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Opportunities and Challenges to Capturing the Multiple Potential Benefits of REDD+ in a Traditional Transnational Savanna-Woodland Region in West Africa

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Abstract

The REDD+ scheme of the United Nations intends to offer developing countries financial incentives to reduce the rates of deforestation and forest degradation for reducing global CO2 emissions. This is combined with building carbon stocks in existing wooded ecosystems and fostering other soil, biodiversity and water conservation objectives. Successful application of REDD+ to the Xylophone Triangle of West Africa faces substantial challenges and risks to both meeting REDD+ objectives and to the local people’s rights and livelihoods. The transnationality of the culturally coherent area requires collaboration of three national governments. The opportunities, however, are great to capitalize on the region’s biodiversity, the well-developed traditional ecological knowledge and the use of local medicinal plants as an integral part of the agro-ecosystem. Possibilities open to, not only sequester carbon, but also to increase the resilience of the ecosystem and of independent rural livelihoods in the face of climate change and globalization.

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Notes

  1. The Sahel countries: Gambia, Guinée-Bissau, Mauritania, Sénégal, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad, Cape Verde, www.cliss.bt, retrieved 4 June 2012.

  2. Mali received almost 1 million refugees from Cote d’Ivore and Burkina Faso in the period 2000–2002 (UNEP 2011).

  3. The main ethnic group in the dozobele and in the Xylophone Triangle.

  4. Those combined effects of REDD+ and biodiversity safeguards were recently elaborated in an African regional workshop in Cape Town organized jointly by the UNFCC and CBD conventions (UNFCC and CBD 2011). Submission by the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity to the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2011/smsn/igo/137.pdf.

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Acknowledgments

We thank K. Gerhardt and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on this manuscript.

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  1. School of Global Studies, Global Sustainability Studies, Human Ecology, University of Gothenburg, Box 700, 405 30, Gothenburg, Sweden

    E. Gunilla A. Olsson

  2. School of Global Studies, Global Sustainability Studies, Social Anthropology, University of Gothenburg, Box 700, 405 30, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Syna Ouattara

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Correspondence to E. Gunilla A. Olsson.

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Olsson, E.G.A., Ouattara, S. Opportunities and Challenges to Capturing the Multiple Potential Benefits of REDD+ in a Traditional Transnational Savanna-Woodland Region in West Africa. AMBIO 42, 309–319 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-012-0362-6

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