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I am a Ph.D. student in UC Berkeley’s Environmental Science,
Policy, and Management program, where I study REDD programs. My
fieldwork takes place on the Pacific coast of Colombia, where USAID
is supporting a large-scale REDD+ project among Afro-Colombian and
Indigenous communities.

I am concerned about California’s interest in including
international offsets in AB32 because REDD poses a risk to the
people in the communities involved, will be more costly than
presently recognized, and is likely to pose a serious threat to the
legitimacy of the entire AB32 effort.  
 
As you have already received much feedback on the white paper, I
will focus my comments on the elements of concern that I see most
clearly in my own fieldwork. 
 
To offer a little context, the region where I work is made up of
some of the wettest and most biodiverse tropical forests in the
world, on the Pacific coast of Colombia. Most of the land has been
granted to Afro and indigenous communities in collective land
titles over the last 20 years as part of Colombia’s 1991
Constitution, which focused on pluriethnic rights. USAID has been
working in the region for many years through a sequence of
projects, all of which have involved some “alternative development”
efforts, whether as an alternative to deforestation or to coca
growing – or both. 
 
In 2011, USAID began a program called BIOREDD+ in the region. It
aimed to incorporate one million hectares of land under collective
title in the Pacific into a series of REDD+ projects that would
offer alternative, sustainable development and the promise of
funding via carbon credits down the road in exchange for reduced
deforestation. The program also now incorporates some projects of
reforestation on land destroyed by gold mining. Presently, 19
communities are involved in projects that have been validated, and
are entering an 18 month phase in which they are aiming toward
project verification that could allow them to begin generating
carbon credits and receiving funding on the voluntary market. I
want to be clear that the program is not, to date, part of any
jurisdictional REDD effort, though this would be the aim as
Colombia further develops its program. 
 
Other than the jurisdictional issue, however, this program would
seem to be an ideal REDD project in many ways: USAID has a long
history in the region and knows the communities well; the projects
are taking place on collectively titled lands where processes of
free, prior, informed consent are required under law and have been
observed in the four-year development of these projects; and the
communities are not being asked to take on the expensive technical
costs of REDD, but can rather rely on USAID to fund carbon
measurements and complex social, economic, and ecological analyses
required for determining deforestation projections. Indeed, USAID
invested some $26 million over the first four years of the program
to get to the point of validation.
 
My time in the field suggests that this program, however, suffers
from some major challenges, many of which much other research
confirms are not unique to the Colombian context. 
 
The BIODREDD+ program, like REDD as a whole, is clearly the result
of a kind of magical thinking about “development” that has yielded
remarkably few encouraging results over the last fifty years, and
indeed has resulted instead in a well-documented series of perverse
consequences. The idea is essentially that if the “developed” world
can give enough money and technical support to some entity in the
“developing” world, a desired result can be realized. The politics
of REDD in the international climate change context are such that
many have set aside these decades of experience in a naively
hopeful view that somehow this time will be different, that with
enough hand-holding by UN-REDD and the Green Climate Fund toward
readiness and enough emphasis on safeguards, that the wide-ranging
goals of REDD+ are realizable. 
 
I will not attempt to summarize here all of the problems with these
assumptions, but a few are worth bearing in mind in the context of
REDD. First, the local level where REDD projects are taking place
have just as many political and personal complexities as those
places that are trying to pay them to offset their own emissions.
The main difference is usually that what is in law in these places
has little bearing on what actually occurs on the ground. A solid
primer on what this means in the field is James Ferguson’s The
Anti-Politics Machine of 1991. 
 
In my field work, there are community leaders that have accepted
REDD on behalf of the community because they think the funding
associated with it from USAID can bring some temporary jobs
(including for them and their families), but they have little
belief that they will be able to have any impact on deforestation.
This is because, though they have title and officially are supposed
to have control over the territory granted them by the state, many
armed outsiders live from entering their territories and cutting
wood. Additionally, they are understandably loathe to take away one
of the only livelihoods of their community – a community where most
live on less than $2 a day. It would be wonderful if USAID money
could pay for some extra boats for those who cut wood to also fish,
or to teach them to plant and harvest cacao, but few are likely to
leave timber harvesting if it is more lucrative in the immediate
and is what they have done their whole lives. In an area where, as
in many parts of the world, those fighting on behalf of clean water
and intact forests have been killed for their work, leaders are
also very cautious about confronting the armed actors that are
financing these activities or taking wood out themselves.  As in
many forest regions around the world, there is also little capacity
or will for enforcement by state actors, who are also risking their
lives – and those of their families - if they decide to take
action. In the communities where I work, the “state” is generally
seen as providing little and, when it does enter, as either
providing goods that unneeded, putting restrictions on their
traditional ways of life, or threatening the communities by putting
them in the middle of battles between the military and the armed
actors. 
 
There are instances of community leaders in this region
deliberately keeping certain members of the communities in the dark
about development projects in order to save the benefits for their
supporters or friends – they become their own personal pork
projects, in other words.  As a result, though these projects have
all technically gone through an FPIC process, it is hard to find
people outside of the leadership board who actually have heard of
REDD or know what it is. When people do know what REDD is, they
describe it consistently to me as the project where “gringos come
to take out oxygen.” 
 
