The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is exploring
reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) as a new global strategy to
address global warming. This represents a major expansion of earlier forest-oriented
initiatives under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) that focused on afforestation
and reforestation activities characterized by plantation schemes. While the scope of
REDD projects is still being defined, potential categories include not only forestation but
conservation and stock enhancement, creating a range of new opportunities. The core
concept behind REDD, however, is that deforestation trends can be slowed, halted, or even
reversed conserving millions of tons of carbon that would otherwise be emitted.
A recent study in the province of East Kalimantan, for example, estimated that 305 million
t CO2 could be conserved between 2003 and 2013 if the province’s protected areas were
effectively conserved, generating a potential income stream of $120 million per year at a
price of $4 per ton of CO2.1
Yet, optimistic projections of this type entirely depend on a
REDD projects capacity to halt the powerful political and economic forces that have
decimated Kalimantan’s forest over the past forty years. This paper examines drivers of
deforestation operating in northwest Cambodia to explore how they might be slowed in a
REDD project scenario and how the future international articulation of project design
parameters could enable or constrain a global REDD strategy.
Emerging REDD agreements and developing carbon markets have generated enormous
interest among climate change specialists, with growing attention to potential national
REDD projects. Special technical committees (SBSTA) operating under UNFCCC
processes are focusing on setting standards, with an emphasis methodologies for verifying
emissions reductions. Far less attention has been given to the fundamental challenges in
the field involved in mitigating the impact of powerful drivers of deforestation and
degradation operating in developing countries.
This paper examines experiences from Oddar Meanchey Province in northwest Cambodia
where a sub-national REDD project is being designed. The author identifies nine distinct
forces operating at the national, regional, and local level that are driving an annual
deforestation rate of 2.1% in that province between 2000 and 2008. The paper discusses
strategies that may be implemented in order to control operational drivers of deforestation,
as well as some of the other underlying causes that have caused Cambodia’s forest cover to
decline by 31% between 1980 and 2000.