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In this issue
Message from
RUPES Project Office
In
March 2007, a group of experts, practitioners, and brokers met in Italy
to discuss how lessons learned from recent global experiences with
payments for watershed services (PWS) could be used to improve the
efficiency of watershed management. You can find a link to view the
meeting report in the first article.
In
the second article, we share you a good news from the Philippines. The
Mitsubishi UFJ Securities (MUS) Co., Ltd. has finally signed an
agreement with the Kalahan Educational Foundation for a small scale CDM
project in Ikalahan Ancestral Domain - RUPES research site in the
Philippines. Congratulations
to RUPES-ICRAF Philippines who has facilitated the process.
Related
to the article, in our References section, we put a newly published
research report on carbon density in agroforestry systems carried out in
the Domain.
Don't
forget to check our Featured Links. Early this month, the official
journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, put together a
Special Feature on Ecosystem Services highlighting, among others, the
increasing recognition of ecosystems as natural capital assets and the
challenge to turn this recognition into incentives and institutions that
will guide wise investments in natural capital, on a large scale.
Happy
reading ...
Aunul
Fauzi
Communication Specialist
Top.
Bellagio
Conversations
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Dr
Meine van Noordwijk, RUPES Program Coordinator, joined a
group of the 24 individuals from 13 countries at the
Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center at Lake Como
(Italy) in March 2007 to discuss lessons learned from recent
global experiences with payments for watershed services.
The
report from the discussion was recently published. Edited by
Nigel Asquith, Fundación Natura Bolivia, and Sven Wunder,
Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the
report was entitled Payments for Watershed Services: The
Bellagio Conversations. It is now available for download
from www.naturabolivia.org/indexI.htm
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The
following is a scrap from the first page of the report.
"Most
water users would prefer their water to be free of charge, and
most upstream land managers would prefer their activities to
be unrestricted. However, the upper watersheds that should
provide clean water to downstream users often have to support
additional and sometimes conflicting functions, such as
agriculture and forestry activities. Existing regulatory
frameworks have often proved unable to reconcile these
conflicting needs. Watershed management may be improved by
providing incentives to upstream land users to adopt
production systems and land use practices that are better
aligned with the importance and value attached by downstream
recipients to the environmental services yielded by those
systems. Payments for watershed services (PWS), a subset of
"payments for environmental services" (PES), appear
to have the potential to improve resource management. The
rationale behind PWS is that downstream service users benefit
from the upstream land use practices that ensure the supply of
services such as protection from erosion and sedimentation,
and stream flow stabilization. However, if upstream service
providers are to take appropriate land use decisions, and
provide downstream users with such services, they likely need
to be compensated for their opportunity costs, i.e. the
economic gains they would have made if they had continued with
their first land use plan." [Aunul
Fauzi]
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Top.
First
Fruit in Negotiating Carbon Payments
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The
Kalahan Educational Foundation (KEF) has finally signed an
agreement with the Mitsubishi UFJ Securities (MUS) Co.,
Ltd.
Through
the RUPES Project, KEF (an indigenous community-based led
organization) is developing a carbon sequestration project
in at least 900 hectares of the Ikalahan Ancestral Domain in
Nueva Vizcaya.
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Under
the agreement, MUS provides consultancy services on issues
relating to the creation and acquisition of Certified
Emission Reductions (CERs) and other matters related to the
Clean Development Mechanism as well as on the generation of
Emission Reductions.
Unlike
with the other consulting services, aside from shouldering
the upfront costs of CDM registration process, MUS offered
an option to purchase the generated CERs and ERs from the
project at 8$USD per tonne with payment to be made upon
delivery of the CERs 12 months upon the execution of the
agreement.
ICRAF-Philippines
is actively involved in enhancing the capacity of KEF to
negotiate payments for their carbon sequestration and
assisting KEF in preparing information and documents
necessary for the CDM registration. Currently, the community
has started planting indigenous seedlings to the target
areas. KEF is also preparing for non-Kyoto market. Preparation
of the project idea note and baseline information of Kalahan
carbon project was made possible through the financial
assistance of the International Fund for Agricultural
Development (IFAD). [Grace
Villamor]
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Top.
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