Today marks World Wildlife Day, this year it’s a day to highlight the central role of forests, forest-species and ecosystem services in sustaining the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people globally.
Halting and reversing deforestation delivers a cost-effective and nature-based solution (NBS) to curbing climate change. According to one estimate, the world’s existing tropical tree cover alone could provide 23 per cent of the climate mitigation needed over the next decade to meet goals set in the Paris Agreement. Healthy forests can deliver massive economic and climate resilience benefits, improve food security, decrease biodiversity loss, and benefit human and ecosystem health. More than 25 per cent of the world’s population rely on their resources for livelihoods and basic needs including food, shelter, energy and medicines. However, forests, forest-species and forest-related livelihoods remain under constant and ever-increasing threat from deforestation and forest degradation.
Participatory Forest Management (PFM), in which local communities participate in rule setting, monitoring and sanctioning for their forest, has been adopted in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) as a multi-stakeholder method of managing forest resources to achieve sustainability and conserve biodiversity. PFM has been embraced in Kenya since 2005, under the premise that forest management can be improved when forest-adjacent communities participate in conservation and rehabilitation efforts, and that these approaches can also alleviate poverty by improving livelihood opportunities.
Previous research conducted by the GSMA CleanTech team – Digital Dividends in Natural Resource Management – suggested that digital technologies could offer new opportunities for Kenya to increase the efficiency, impact and transparency of PFM efforts. Over the last several months, we have been testing these assumptions by conducting new qualitative and quantitative research with Community Forest Associations (CFAs) across the country, as well as organisations that support PFM, including Safaricom, KFS, WWF Kenya, the Kenya Forestry Research Institute, National Alliance of Community Forest Associations (NACOFA), CIFOR, Wildlife Works and many others.
Our research, which we plan to publish in May, has helped develop a more detailed picture of how Community Forest Associations (CFAs) engage in forest management and explore how digital tools (especially mobile) could improve data collection, information sharing, and the delivery of community incentives. Here are a few interesting findings from our project:
- CFA members are keen to transition towards digital data collection and information sharing to facilitate their work: inputting real-time data on a range of conservation activities and forest threats such as wildfires and illegal logging. Such tools must be appropriately designed for offline work, integrate both feature and smartphone services, and be rolled out with targeted marketing, training, and appropriate incentives.
- From our sample, 90 per cent of CFA members believe that tree-planting could be increased if members were rewarded for their work, either through direct payments or community development programmes. Two-thirds of CFA members believe that a payment scheme for tree planting would encourage new membership, for example women, youth, or neighbours motivated from seeing others earning. Both Stakeholders and CFA members highlighted that payments must be linked not only to tree-planting, but to the continued growth and survival of trees.
- CFA members were generally very enthusiastic about tools that allowed them to connect more easily within and beyond their CFA to share information and improve conservation and income-generating efforts.
To deliver on the 2030 Climate and Sustainable Development agendas, it is essential that we work towards alleviating poverty, ensuring sustainable use of forests and conserving life on land.
To find out more about the research please do not hesitate to get in touch.
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