Community guidelines for accessing forestry voluntary carbon ... - FAO

Chapter 1: Forests and climate change
So, local forest managers and forest users can have a significant impact
on their local environment. Their actions can help to address climate
change by:
• Locking up more carbon in the forest (enhancing the sink
capacity);
• Preventing GHG emissions from the forest (avoiding
degradation); and
• Ensuring that forests continue to provide the environmental
services necessary for forest-dependent communities to
sustain their livelihoods and their adaptive capacity.
There are three broad ways in which the forestry sector can help to
mitigate climate change:
1. Planting: through afforestation or reforestation;
2. Improving forest management: thus reducing degradation of
existing forests; and
3. Avoiding deforestation: preventing the conversion of forests
to other land uses.
See section 2.4 for more details and case studies on these approaches.
All of them can potentially have additional positive environmental and
socio-economic benefits (or co-benefits), for instance by increasing
biodiversity or the income-generating capacity of a community, but the
nature and extent of these co-benefits depend on how the activities are
implemented, as discussed in section 2.3.
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