The amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by clearing and burning tropical forests accounts for the world's second largest source of human-driven greenhouse gas emissions. The importance of preventing the destruction of tropical rainforests like the Amazon has therefore acquired a new level of importance. Locally-based strategies like those used by ACT to prevent the deforestation of the Amazon can prevent the release of significant amounts of carbon dioxide and mitigate climate change, whose effects ultimately threaten the health and well-being of families and economies throughout the world. The reality of global warming has led us to begin the process of integrating our existing indigenous-led forest protection activities with the emerging potential of carbon markets and payments for ecosystem services (PES).
Among the many strategies discussed to mitigate the many sources of carbon dioxide emissions, those designed to avoid deforestation are some of the most attainable, effective, and cost-efficient. Using very conservative estimates, an acre of tropical forest stores approximately 100 tons of carbon. In the U.S., a fuel-efficient car used for commuting to work exhausts approximately 10 tons of CO2 in a year. One can see how preventing the deforestation of merely a few acres of rainforest would sharply outweigh a radical change in fossil fuel use by an individual. This has prompted conservationists to explore how incentive structures built into emerging global emissions trading and ecosystems services markets can be tied to the preservation of rainforest habitat at the local level. ACT's existing conservation projects with indigenous communities in the Amazon are ideally suited not only to prevent deforestation on indigenous lands but to enable well-prepared indigenous communities to directly benefit from these new incentive programs, which may in turn allow them to continue to live sustainably in these forests.
What We're Doing: Promoting Self-Reliance
ACT's first carbon and ecosystem services market pilot projects are already underway in the Brazilian rainforests, where the majority of Amazon rainforest is located. ACT is working together with the Suruí people of the western Amazonian state of Rondônia and the NGOs Forest Trends, IDESAM, Kaninde and Funbio to develop the very first REDD project with an indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon. Additionally, in the Tumucumaque Indigenous Reserve in the northern state of Amapá, ACT is partnering with the Conservation Strategy Fund and the regional indigenous association APITIKATXI to develop a full PES proposal to position the Park to obtain sustainable financing through current and future PES mechanisms.
Years of training and capacity building initiatives with our indigenous partners, their communities, and legal associations in the areas of land management, strategic planning, and general administration has allowed many of them to become well positioned to receive and successfully absorb income from PES and/or carbon markets and to convert these resources into meaningful community development and forest protection initiatives.
ACT's conservation and community programs have already proven to be uniquely effective and invaluable to our partners, but these activities require resources in order to continue. The emerging carbon credit/offset markets and potential markets for PES present a promising new avenue from which to acquire those resources, as well as an added incentive for indigenous communities to continue sustainable development practices and forest protection, while promoting a large degree of self-reliance.
The Path Ahead
Fostering the self-reliance of our indigenous partners aided by new payment mechanisms is doubly beneficial: our partners acquire resources to continue their community-based projects, and ACT is able to shift attention and resources to other indigenous communities. Simply put, revenue from carbon markets and PES create the possibility for a viable "exit strategy" that allows ACT to reach more communities, and enables our existing partners to exercise increased responsibility over their affairs.
ACT recognizes that the rainforest regions of the Amazon Basin alone cover 1.4 billion acres - an area roughly the size of the continental United States. No matter how effectively executed, our projects by themselves cannot protect more than a modest percentage of those forests - nothing short of a major agreement between all Amazonian nations involving massive infusions of resources could save them all. But ACT believes that it is showing the path to such an ideal, fostering collaborations between forest inhabitants and distant governments and demonstrating how to best leverage modest resources to achieve real protection on the ground.
Climate Change Adaptation
ACT's projects to conserve rainforest and build the strength of indigenous communities run in parallel. And so it is with ACT's efforts to assist in the global effort to mitigate the effects of climate change: as we partner with indigenous peoples to save the forest, so we work to increase the level of preparedness of forest communities for the long-term effects of global warming. Typically, this means collaborating with the communities to disseminate information about global warming; determining what changes the communities have already observed in their environment; and enabling the communities to implement projects that help their villages adapt to these changes. A great benefit of this process is the identification of indicators by which indigenous peoples evaluate changes in their environment, indicators that complement information derived from scientific studies and instrumentation.
