Abstract
This paper explores multi-stakeholder perspectives on the extent to which forestry projects that pursue ecological restoration and rehabilitation in Madagascar engage with local communities and can co-deliver climate-development benefits. Drawing on mixed methods (policy analysis, semi-structured interviews, participatory site visits and focus groups) in two different forestry contexts, we show that by strengthening access to capital availability, projects can enhance local adaptive capacity and mitigation and deliver local development. We show that active consideration of ecological conservation and action plans early in project design and implementation can co-develop and support monitoring and reporting systems, needed to progress towards integrated climate-compatible development approaches. Climate mitigation benefits remain poorly quantified due to limited interest in, and low capacity to generate, carbon revenues. Monitoring alone does not ensure carbon benefits will materialize, and this research stresses that institutional considerations and strengthened engagement and cooperation between practitioners and communities are key in achieving both climate mitigation and community development impacts. Multiple benefits can be fostered by aligning objectives of multiple landscape actors (i.e., community needs and project developers) and by systematically linking project deliverables, outputs, outcomes and impacts over time, grounded in a theory of change focused on ensuring community buy-in and planning for delivery of tangible benefits.
Highlights
Land degradation is often exacerbated by climate change, threatening multiple socio-ecological systems and the livelihoods of people whose lives depend on them
The capacity to exploit synergies between the multiple benefits delivered by trees and multifunctional landscapes through ecological restoration and rehabilitation has been limited to date by spatial and temporal constraints
The bulk of development needs reported at community level revolved around socio-economic development difficulties that are commonly identified in resource-poor and remote contexts, which limit a project’s capacity to co-deliver wider climate and development impacts
Summary
Land degradation is often exacerbated by climate change, threatening multiple socio-ecological systems and the livelihoods of people whose lives depend on them. Ecological restoration and rehabilitation projects are pursued with a view to mitigating the impacts of climate change by storing carbon in plants and soil, while often reducing people’s vulnerability and increasing their capacity to adapt [1]. Land 2020, 9, 157 acknowledged that these mechanisms offer potential to deliver “triple-wins” or climate-compatible development, assisting climate change mitigation, and reducing vulnerability, alleviating poverty and enabling people to adapt [5]. The capacity to exploit synergies between the multiple benefits delivered by trees and multifunctional landscapes through ecological restoration and rehabilitation has been limited to date by spatial and temporal constraints. While multiple forest and landscape restoration benefits such as carbon sequestration, rehabilitation of degraded lands, flood risk reduction and enhanced biodiversity, can be generated in synergy, trade-offs occur when long-term impacts on vulnerability and adaptation capacity are taken into account [8]. Long-term increased vulnerability, or decreased adaptive capacity, deriving from short-term adaptation actions that produce unintended impacts, are defined as “maladaptation” [9]
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