CIGAREDD

CIGAREDD

lunes, 30 de noviembre de 2015

At present Mexico has a baseline (REL) for deforestation but not for degradation or for forest enhancements; so cannot claim performance-related rewards for these elements of REDD+


Mexico has proposed a national Reference Emission Level (REL) to the UNFCCC and has developed an Initiative for Reduced Emissions, with finance from FCPF.  However the REL includes only emissions from deforestation and forest fires.  This is mainly because there is insufficient historical data on changing carbon stocks within forests to estimate trends in degradation and forest enhancement.  On a parallel track, there is an opening for activities that promote carbon removals through forest enhancement. These can be developed by forest owners, including communities, as individual projects, and could be financed through sale of credits in national and international voluntary carbon markets, based on local monitoring of increasing stocks as a result of local management interventions.

Reduced degradation however remains out of the picture in terms of finance for the time being, even though it is possibly the greatest contributor to forest emissions. The difficulty is primarily related to lack of historical data, which is a problem worldwide, and the challenge is how to develop robust degradation baselines either at the local or the national level. 

This message is the fourth of 8 key messages from the WOTROMEX programme.  The case study area is the Ayuquila Basin in western Jalisco, which is a REDD+ Early Action Area under the Mexican national strategy for REDD+. WOTROMEX is supported by the Netherlands Science for Global Development Programme (NWO-WOTRO) and has been carried out by CIGA-UNAM together with the University of Twente, the Netherlands 

domingo, 29 de noviembre de 2015

Reducing the shifting cultivation cycle from 10 years to six has not increased overall emissions

The shifting cultivation cycle in the study area has been reducing from 10 years to five or six years over the last 10 to 15 years. Contrary to popular opinion, this has not led to increased emissions because the driving force behind the change is not population increase (i.e. not pressure on the land) but a combination of public policy (subsidies which inadvertently encourage farmers to circulate their land more quickly) and the fact that clearing fallows requires much more labour if they are left from more than five years.

With a downward relative trend in maize prices over the last decade, and given that labour is the constraining factor in traditional agriculture, farmers nowadays prefer short cycles (cutting mature fallow is very labour intensive). Since in this area there has not been an increase in numbers of farmers engaged in shifting cultivation, this shortening of fallows appears to have been accompanied by an increase in areas abandoned by agriculture, and these areas are increasing their carbon stocks. Biomass emissions per ton of maize  produced in a shifting cultivation system are around 1.27 t C compared to 0.59 t C in permanent agriculture, but this does not take into account the much higher carbon inputs in permanent agriculture in the form of energy and agrochemicals.

This message is the fifth of 8 key messages from the WOTROMEX programme.  The case study area is the Ayuquila Basin in western Jalisco, which is a REDD+ Early Action Area under the Mexican national strategy for REDD+. WOTROMEX is supported by the Netherlands Science for Global Development Programme (NWO-WOTRO) and has been carried out by CIGA-UNAM together with the University of Twente, the Netherlands