Jeff Hayward: Quantifying Carbon, Communities, and More
Ecosystem Marketplace | 27 October 2008
The debate over Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) hinges on how to verify the amount of carbon captured in trees and how to determine whether the actions being paid for actually cause a net capture of carbon. It’s sticky territory that the climate initiative manager for nonprofit conservation organization Rainforest Alliance – Jeff Hayward first traversed while validating the then-nebulous concept of “sustainable” forestry, and he believes today’s projects will only succeed if they think beyond carbon.
“Carbon alone is not going to protect these forests… To be sustained over time, carbon projects must take an integrated approach, bringing in additional sources of income for the communities whose participation is essential to the survival of these projects.” – Jeff Hayward, Rainforest Alliance
Hayward says that, over time, he’s developed the ability to know going in which projects have the highest chance of success. “The first clue is a well-run organization with a really concrete set of goals and objectives, and the institutional capacity to make it happen,” he says. Then Hayward and Rainforest Alliance look at the project’s environmental and social impacts. Are the right tree species being planted? How does the project aid biodiversity? And, how’s the community relationship — are materials in a local language? Are they explained in a way that a non-scientist can understand?
Hayward says that all of the recent REDD projects he’s evaluated had not just conservation components but other types of economic benefits to local people as well. “What’s pretty cool about all of this is that in the last few years, so much has come together that was missing,” Hayward says, citing the emergence of markets and convincing carbon-based science, along with a surge of public support with the help of the movie An Inconvenient Truth. “Now we just need to keep pushing hard and pedaling as hard as we can to make sure that these systems improve and keep going forward.”
