The Southern Cardamom REDD+ project has intensified efforts to improve local infrastructure in the project area, provide financial assistance in response to COVID-19, and help secure land rights through demarcation. The Project has focused on helping communities by providing tangible public benefits, which in turn increases people’s understanding of how keeping the forest standing benefits them directly.
Small and large-scale projects are continuing to bring transformative benefits to communities throughout the project area during the first half of 2021, touching the lives of the entire community. Through the Carbon Trust and Locational Carbon Committees, large investments in water projects have been made and significant developments in community income generation activities have continued to prosper, having a meaningful, positive impact on community livelihoods. While these activities continue to flourish, the lack of rain and COVID-pressures are straining resources. These pressures have resulted in competition for resources and increased human-wildlife conflict, livestock incursions and poaching. The project team is working to resolve these challenges through focused community engagement, an illustration of the dynamic, adaptive management capacity that strong REDD+ projects can bring to support forest communities.
Unlike the Covid-19 challenges that educators, students and families faced this last year, the Kasigau Corridor REDD+ Project has seen continued investment and progress in educating local community members.
Fish have been a traditional and primary source of food and essential nutrients for communities surrounding Lake Mai- Ndombe. For decades, the lake was teeming with fish caught by local fishermen.
Defending the traditional rights of Indigenous Bunong people by securing community land titles is a core conservation strategy of the Keo Seima REDD+ project.
Resilience and adaptive management in the face of COVID: The project’s key stakeholders – conservation agreement signatories, the protected area coffee cooperative, rangers, and technicians – continue to be supported by the project, and have found a way to maintain the implementation of crucial field activities.
The Keo Seima REDD+ Project lies on the frontier of a deforestation wave that has devastated the surrounding landscape in recent years – including the total loss of the nearby Snoul Wildlife Sanctuary. In 2020, the repatriation of over 100,000 Cambodians working overseas due to COVID-19 put even greater pressure on the forest, increasing internal migration as people sought opportunities to meet their urgent livelihoods needs.
In 2020, the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project continued to face, and face down, an unrelenting series of threats to the forest and its wildlife, while providing communities with crucial support in the midst of the COVID pandemic. Ranging from small scale poaching to large scale corrupt land-grabbing, the project has tirelessly defended the highly threatened Cardamom forest.
Located in a remote 300,000 hectare rainforest area in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Mai Ndombe REDD+ Project provides essential basic social services for over 50,000 people in 28 villages. Already challenged by the remoteness of the project, poor infrastructure, and other day to day implementation issues, in 2020 the project had additionally to overcome the new challenges brought by the COVID pandemic. Yet the project successfully faced down these daunting challenges and made breakthrough accomplishments that advance the project toward durable conservation success.
In 2020, the Kasigau Corridor REDD+ Project continued to deliver unwavering impact for the forest, wildlife, and community, delivering social services and economic resiliency in a time of economic collapse. The world’s first REDD+ project, Kasigau continues to deliver groundbreaking results for, and in partnership with, the 120,000 community members living within the project area.