we assessed to what extent sub-national REDD+ projects addressed the long-term impacts of the sustainability of hunting on forest ecosystem function including carbon storage. We found that hunting, the risk of defaunation, and its effects have been ignored in the REDD+ policy process at both the international and national levels. At the project level, we found some reference to hunting and the risks posed by the loss of forest fauna, albeit only addressed superficially. Our results underline the fact that forest ecosystems are being reduced to their carbon content and that, despite the rhetoric of biodiversity co-benefits, fauna is not treated as a functional component of forests. This neglect threatens to undermine forest ecosystem function and service delivery as well as long-term forest carbon assimilation capacity and hence, ultimately, to compromise REDD+ objectives.

Unearthing the myths of global sustainable forest governance

“…Within REDD+, technical and bureaucratic views of forests have become more prominent, and most of the reporting, measuring and verification (MRV) methods are cases in point. Current MRV methods predominantly focus on units of carbon stored or hectares of tree cover preserved, which risks side-lining local peoples’ rights to access and use of forest products, but these are also weak indicators of the ecological quality of a forest, which still constitutes a viable habitat for forest fauna (Krause & Nielsen, 2019).…”

Harmony with Nature: towards a new deep legal pluralism

“…It underpins the rationale for the UN-REDD Programme and UN-REDDþ, a results-based payments system of carbon credits for developing countries created in 2008. This technical approach to forest management illustrates what Delabre et al identify as a "political lock-in," where the socio-ecological and spiritual importance of forests to humans is not sufficiently recognised (Delabre et al 2020; see also Krause and Nielsen 2019).…”

How the loss of forest fauna undermines the achievement of the SDGs

“…Both deforestation and forest degradation have reduced the extent and quality of tropical forest habitats (Alroy 2017 ). However, while deforestation and forest degradation have received considerable political attention (UNFCCC 2016 ), a third “de”—defaunation, a term that refers to the disappearance of fauna as a result of anthropogenic drivers such as hunting and habitat alteration (Dirzo et al 2014 )—has been largely overlooked within forest conservation policies and forest protection mechanisms such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), and is routinely left out of forest governance strategies (Krause and Nielsen 2019 ). This omission is detrimental insofar as defaunation has significant negative effects on tropical forest ecosystems, which in turn impacts biodiversity in these systems, as well as numerous socio-economic and cultural impacts that affect human well being.…”