Last week we examined the current circumstances and contradictions that Guyana faces regarding its ‘green brand’ and the rapidly evolving extraction of fossil fuels in its territorial waters. Since then an 18th discovery has been announced. This week we examine the international circumstances which have hampered and are likely to continue to hamper Guyana’s efforts to fully benefit from international assistance for sustainable forest management. Next week we propose a solution to the issues and challenges raised in these first two articles.
The concept of preserving the rainforest is nothing new to Guyanese. The indigenous populations have been guardians of our forest since time immemorial, whilst government-led conservation efforts have been with us since the 1980s. Worldwide, attention on tropical forest protection really only caught hold in the 1960s and 1970s with the growth of global environmental movements, international agreements, and financial support. But there has been little progress.
In the early 2000s, scientific evidence revealed the importance of tropical forests in addressing global climate change. A resurgence of interest culminated in the United Nations’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade initiative (FLEGT). REDD+, initiated in 2005, focuses on wealthy nations trading-off their greenhouse gas emissions by paying poorer countries to reduce (rain)forest clearance from all types of activities. FLEGT, established in 2003, focuses on ensuring the forests, from which the European timber industry is supplied, are sustainably managed.
Guyana has been an active participant in the formulation and implementation of both initiatives. It’s REDD+ began in 2009 with the signing of the ground-breaking agreement with Norway that led to US$250 million being made available to the country to build a REDD+-ready system, promote alternative livelihoods away from forest clearance, and develop a clean energy system. FLEGT has made slow but steady progress in Guyana with funding provided to build a partnership to sell legally assured timber into the EU market.
There are some clear successes from both programmes. The REDD+ programme in Guyana has built a valuable source of data on the forest and built huge awareness at both the technical level and in the population as a whole on climate change, Guyana’s role in the challenge and the value of the country’s forests. It has helped create valuable, unique, international partnerships chiefly with Norway, in the realm of natural resource management. And it has helped to develop capacity in government and other organisations to better monitor, plan and manage natural resource extraction – capacity that has been further built by programmes such as FLEGT. Beyond the specific areas in which we have built capacity there are corollary benefits, including increased awareness of the impacts of mining on ecosystem and human health and wellbeing, and increased ability to discern illegal activities in mining and in the declaration of mineral production. We are even more aware of the many problems in the forestry sector and have made significant advances in reducing illegal logging, and monitoring the source and movement of forest products. Most of all, these systems have contributed to improvements in the control of other activities such as illicit drugs trafficking, and fuel, and raw material smuggling in our forest and across our borders.
One of most significant collateral benefits of introducing these systems has been the local and global appreciation of the relative undespoiled beauty of Guyana’s unique landscapes. Guyana has been identified as one of the best places on the planet to visit, stimulating a burgeoning (eco)tourism sector, much of it built by private and community enterprises in some of the more remote parts of the nation. With both the growth of tourism and increased monitoring and better management of natural resources, new jobs and new opportunities for investment have emerged. At the same time, these systems have made us aware of the new skills and employment opportunities such as in wildlife management and the trade in wildlife; specific environmental assessment, monitoring, and enforcement expertise; management of hydrological (e.g. hydro-power) and aquatic (e.g. fresh water and inland fisheries) systems; and non-timber forest products, such as furniture, and medicinals.
But there is much doubt that this progress will continue and the reasons for this is simple – do the incentives offered for good practice outweigh the costs at the producer level? Does the overall value chain connecting the rights holder and the final consumer or beneficiary favour the rights holder sufficiently?
In many ways Guyana’s experience has mirrored the international picture. While there are some clear successes in making Guyana “ready”, the Norway agreement was to have been a bridge to much greater and more sustainable sources of funding from a global carbon marketplace. This marketplace has flattered to deceive. There is more supply than demand. It is unreliable given the systemic sovereign changes that are implied by REDD+, and it is encumbered by numerous intervening hurdles between the market and the producer. Although other sources of finance – chiefly pledges from national government and multilateral agencies such as the UN and the World Bank to the tune of around US$10 billion over the last decade – this is a drop in the ocean compared to estimates from the start of REDD+ of annual global funding gaps of almost US$20 billion required every year.
To complicate matters even more, the COVID-19 pandemic has further strangled international REDD+ finance given its dependence on government finance whether through bilateral or multilateral streams. Government budgets all around the world are stretched beyond historical precedence in dealing with socioeconomic challenges associated with the pandemic. These developments come on top of ideological changes across crucial donors, such as the US and the UK, away from funding international aid programmes and the multilaterals associated with these programmes. The World Bank is in danger of losing key US sources of finance and the UK has recently abolished its dedicated Department for International Develop-ment (Dfid) – merging it with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Indeed, what the funding landscape will look like post-COVID is highly uncertain – and early signs points to more support for ‘rebuilding’ projects such as renewable energy than conservation of forests.
All of this means that Guyana’s successes in forest management is now at significant risk unless we develop an alternative mechanism to maintain and advance the gains made thus far. Sources of finance are needed to incentivise good practice, bend the curve further towards sustainability, build institutions and improve coordination across different agencies and strategies.
Next week we will examine an option that could help such a system come to light – utilising funding sources within Guyana itself – while helping to preserve the country’s ‘green brand’ and dealing with some of the challenges of large-scale fossil fuel extraction.
David Singh, PhD, is a Natural Resource Management Practitioner, Adjunct Faculty, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University.
Rory Fraser, PhD, is a Professor (Ret’d) of Forest Economics and Policy.
Timothy Laing, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Economics, at Brighton Business School, University of Brighton and GREEN Institute, University of Guyana.
