ABSTRACT
Nepal introduced community forestry as a national policy during the 1970s and, according to the Community Forest Division (May 2010, personal communication), around 1.2 million hectares, or 21 per cent of Nepal's forest, are currently under community forest management (CFM). Indeed, Nepal is often held to be a world leader as regards CFM (Bhattarai and Khanal, 2005; Ojha and Hemant, 2006). CFM in Nepal has been quite effective, not so much in reducing rates of deforestation but rather in reducing degradation of forest, which had been caused by overexploitation of forest products by communities for their livelihoods. One of the main effects is that forest biomass increases in the areas under CFM, as shown in Chapter 2. There are many people in the country, therefore, who expect that communities involved in CFM would be credited for reductions in the rate of deforestation and forest degradation under REDD+ in the future, and thus benefit from financial rewards in the carbon market. Carbon in this context is, however, an entirely new and ‘virtual’ product. While rules on the harvesting and sale of timber, and the gathering of firewood, have been developed over time, and tested in law, it is not at all clear how trading in carbon will be handled. This chapter therefore discusses the legal basis for CFM in Nepal and whether communities are likely to be able to claim rights over the ‘saved carbon’.
