I've had a few people ask me to explain exactly what we are doing here. I must be clear that this blog is NOT intended to be a work blog...at all. This blog is about Tristan
and my life here. However, as always happens when you life is your job, the
lines get crossed and one becomes the other. So here we go.
There are a lot of ways to describe the project we are
working on. What follows is my preferred explanation.
I am the Operations Manager for a 299,640 hectare forest
conservation project. Tristan is the Forest Manager for all forestry
and agroforestry activities within the project. The DRC, with a salute to the
future, has granted our companies the first ever Conservation Concession in the
country. Previously this land was designated for logging (and has been actively
logged more than once). Logging brings some short term benefits to communities
(jobs, easy access wood, etc.) but, a significant portion of the highly valuable wood revenue goes
directly to the federal government, and an even higher percentage directly to offshore
logging companies. This project is designed so that communities can receive the
true-value of keeping their ecosystems intact. Project benefits are transferred to communities through infrastructure
development, improvement of and access to health and education and other
activities that will be decided and developed by the communities themselves. The
goal is to sustainably move desperate communities to a trajectory of health and
livelihood enhancement and forest and ecosystem conservation. This is not a simple
job.
The basic framework of the project works like this. We have
a unit of funding, voluntary carbon offsets , which are generated from measuring
how much carbon dioxide we avoid creating due to preventing the logging of the
forest. In other words, if it wasn’t for this project the land would still be an active
logging concession and the harvesting of trees and forest would release carbon in to
the atmosphere. We sell carbon offsets to companies and governments who want to voluntarily* offset their own
carbon emissions via a project that brings biodiversity and community
enhancement benefits to those who live and use those forests on a daily basis. The
industry term for this is sometimes Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES); the people
living in the forest are paid for the value of the ecosystem services that
their intact forests provide to the planet. Often, western world PES falls under the Corporate Social
Responsibility (CSR) commitments of companies, so the idea that industries
should not independently profit without giving back to the planet which the business
impacts. CSR is purely voluntary,
but it is becoming an ethical industry norm.
Project communities are direct receivers of offset sales and
in each village we are deep in the process of setting up Local Development Committees
(CLDs in French) that will decide with their communities how project benefits
will be utilized. In the mean time we work off a document (called the Social
Terms of Reference) that was developed over many months of community
consultations. This document, a
legal agreement with 26 project area communities, identifies key areas for
funding. They pretty exclusively fall under improvement and access to
Education, Health and Agriculture/Markets, all critical needs for communities
in rural DRC.
In short our jobs are to run all project activities within our
assigned budget. Current activities include School Supply Distribution, a Mobile
Clinic and Mobile Vaccination program, Agricultural Alternative Demonstration
Gardens and School Building. Every 15th and 30th of the
month I send a marketing update to our investors. I will also post this here so
you can read our most current activities.
*Voluntary Carbon Market: Most
published data on the carbon market reflects compliance requirements
that have essentially commoditized carbon as a tradable good with a
fairly standardized price and quality. In parallel with this compliance
market, voluntary activity by businesses and individuals wanting to
reduce GHG emissions for reasons other than statutory compliance grew
substantially in 2005. This side of the market essentially represents
consumer demand for action on global warming and has the potential to be
an active driver of change as the international community struggles to
fully implement an effective climate change framework. While maturing
quickly, the voluntary market remains small, fragmented and
multi-layered.
Project facts you might be interested in learning:
-
There are between 32,000 (administrative number)
and 52,000 (internally calculated
number) people living in the project area;
-
The Bantu majority are actually immigrants to
the land from many hundreds of years ago, the native people, now called
pygmies, are severely marginalized and live on the very cusp of survival.
-
These people live between 26 main villages with
annex villages and farms, located in 3 very different tribal areas.
-
The local language is Lingala, a language that
was developed as a trading language and is actually no one’s native language.
-
The project employs over 80 full time local
staff. (Here are some of them.)
-
Most project travel is done by boat across the lake. This lake is the colour of Root Beer as
there is no clay in the soil to absorb the phenolic acid created by the
surrounding forest.
-
The project area is home to Bonobos (our closest
relatives) and is in the migratory corridor for forest elephants. We hope the
elephants decide to come back to hang out with us soon, our investors will be
thrilled when this happens.
-
People living in the villages in the project
area are in greater poverty, worse health and have less access to health care
and education than ever before since independence in 1960
-
This is one of the few countries of the world
were the grandparents remember a time of plenty and freedom and the
grandchildren know none of this.
-
The project undergoes an annual verification to
ensure that it is continuing the meet its project objectives (ie it is
positively affecting the communities and biodiversity in the areas), as well
we can utilize this information for future adaptive management.
