ABSTRACT
Implementing REDD is highly complex and controversial despite being premised on a fairly straightforward concept-that carbon stored by trees has value for which governments and high-polluting industries in richer countries will pay. In many low-income situations, rural households depend critically on forests for timber, fuel, and other nontimber forest products. Where households in LEDCs rely heavily on forests (albeit often illegally) for their key cooking fuels in rural (fuelwood) and urban (charcoal) areas, unless these households are able to switch to alternative fuels, reducing access to these forests is likely to harm livelihoods or simply displace the extraction and production of these biomass fuels to other less protected, non-REDD-designated forests (referred to as “leakage”). Also, in the rush to embrace REDD, there are increasing reports of forest-dependent people being evicted from forested areas. For example, the Worldwide Fund for Nature has recently been criticized for supporting a process that shifted resource control and management from local to regional and global actors and evicted traditional mangrove rice farming households in the Rufiji Delta North in Tanzania, who use a system of natural mangrove regeneration (Beymer-Farris & Bassett, 2012). Unless programmes and markets to pay for positive externalities of forests address this impact of reduced forest use on the rural poor, the solution to the forest externality problem creates other social welfare concerns.
