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My involvement in community-based carbon management started one night in 1993 when I was awakened in Edinburgh by a phone call from someone at Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Ecología (INE) informing me that the institute had approved funding to investigate the feasibility of supporting agroforestry and forest restoration in indigenous areas of Chiapas using carbon service payments. The idea of using carbon payments for afforestation and forest conservation was then quite new. Some grandiose schemes for massive afforestation programs to balance the global carbon cycle had been postulated, but little had been done to examine the practical issues of how carbon payments could be used as an effective financial mechanism from the farmer’s and rural community’s perspectives. I had become interested in the idea of using ecosystem payments to encourage more sustainable land use as a result of working for peasant farmers’ cooperatives at the receiving end of government and for World Bank forestry and agroforestry programs . These “top-down” packages never seemed to deliver what was needed, when it was needed, where it was needed. Our local extension team had yearned for more flexible access to finance and skills to enable them to implement things that the communities themselves had decided were necessary and feasible. This initial study, undertaken by scientists at Mexico’s Colegio de la Frontera Sur, John Grace and me at the University of Edinburgh, and technicians from a regional credit union in Chiapas, sought to provide answers to some fairly basic case study Reflections on Community-Based Carbon Forestry in Mexico richard tipper 308 questions. Would farmers want to undertake activities on the basis of a carbon service agreement? What types of forestry activities did farmers and communities wish to pursue, and what carbon benefits could be achieved? What level of payment would be needed and at what intervals? How could carbon services from many individual farmers or groups be aggregated in a way that could be taken to “buyers” of the service? The results of the study were published in a government report and a scienti fic paper that was presented at interminable workshops on what was then the theoretical concept of “joint implementation.”1 But “the proof of the pudding was in the eating”—literally. I was invited to lunch by Max Mosley, president of the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, the organization responsible for running Formula 1 motor sport. By the time coffee was served I had an offer to take back to the farmers in Mexico. The project started as an internal budget line within the Unión de Credito Pajal, with about thirty farmers from six Tzeltal and Tojolobal communities participating . We soon realized that if this were going to be done properly, we needed a more formal system to ensure that we could keep track of successive sales of carbon , ensure proper consultation, planning, and implementation at each location, and provide adequate support to the farmers. The UK Department for International Development’s Forestry Research Programme (now terminated) obliged by supporting the development of what is now known as the Plan Vivo system. The Plan Vivo system offers planning guidelines for farmers and technical support teams; technical specifications providing straightforward, measurable indicators of carbon uptake for various types of forestry systems; standard carbon service agreements between farmers and a central trust fund; a governance structure and rules for the central trust fund; procedures for monitoring progress in making payments ; and databases for keeping track of carbon and money. Much of the time since 1997 has been spent refining and developing this system to meet the requirements of the expanding voluntary carbon market. Institutionally , the project developed through the formation of an independent trust fund, Fondo Bioclimatico, and later a process for issuing Plan Vivo certificates from a central Plan Vivo agency run by a United Kingdom–based NGO. From 2001 the project became financially independent of development assistance, and it is now a carbon-offset-financed enterprise. In 2005 the project encompassed some 900 individual farmers plus several large groups in 43 communities representing 8 ethnic groups from different parts of Chiapas and Oaxaca. Through sales of offsets of more than 250,000 tonnes of CO2, it has established around 1,000 hectares of new agroforestry and forestry systems and brought 4,000 hectares of communal forest into conservation management. Over this time there have been various flirtations with the formal CDM system . The attractions of a large and...

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