Practice-Based Knowledge for REDD+ in Vanuatu

Abstract

The rural populations of small island developing states in the Pacific region are amongst the most exposed to the harsh realities of climate change. Forest management, tree planting, and agroforestry are some of the most promising strategies to build local resilience while providing food and income security in these remote areas. In this paper, we outline the contextual reasons for why deforestation and forest degradation continues, and provide practice-based approaches for REDD + to address deforestation. Our transdisciplinary methods include the construction of seven land use models to compare business-as-usual scenarios with respective REDD + strategies across Vanuatu’s five REDD + islands, combined with a case study of Vanuatu’s first REDD + project. Close collaboration between international researchers, local government officials, and Ni-Vanuatu non-governmental organizations and communities allowed for information sharing across epistemologies, adding local, place-based knowledge to scientific inquiry, responding to calls for more ‘locally led’ approaches to climate adaptation in Vanuatu.

Keywords:

• Agroforestry
• climate adaptation
• mitigation
• climate finance
• REDD+

Acknowledgements

Department of Forests, especially Ioan Viji, and the Regional Forest Officers for their support throughout the research process and their contribution to the report: Analytical Studies for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) in Vanuatu. We are very grateful to all individuals and communities in Vanuatu who have shared their time, perspectives, and insights with us, especially those involved with the Loru Project. Gabrielle Kissinger provided comments on early versions of this article.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 A further REDD+ project is under development on the island of Erromango, but is yet to reach the stage of Government endorsement.

2 Two of the authors are Ni-Vanuatu (one male, one female), and three of the authors identify as white (two female, one male) originally from the Global North. This positionality entails differences in privilege, worldviews, and relation to each other and to the study participants, which inevitably affects the process and outcomes of this collaboration.

3 More details on the project, community involvement, methods, and detailed findings are available on the project website: https://www.planvivo.org/loru

4 International demand for timber and unsustainable logging practices caused widespread forest destruction across Southeast Asia and Melanesia, accelerating around 1960 and lasting for several decades (Dauvergne 2001). In Vanuatu, commercial logging caused significant harm to forests in the two decades following independence in 1980.

5 ZeroMission (https://zeromission.se/en/) and Ekos (https://ekos.co.nz/) have been the main buyers, acting as intermediaries selling carbon offsets to the European and New Zealand voluntary offset markets.

6 Respondents do not have income records, so survey error is likely. This finding could be inflated due to some participants answering with their household income rather than personal income. Further, although only women sell food crops at the market, both men and women work in their gardens, making it difficult to distinguish between personal and household income.

7 The practice-based knowledge category of articles was first introduced to this journal in 2014 by Weber et al., with the goal “to provide a dedicated space within the published, peer-reviewed literature for scholars, government officials, nonprofit managers, and engaged citizens to share experiences informed by practical action” (1074).

Additional information

Funding

This research and field work was made possible by Vanuatu’s Department of Forests with funding from Vanuatu’s REDD + Readiness grant delivered through the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) and through in-kind contributions from The Nakau Programme.