Can one of the poorest countries in Africa hold on to its forests?
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This blog explores whether very low-income countries can protect their forests whilst meeting citizens’ expectations for economic development. It was originally published on Reuters
Can one of the poorest countries in Africa hold on to its forests?
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February 24 - Harrison Karnwea is in his late sixties and meant to be retired, but the tall, calm rubber-company executive is at a World Bank Forest and Climate Resilience conference in Monrovia, working the room and putting in long hours to help protect Liberia’s enormous forest wealth.
The small West African country contains the largest extent of tropical forest in the region, and two huge tracts of megadiverse Upper Guinean Forest which are home to chimpanzees and pigmy hippos. It is also one of the poorest countries on the Africa continent after a brutal civil war and an Ebola outbreak that set back its recovery.
The World Bank recently benchmarked Liberia against other neighboring countries and assessed it to be the most environmentally sustainable country in West Africa. Despite extensive forest degradation forest clearance has remained relatively low in the last twenty years compared to its neighbors and it still maintains over four million hectares of primary forest. However, the World Bank also concluded it has the least efficient land use in the region and there is a high risk that as it tries to grow its economy deforestation will accelerate.
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Harrison is a veteran of the Liberia Forest Development Authority, an organization charged with both national park protection, community forestry and logging contracts. He has a healthy skepticism about the forest licensing system having seen a palm company try to manipulate local communities into clearing forest for them.
When he was director of the authority under the previous president Karnwea reversed their permission to develop a plantation and banned the export of conversion timber. He has now become one of the country’s most effective advocates for community-centred forest protection. His logic is simple : the Forest Development Authority can’t protect forests without communities – it’s an organization that has a tiny budget, and a handful of forest rangers in a country with few paved roads and very isolated communities.
His logic is simple: the Forest Development Authority can’t protect forests without communitiesBut he also reminds government ministers and international donors based in the capital Monrovia that most farmers in the forest rich areas deserve support because they are still reliant on slash and burn agriculture, and lack the basic tools to make sedentary, deforestation-free agriculture work.
Middle income countries like Indonesia, and Brazil in the early 2000’s have shown that it is possible to dramatically slow deforestation and break the link to food commodity production. But that success was not only a function of political will. It also required significant resources and strong institutions to implement forest law and to support small farmers seeking to raise their income without clearing new land.
Is there a formula that can work for low-income countries? The Liberian president and former international footballer George Weah thinks so. He has laid out an ambitious climate plan to halve deforestation, create five new protected forest areas and to impose a moratorium on new logging concessions.
Unfortunately, Liberia’s economic incentives are still pointing in the opposite direction; the only income it receives from forests is from logging, and despite the President’s championing of an Africa carbon trading system the country is still many years from being able to meet the international requirements to receive carbon finance.
The irony is that Liberia doesn’t just have to wrestle with long-standing poverty traps but an accountability trap where western partners expect it to meet the exacting requirements of sustainability standards before its communities can benefit from international trade in carbon or sustainable agriculture produce. These standards rely on sophisticated monitoring and verification systems which are very hard to achieve in a country where many public officials don’t receive a minimum wage and there is no national land use mapping.
There are many people in Liberia and in the donor community working patiently to strengthen forest governance and chart a course through this maze to sustainable trade, with most focused on central government management and accountability. It is slow work given its susceptibility to elections and departmental rivalries.
There has also been concerted support for community land rights and land-use planning in the key forest rich landscapes in the South East and the North West of the country, where most of the forest remains.Fortunately, there has also been concerted support for community land rights and land-use planning in the key forest rich landscapes in the South East and the North West of the country, where most of the forest remains. Four landscape initiatives backed by the Norwegian Government and delivered by IDH and its partners has resulted in 80 clans close to the Sapo National Park securing their customary land rights covering nearly half a million hectares, and agreeing a land use plan that would preserve the majority of the primary forest, forest which currently makes up two thirds of their territory but has no formal protection.
However, without benefits to the local population their decision to protect so much forest is unlikely to endure. Very poor communities can and do decide to give up their forest land to industrial agriculture or logging if they see no other way to making a livelihood. Whilst there is the prospect of results-based carbon revenues arriving in the next decade it may not be in time for many forests, which is why IDH is trying to ensure that communities get some small financial rewards for taking steps such as halting slash and burn in high forest areas, patrolling the forest to ensure compliance and restoring old illegal mining sites.
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The lesson from Liberia is that poor communities can be effective champions of forest protection, even when state capacity is very low. However, if they have few options to grow their agricultural income their support is only likely be sustained if they get some financial benefit from doing the right thing.The lesson from Liberia is that poor communities can be effective champions of forest protection, even when state capacity is very low. However, if they have few options to grow their agricultural income their support is only likely be sustained if they get some financial benefit from doing the right thing.
That principle is well understood in business, but in communities struggling to survive there is a danger of making the perfect the enemy of the good. Some faster ways are needed to provide small cash payments to these communities whilst rigorous environmental and carbon results-based frameworks are developed. That may require donors and governments to be a little less risk averse, to remove a few of the layers of complication and ‘countability’, and to work on existing empirical evidence that communities with agency invariably find their own solutions to collective action problems such as deforestation.
Speaking after the World Bank conference Harrison gave a sense of the stakes for Liberia. He reminisced about having forest monkeys come into his village when he was a boy: "Now there are no trees but rubber trees, and no monkeys ... I don’t want Liberia to become part of the Sahel."
