The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) joined forces in 2019, leveraging a combined 65 years’ experience in research on the role of forests and trees in solving critical global challenges.
The rights over tree tenure often determines who benefits from REDD+ activities in Ghana suggests Willem den Besten from IUCN. Due to the strong influence of formal and customary systems of land and tree ownership in Ghana, it can be very hard for farmers to obtain certificates of tree ownership.
As an example if a tree grows naturally on a farmer’s land, the farmer does not own it. So the government can issue contracts to logging companies to fell the trees and often farmers are not compensated for crop damage that results from felling operations.
Even when trees are planted by the farmer and they should have legal rights to them, the challenging procedures of tree registration had meant that farmers fail to register their trees. Consequently, they miss out on benefits derived from the trees. In these circumstances, the farmer cannot see the value of having trees on their property and these impacts negatively on the uptake of REDD+ activities.
When a seminar was organised last month to address the tree ownership problem, it was realised that a solution may be buried within Ghana's legal frameworks. Ghana's forestry commission have now simplified tree registration procedures and other groups have begun local farmer education aimed at rebuilding farmers' confidence in the benefits of investing in trees.
Read more on tree tenure issues in Ghana here.
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