Posted on March, 22 2024

More than a quarter of the world’s forests are managed by indigenous peoples, local communities, and smallholder forest communities. To address the climate and biodiversity crises, we must urgently scale up solutions that support these forest communities to effectively protect and sustainably manage their forests.

A solution for some forest communities is to access incentive systems such as through carbon-linked finance, or the now rapidly evolving biodiversity credits. However, accessing these incentives systems requires data – and collecting data has a cost.

For forest communities, deciding whether it is worth their while to access carbon-linked finance that supports the sustainable management and restoration of their forests, will in part depend upon the cost of data collection – which can be prohibitive for small community forests.

Another issue is that traditional forest inventory techniques and satellite monitoring exclude local people.

Enter the Forest Integrity Assessment (FIA) tool: a participatory tool for non-experts to measure the biodiversity condition of natural forests. The tool was initially developed in 2016 by WWF in collaboration with the High Conservation Value (HCV) Network and the Rainforest Alliance, thanks to support from IKEA. More recently, FIA tests in southern Asia have also demonstrated a strong potential for the tool to include carbon data.

Now, the local adaptation of FIA through a pilot project in southern Cameroon that has trained forest communities, the tool's potential for unlocking carbon and biodiversity linked finance has now been realised.
 

• “FIA is an innovation for Community Forestry in Cameroon, which needs a new way of doing forestry that goes beyond harvesting timber and non-timber forest products. FIA helps open the door to biodiversity conservation and carbon stock within community forestry, and it helps the forest communities actively participate in forest management rather than being sidelined as observers due to exclusivity and difficulty in data management and use. Finally, given the fact that FIA is a participatory tool, it provides accurate field information which will lead the entity managing the Community Forest to take informed management decisions based on evidence coming from the field.”

Gervais Nsibeuweula, Executive Director at SAPED (project local partner), and who has been working in the community forestry sector in Cameroon for over a decade.
 

• “Collecting forest management data in newly allocated forest areas using the FIA tool allows community forest managers to become aware of the state of biodiversity and threats faced by the forest. This helps them propose more realistic management measures, such as good delimitation of five-year management blocks and their allocation as areas of restoration, protection and conservation of species and habitats, with a view to guaranteeing sustainable management of the community forest.”

Alphonse Ngniado, Forest and Climate Coordinator with WWF Cameroon, and who has been working with forest communities in Cameroon for over two decades.
 

• To find out more, please read the full article: Unlocking incentives for Nature-based Solutions with forest communities | HCV Network

FIA tool development and training workshop in Cameroon made possible thanks to the continued support of IKEA through the WWF-IKEA Forests For Life programme.