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

Community guidelines for accessing forestry voluntary carbon markets
2.6.1 Environmental benefits
Losing forests means losing environmental services. A damaged forest
will not be able to support the following essential functions:
• Watershed protection and improved water quality;
• Biodiversity conservation;
• Nutrient cycling;
• Soil conservation and stabilization;
• Reducing the risk of natural disasters;
• Protecting coastal areas; and
• Creating habitats for wildlife and plants.
Climate change will affect many of these functions with potentially
devastating impacts on the environment, and the lives and livelihoods
of people who depend on forests.
All of these ecosystem functions are important for a wide range of
people, not just to those who manage the forests that provide them.
In recognition of this, interest in Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES)
is growing. PES schemes depend on finding people or organizations
that are willing to pay, on a regular basis, for receiving these services.
It is also challenging for PES schemes to succeed in delivering financial
benefits to (the right) local forest managers and communities. The
forestry VCM is essentially a form of PES – in which the ecosystem
service is climate change mitigation – and the experiences of existing
PES schemes hold valuable lessons for the forestry VCM. In the not too
distant future it may become possible to ‘bundle’ several ecosystem and
environmental services together (such as climate change mitigation,
biodiversity conservation and watershed management, for example)
where appropriate. This would also reduce the risk of double accounting
– where two or more PES schemes overlap on the same area.
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