Community Forest Management and REDD+

The urgent need to limit anthropogenic
carbon emissions has led to a global initiative to Reduce
Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+).
But designing national architectures for REDD+ that
integrate local actions on forests with national-level
outcomes and do so effectively, efficiently, and equitably
continues to be challenging. One option to facilitate the
design and implementation of REDD+ is to learn from the
experience of other programs that have historically been
successful in achieving sustainable tropical forest
management, such as community forest management (CFM).
Lessons about the factors that contribute to CFM success
will be useful in designing REDD+ programs. REDD+ may also
benefit from harnessing the capital developed by CFM. Of
course, REDD+ and CFM represent both opportunities and
challenges for each other. Identifying how CFM can
contribute to REDD+ goals, and the potential benefits and
risks in using CFM to achieve REDD+ implementation requires
careful analysis of available evidence because the two sets
of interventions do not have a complete overlap in terms of
their objectives and mechanisms.