Answering the call for deeper discussion on carbon markets from our community partners in Asia, the Peoples Forests Partnership (PFP) co-funded a Knowledge Exchange on Carbon Markets and Indigenous Peoples. This took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand, on 16-19 September 2024 and consisted of a three-day training followed by a field visit.
The event, which we held together with our organising partners RECOFTC, Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP), TEBTEBBA and the United Nations Development Programme, as well as our funding partners Nia Tero and the World Bank’s Enhancing Access to Benefits while Lowering Emissions (EnABLE) multi-donor trust fund, brought together a diversity of actors including community members from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam, and bridged four regional languages: Thai, Khmer, Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia.
The event represented an outstanding opportunity for the PFP to get deeper insights on the diverse circumstances communities are facing in the different countries. The matters that arose demonstrated a complexity of challenges that communities deal with, including but not limited to:
Continuous lack of recognition leading to ancestral lands being considered as ‘vacant’
Obligatory national standards that do not require free, prior and informed consent (FPIC)
Inadequate demarcation of land, leading to limited access to forest areas for sustainable land use
Confusion and mistrust due to a lack of unbiased information and complex relations with governments
Photo and quote caption provided to the PFP by the Indigenous Media Network
The knowledge exchange underlined the importance of bringing together trusted practitioners with proven experience in project development and carbon markets, in order to untangle the mosaic of actors and their purposes in the highly complex and lengthy development of carbon projects and programmes. It also highlighted the need for targeted legal and regulatory analysis specific to each country, as there are manifold legal situations.
The PFP entered into the discussions with the intention to listen and learn from the local practitioners and came away with a much clearer idea of appropriate priorities for building capacity amongst Indigenous Peoples (IPs) and local communities (LCs) and for developing partnerships.
Our takeaways from the event included:
Distributing and cascading unbiased information to build trust and capacity, and enable informed decisions, is crucial. Capacity building must include private sector actors as well, in order to facilitate understanding of the requirements and realities of all stakeholders in place. Only this kind of preparation will set an appropriate baseline for equitable collaboration.
It is also crucial to continue creating space for those who are already active advocators for IP and LCs in relation to carbon markets and to make sure they can actively participate in decision-making processes.
Global shared integrity principles, such as the PFP Principles, can represent critical guidelines in order to understand what rights communities have and how positive experiences can be co-created.
The need for community-led or co-designed processes of FPIC, benefit-sharing mechanisms and monitoring, learning and grievance mechanisms was strongly reflected in the demands and priorities identified during the event.
It is essential to build or expand networks of trusted partners to whom communities can reach out with any questions and doubts in order to respond to country-specific challenges and trust deficits. While the PFP Principles can serve as a guideline to analyze the approaches of the actors in place, the PFP will aim to expand its outreach in order to represent such a network.
Photo and quote caption provided to the PFP by the Indigenous Media Network
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