Give forests back to local people to save them

Fred Pearce in New Scientist: Give tropical forests back to the people who live in them - and the trees will soak up your carbon for you. Above all, keep the forests out of the hands of government. So concludes a study that has tracked the fate of 80 forests worldwide over 15 years.

…In the first study of its kind, Chhatre and Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor compared forest ownership with data on carbon sequestration, which is estimated from the size and number of trees in a forest. Hectare-for-hectare, they found that tropical forest under local management stored more carbon than government-owned forests.

…One reason may be that locals protect forests best if they own them, because they have a long-term interest in ensuring the forests' survival. While governments, whatever their intentions, usually license destructive logging, or preside over a free-for-all in which everyone grabs what they can because nobody believes the forest will last….

The authors suggest that locals would also make a better job of managing common pastures, coastal fisheries and water supplies. They argue that their findings contradict a long-standing environmental idea, called the "tragedy of the commons", which says that natural resources left to communal control get trashed. In fact, says Agrawal, "communities are perfectly capable of managing their resources sustainably"….

New beech leaves, Grib Forest in the northern part of Sealand, Denmark. Shot by Malene Thyssen, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Malene, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License