Cambodia’s REDD+ Pilot Projects Contribute to Settlement of Forest Disputes

Credit: www.un-redd.org

In January, the UN-REDD National Programme in Cambodia hosted a field mission and associated meetings, bringing together a wide range of stakeholders, to identify preliminary options on how to strengthen consensus building mechanisms for forest disputes, based on international best practices and observations at  the two REDD+ pilot project sites. Participants included international experts in conflict resolution and stakeholder engagement, community forest network members, civil society and indigenous peoples representatives, as well as representatives from the provincial and national governments.The field mission and associated meetings have resulted in the assessment of the types of drivers of deforestation and forest degradation likely to lead to conflicts, identification of potential consensus building mechanisms and ways to

strengthen them to prevent and resolve forest sector disputes/grievances; and a preliminary analysis of relationships among different state and non-state actors.  These results will be used as inputs in designing an effective consensus building and conflict resolution system for REDD+ in Cambodia.

Read full article: http://www.un-redd.org/Newsletter36/Cambodias_REDD_Pilot_Projects/tabid/106079/Default.aspx

Role of remote sensing and community forestry to manage forests for the effective implementation of REDD+ mechanism: a case study on Cambodia

By Ram Avtar, Haruo Sawada and Pankaj Kumar

Environment, Development and Sustainability (March 2013)

In this study, we have shown the importance of remote sensing applications and community forestry for forest management, discussed as a case study on Cambodian forest management. Curbing deforestation is necessary for the effective implementation of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forests Degradation (REDD+) mechanism and management of forest resources to support sustainable forest management plans. The updated information of the forest cover and forest biomass using advanced remote sensing techniques can be useful for selecting the suitable sites for planned thinning, reforestation, community forestry, and concession land, which eventually will help in controlling the deforestation in Cambodia. To overcome the limitations of remote sensing, an integrated approach of remote sensing and community forestry to monitor forests from local to national level has also been discussed.

 Credit: http://www.globalcanopy.org/

Paper source: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10668-013-9448-y

What are PES? A review of definitions and an extension

Sandra Derissen and Uwe Latacz-Lohmann

 Ecosystem Services (Available online 13 March 2013)

The term PES is often used to denote market incentives for the provision of public goods within the field of environmental and resource issues. In this context, PES translates into either ‘payments for environmental services’ or ‘payments for ecosystem services’—the terms that are not consistently defined in the literature and sometimes used as synonyms. Given the lack of coherent definitions, this note reviews current definitions of payments for ecosystem services and payments for environmental services entertained in the literature, discusses alternative meanings of environmental and ecosystem services in the PES context, and finally proposes a consistent definition. We argue that current definitions of PES found in the literature are insufficient to adequately describe the man-made nature of many environmental goods and services: that nature is ’produced’ through human intervention. Building upon the FAO's definition of environmental services, we propose a definition that regards environmental services as services provided through countryside management in a broader sense whilst produced either unintentionally or intentionally.

Credit: http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/mother-nature-s-sum-4226/

Paper Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212041613000119