ANN ARBOR—Studying 80 forest “commons” in more than a dozen developing nations, a University of Michigan researcher and his University of Illinois colleague have found links between local ownership and control of those forests and the fight against climate change.

They found that greater local ownership and input into forest management appear to keep these areas, also called forest commons, from being overharvested or otherwise misused, thereby increasing their ability to capture carbon and mitigate the effects of climate change.

Their findings, based on data collected on three continents, appear in a paper published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors are Arun Agrawal, a professor and associate dean of the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment, and Ashwini Chhatre of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“The urgency of the global need to increase carbon storage in forests and local reliance on forests for continuing livelihood benefits through extraction of forest biomass make it especially important that scientists better understand the relationship between carbon storage in forests and their contributions to livelihoods,” Agrawal and Chhatre wrote.

“We show that larger forest size and greater rule-making autonomy at the local level are associated with high carbon storage and livelihood benefits,” the authors concluded.

Forest commons are an important class of forests and are defined in part by the relatively large number of people who use them, the researchers stated. Forest commons also have defined boundaries and legally enforceable property rights.

Community-owned and managed forests comprise less than 10 percent of forests globally. Although individual forest commons are small in area, they are crucial to the livelihoods of the rural poor in the developing world, according to Agrawal and Chhatre. In the aggregate, such forests provide livelihood benefits to more than 500 million poor people, according to development agencies.

In part because such forests are essential to rural livelihoods, governments in many developing countries have transferred management and use of rights to rural users through decentralization policy reforms. Evidence is emerging that such a focus may be instrumental in reconciling multiple outcomes from forests in developing countries.

The researchers examined five independent variables related to forest commons: size, whether the commons was owned by the community or the government, whether some form of local autonomy existed, the distance residents traveled to reach the commons, and the distance from the commons to the nearest administrative center.

The forest commons varied in size, topography and elevation, as well as population densities. Thirteen sites were in Latin America, 22 in East Africa and 45 in South Asia. Agrawal and Chhatre used a data set created through 15 years of systematic research in Africa, Latin America and South Asia.

The researchers analyzed data compiled by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions research program. The program is based at SNRE and directed by Agrawal. It has created a social-ecological database on forests that provides the most systematic and best available quantitative information on forest commons in the developing world. IFRI has been collecting and compiling this data since 1992.

The analysis conducted by Agrawal and his colleagues revealed that the larger the forest commons that are locally managed and owned, the more carbon storage took place and the higher the livelihood benefits.

On the other hand, “When local users perceive insecurity in their rights (because the central government owns the forest land), they extract high levels of livelihood benefits from them, and when their tenure rights are safe, they conserve the biomass and carbon in such forests,” they wrote.

“Rule-making autonomy and ownership are distinct and important institutional influences on forest outcomes,” Agrawal and Chhatre wote. “Our results are directly relevant to international climate change mitigation initiatives such as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.”

They conclude that “increasing forest size and greater local autonomy in matching rules to resource characteristics exist in a win-win relationship with carbon storage and livelihood benefits from forest commons.”

“Transfer of ownership over larger forest commons patches to local communities, coupled with payments for improved carbon storage, can contribute to climate change mitigation without adversely affecting local livelihoods.”

About International Forestry Resources and Institutions

The International Forestry Resources and Institutions research network is a unique group of researchers working on forest governance and livelihoods. It focuses on data collection and analysis across multiple international settings at the local level, using both social and ecological data collected at several points in time. The IFRI network is comprised of 12 collaborating research centers around the globe. Its researchers use a common data collection method to ensure that sites can be compared across space and time. Its database contains information about forest ecology, livelihood, governance arrangements and forest user groups collected from more than 250 sites in 15 countries since 1992.

www.snre.umich.edu/coe/ifri

About the School of Natural Resources and Environment

The School of Natural Resources and Environment’s overarching objective is to contribute to the protection of the Earth’s resources and the achievement of a sustainable society. Through research, teaching and outreach, faculty, staff and students are devoted to generating knowledge and developing policies, techniques and skills to help practitioners manage and conserve natural and environmental resources to meet the full range of human needs on a sustainable basis.

www.snre.umich.edu/