GIVE tropical forests back to the people who live in them 鈥� and the trees will soak up your carbon for you. Above all, keep the forests out of the hands of government. So concludes a study that has tracked the fate of 80 forests worldwide over 15 years.
Most tropical forests 鈥� from Himalayan hill forests to the Madagascan jungle 鈥� are controlled by local and national governments. Forest communities own and manage little more than a tenth. They have a reputation for trashing their trees 鈥� cutting them for timber or burning them to clear land for farming. In reality the opposite is true, according to at Urbana-Champaign.
In the first study of its kind, Chhatre and in Ann Arbor compared forest ownership with data on carbon sequestration, which is estimated from the size and number of trees in a forest. Hectare-for-hectare, they found that tropical forest under local management stored more carbon than government-owned forests. There are exceptions, says Chhatre, 鈥渂ut our findings show that we can increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of forests from governments to communities鈥�.
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One reason may be that locals protect forests best if they own them, because they have a long-term interest in ensuring the forests鈥� survival. While governments, whatever their intentions, usually license destructive logging, or preside over a free-for-all in which everyone grabs what they can because nobody believes the forest will last (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
The authors suggest that locals would also make a better job of managing common pastures, coastal fisheries and water supplies. They argue that their findings contradict a long-standing environmental idea, called the 鈥渢ragedy of the commons鈥�, which says that natural resources left to communal control get trashed. In fact, says Agrawal, 鈥渃ommunities are perfectly capable of managing their resources sustainably鈥�.
The research calls into question UN plans to pay governments to protect forests. The climate change meeting in Copenhagen in December is likely to agree on a formula for a programme called . 鈥淭here is a real fear that REDD will lead to dispossession of local communities [as] governments stake their claim on emissions reduction credits,鈥� says Chhatre.
Simon Counsell of the is not surprised by the findings. 鈥淚n Brazil and elsewhere, we know the most enduring forests are in indigenous reserves, like that run by the Kayapo in the eastern Amazon 鈥� the largest protected forest in the world.鈥