BIO-CULTURAL COMMUNITY PROTOCOLS - Portal do Professor

PART II / CHAPTER 4
4.1 Bio-cultural and Legal Empowerment
International environmental laws and frameworks are
inaccessible to many forest-dependent communities.
Thus, ILCs require time and information to consider their
options within their local contexts before they can be
expected to make informed decisions within novel legal
and policy frameworks. REDD must support a process that
enables ILCs to reflect upon the inter-linkages and mutually
reinforcing relationships between the forests and their
culture, spirituality and customary laws, and to identify the
bio-cultural foundations of their ways of life in a format
accessible to other REDD stakeholders. ILCs also require
information about REDD and their forest-related rights in
order to better understand the options they have as
communities living in areas that may be affected by
REDD-related policy measures and projects. This will assist
them in clarifying several things for other REDD stakeholders,
including the following: the community’s membership and
traditional authority and territory; their customary laws relating
to sustainable forest use and management; their rights under
international and national law; circumstances under which
they would be required to provide FPIC; and values that would
inform any decisions taken as part of their FPIC. These issues
are discussed in more detail below.
4.2 Mapping Traditional Territories
An important element of a REDD community protocol
would likely be a mapping exercise through which the
community members would identify their traditional
territories and the forest resources they depend on using
modern technologies such as geographic information
systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS). The use
of mapping to help communities articulate their bio-cultural
landscapes can be an empowering process. 18
The
documentation of traditional land uses can help formalize this
information in a format accessible to Western science
and enable ILCs to disseminate it to other REDD stakeholders.
Mapping exercises introduce communities to the use of
modern technologies that could subsequently enable their
participation in the monitoring, reporting and verification
activities that underpin REDD.
BIO-CULTURAL COMMUNITY PROTOCOLS AND REDD
While this will not necessarily solve the problems related to
resource tenure identified above, it may serve as a basis for
a deeper level of ILC participation, inter-stakeholder
communication and engagement.
4.3 Understanding What Conserves Forests
The relationship between ILCs and the forests they live in is
dynamic, and in many cases, their local TK offers great
insight into how to ensure the forest’s conservation.
By articulating aspects of their culture such as bio-spirituality
and customary laws and practices that have helped conserve
the forests, ILCs are able to directly refer to and call upon
the international and national laws intended to support
their traditional ways of life. A REDD community protocol
can be used to express this relationship and examine the
forests within a greater ecological and bio-cultural context,
thus preventing the disembodiment of carbon.
4.4 Free, Prior and Informed Consent
Only legally empowered ILCs can make informed decisions
about how to respond to important decisions relating to the
granting of rights over the forests in which they live.
The empowerment process should include information
about international laws pertaining to forests, indigenous
peoples and other frameworks that support ILCs such as the
Convention on Biological Diversity. Rather than merely
focusing on REDD, communities should gain the capacity
to comprehend how various aspects of their lives are
regulated by a number of laws and to draw on those
most relevant to supporting their endogenous plans
for development.
Responding directly to REDD, communities can set out for
other stakeholders their views on the mechanism and assert
their rights to culturally appropriate consultations towards
their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) to any REDDrelated
policy measures or projects. They can also go beyond
merely stating that they do or do not want their traditional
territory to be part of a REDD project by defining specific
project elements to be included. ILCs can also identify the
values by which they will assess any projects in order to further
clarify their rights and priorities to other stakeholders.
18. See, for example, the Squamish Nation Land Use Plan in British Columbia, Canada, in which indigenous community members used a map to articulate their vision for
their traditional territories. Available at: http://www.squamish.net/aboutus/xaytemixw.htm. Accessed 10 September 2009.
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