Carbon sequestration projects based on land-use, land-use change and forestry activities can significantly enhance sustainable development while minimizing the negative impacts of climate change. Properly designed, these projects can conserve or even increase carbon stock while also improving rural livelihoods.

Good design requires methodologies that determine the baseline of carbon stocks at the beginning of the project, monitor additionality and leakage of carbon, and assess broader environmental and socio-economic effects.

Such an approach makes it possible to measure the maintenance or even increase in carbon stocks, while also monitoring the involvement of low-income rural communities in sustainable forestry, agroforestry and other natural resource management activities.

Organizers of the workshop, CIFOR’s Hety Herawati and Daniel Murdiyarso, emphasized the importance of practitioners, project developers and policy makers sharing their invaluable experiences.

“Combining carbon-sequestration projects with livelihood projects is a fairly recent phenomenon,” Dr. Murdiarso said. “There’s still a lot that the various experts in this field can learn from each other.”

According to Ms. Herawati, the workshop played an important role in increasing the international community's awareness of how carbon sinks and sustainable livelihoods in community-based natural resource management can go hand in hand.

“CIFOR was particularly pleased at the quality of papers presented at the workshop and the number of participants. In total there were some 70 people from around 20 countries. Particularly pleasing was the participation of representatives from the Canadian and Indonesian governments,” Ms. Herawati said.

According to both the organizers, the workshop produced several significant conclusions that will help ensure the success of future sequestration-livelihood projects. These conclusions cut across a range of areas including scientific, technical, practical as well as policy-related issues.

• Climate project development will lead to enhanced environmental resilience and alleviation of rural poverty. Although the lessons learned are limited and experiences are sometimes not replicable, there are a number of success stories as well as failures that are worth taking into account
• Some emerging technical/methodological issues need further elaboration by academia to support decision-making processes
• Links between mitigation and adaptation strategies and measures are urgently needed, especially for ecosystems and communities that are vulnerable to climate change.

Carbon Forestry: Who Will Benefit? Proceedings of Workshop on Carbon Sequestration and Sustainable Livelihoods, held in Bogor on 16-17 February 2005 is available in PDF format from http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/scripts/newscripts/publications/detail.asp?pid=1733