The Role of Africa’s Forests in Advancing the Global Climate Change Mitigation Agenda

Lecture Abstract

Avoided deforestation and reduced forest degradation in low-income countries is hailed as one of the lowest cost options for mitigating climate change. The premise is simple, get people to stop clearing forests and woodlands for agriculture and relying exclusively on biomass as a sole source of household energy, and the sequestered carbon will slow the advance of global warming. Policy makers, donors, and governments have implemented this agenda in sub-Saharan Africa primarily through two mechanisms, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation projects (REDD+) and the verification of carbon offsets associated with household energy projects that shift people from biomass to more efficient technologies or clean fuels. Twenty years after the idea of forest-based climate mitigation emerged, what do we know about its impacts on forests and on the people impacted by these policies? The evidence on the impact of REDD+ projects in Africa is mixed and illustrates the very stark trade-offs required for people in rural areas to change their livelihood strategies to activities that do not require new land. The promise of household energy transitions as a mechanism for avoiding deforestation is tempered by evidence that biomass fuel savings are exaggerated and by scrutiny of certification systems that overstate avoided deforestation. Are we asking too much of forests and people in places where there are few alternative livelihood strategies to farming and where markets for new household energy technologies and fuels are weak or missing? Should we reconsider the potential of forests as a low-cost mitigation option given what we know now?

Speaker Biography

Pam Jagger is a global leader in interdisciplinary population and environment research. She is an applied political economist whose research focuses on the dynamics of poverty and environment interactions in low-income countries. She leads the interdisciplinary Forest Use, Energy, and Livelihoods (FUEL) Lab, and is the Director of the National Science Foundation funded Energy Poverty PIRE in Southern Africa (EPPSA), a 5-year collaborative program to support research and training on the topic of energy access in Southern Africa. FUEL Lab research is currently organized around three themes: environment and livelihoods, environmental governance, and energy poverty. The first theme focuses on quantifying the role of forests and the other environmental resources in household consumption and income generation, and understanding how contributions change in response to land use land cover change, implementation of conservation and development projects, and population dynamics. The second theme examines the livelihood impacts of changes in environmental governance and institutions on access to environmental goods and services. The third theme examines household energy access including understanding the effectiveness of interventions designed to mitigate energy poverty and improve access to electricity and cleaner cooking and novel research questions related to the effects of land cover and land use change on energy access and human health. Dr. Jagger has worked as a policy research scholar with the World Bank, Resources for the Future, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the Center for International Forestry Research.