Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership (KFCP) Design ...

The KFCP will identify potential conflict and develop means to avoid or mitigate it as part of the
village engagement process. Implementation partners will spend months working with communities to
understand their land use and land ownership patterns. This participatory process is expected to bring
latent disputes to light and the village workers will seek to defuse the basis of the conflict. The KFCP
can help communities to avoid conflicts with government agencies and outsiders by ensuring
objectivity and transparency in negotiations over land and incentive/carbon payments. The livelihood
option design and implementation process will include conflict-related selection criteria.
Village Engagement
Gaining the support of all segments of communities in the demonstration site is a precondition for
emissions reduction. Gaining their trust and support will take time, effort, and the ability to offer real
incentives. These communities are generally mistrustful of outside interventions after their very
negative MRP experience and are somewhat jaded from subsequent experience with programs that
offered assistance in forms that were not profitable or sustainable. Rates of poverty are high in these
communities and local economies have suffered from the closure of local sawmills, the fall in the
price of latex, and the increase in the price of rice. Climate change is a remote threat compared with
livelihood threats that are apparent and pressing. Potential financial benefits from carbon credits seem
remote, if the concept is understood at all. An effective and consistent REDD communications
message is essential.
A threshold requirement for KFCP success with local people is the ability to replace lost income from
limitations on use of forest resources, coupled with some form of tenure over village lands. In
providing incentives, care must be taken not to create an economic pull effect by the appearance of a
windfall—there is evidence of out-migration from the area and it would be counterproductive to
reverse that trend. Care will be required to direct benefits to the people who deserve and need them
most, while avoiding capture of benefits by village elites, a common problem in rural development.
The village engagement process must observe the following principles:
Be participatory to ensure local ownership;
Be gender biased and ensure equal access to processes and resources for women and men, in
particular those of marginalized groups;
Provide the opportunity for free and informed consent;
Be flexible and adaptive;
Follow sound development principles, such as ensuring that livelihood alternatives are
financially and socially feasible, gender sensitive, and sustainable (see livelihood standards in
Attachment 1);
Ensure that alternative livelihoods are compatible with REDD objectives;
Target groups most responsible for emissions-increasing practices for behaviour change
and offer real income alternatives;
Ensure that interventions do not make people worse off if REDD is not accepted
internationally—do no harm!
Do not exacerbate gender and socially based disparities (see Section 5.1 for a discussion
of gender and social inequality issues in the KFCP); and
Ensure village planning is done within the GoI-mandated village-level planning process
(Musrenbang Desa) but ensure that the process leads to improved access for women to
development outcomes. These plans provide a means to integrate village plans into higher
levels of spatial planning, make land use compatible with REDD, and provide a basis for
validating land tenure claims.
Reducing Peat Swamp Forest Deforestation and Degradation – Peat Rehabilitation and Hydrologic
Rehabilitation
To reduce deforestation and further degradation of the peat swamp forests, it is important to adopt the
whole-of-dome approach as the protection strategy because the condition of the forests on the dome
are influenced by what happens downstream of the particular patch of forest. An intact patch of forest
26 KALIMANTAN FORESTS AND CLIMATE PARTNERSHIP (KFCP) DESIGN DOCUMENT