Yet such an interpretation of REDD can hardly come as a surprise.
Not only is there a long history of gringos and Europeans taking
key resources from this region, but REDD is extremely challenging
to understand, even for those with Master’s and Ph.D.’s who have
worked in the field for years – it is a small wonder there is
suspicion around it. Even where well-educated leaders have really
tried to bring the whole community in to understand what REDD is
about, it is hard to find a community member who can explain
climate change or what trees have to do with it. Trees and the
territories they are on have a very different meaning for them than
what REDD applies to them. While FPIC is therefore an important
step in concept, it is laughable to suggest that everyone in these
communities, many illiterate, almost none having surpassed high
school, are going to be capable of giving informed consent on REDD
and all of the highly technical elements that accompany it. 
 
Additionally, this extreme complexity of REDD comes with high
costs. As noted, USAID spent $26 million on BIOREDD over four
years, and yet there is almost nothing to be seen on the ground for
it today. Many have noted changing beliefs about REDD+
internationally – how, encouraged by very limited assessments like
those of McKinsey and Nicholas Stern, it was initially seen as this
cheap, quick bridge to reduce warming while the gritty question of
industrial emissions was being sorted out at national and
international scales, and how upon implementation attempts, the
complexities and additional costs began to expose the
ridiculousness of this initial, poorly calculated notion (see the
Global Landscapes Forum). That there is cautious optimism around
REDD today seems true, and seems to be where the ARB is presently.
I would suggest that this optimism is not only naïve, but
distracting and expensive, and therefore an actual threat to making
real progress on climate change mitigation.  These costs assume
that having the right policies in place in these developing
countries, coupled with enough money to actually replace benefits
from cutting wood, can make REDD viable. What decades of experience
shows is that laws on the books mean remarkably little on the
ground, and that the money will probably not be used to replace
these activities. If they do in one place, leakage is very likely
to result. In the region I am working in, such leakage is seen most
obviously in the illegal mining industry. Where the state comes in
to crack down on one major mining spot, one shortly thereafter
finds new mining projects spread around into nearby river basins.
Whac-a-mole is an apt metaphor for this situation – with a
slow-reacting “whac-er,” using a broken mallet, who probably has
some benefactors in the mole community in charge. 
 
Local suspicion about REDD, and differing views on REDD within
these communities can also be highly divisive. REDD, if actually
implemented as in project design documents, would almost always
carry high costs for some and changes in access to resources. It
may also lead to violence and fear where, as noted earlier, leaders
are asked to put their lives on the lines to halt deforestation in
their communities. Whether this atmosphere of division and threat
is conducive to achieving real, permanent deforestation reductions
is an important question. At the same time, 
 
Another central question about REDD’s effectiveness over the medium
term is whether REDD really addresses the biggest drivers of
deforestation, and it emerges in the context of my field site. As I
have suggested above, REDD in the context of my communities is
aimed at getting some of the poorest, most disenfranchised members
of Colombian society, to spend time and effort to stop one of the
most lucrative activities available in their community, a community
which still has one of the richest forests in the country. At the
same time, across most of Colombia’s Andes, huge swaths of
previously forested lands are now home to pastures that house a few
trees and a few cattle, owned by some of the wealthiest people in
the nation. Much of the wealth of these individuals has come from a
long history of extractivism from these Afro and indigenous lands –
often using the slave labor of Afro and indigenous people – and
from deforestation and concentration of lands in the Andes region.
This relatively poor use of land to benefit the few has therefore
been the biggest driver of deforestation in Colombia historically.
There have also been big companies, some foreign, some Colombian,
which have been responsible for the biggest deforestation in the
Pacific – this extraction was actually one of the main impetuses
for Afro community organization to fight for collective title to
their territories. More recently, there are other key drivers of
deforestation, such as palm oil and rubber production (also funded
by USAID), coca movement into forests in order to hide from
fumigation planes (another US-funded project), mining, and sprawl.
 
But the Afro and indigenous communities, many of which have no
potable water or basic sanitation facilities, have clearly
benefitted little from whatever wealth is created from these
deforestation drivers, and their individual impacts on the land
have been relatively few. That is not to say that there is not
cutting of trees on their land, or to fall into the “ecological
native” narrative common in this field, but simply to question
whether asking them to not use their resources for their benefit,
or to put their heads on the line to halt all deforestation on
their territories, is fair given the history of and current main
drivers of deforestation in the country. If they put in a lot of
effort to stop deforestation and develop carbon credits on their
land, they still face threats from the outside that they have
little control over because of the realities of economic power in
their country. If the state looks the other way while a business
comes into the Afro territories again uninvited and begins cutting
their trees again – a very real scenario that has occurred on
multiple occasions - it is the community that suffers as a result,
that loses valuable credits or must put a greater portion of every
credit into the kind of insurance pool that the white paper
describes.  
 
This question of equality in the REDD debate applies, obviously, in
the context of offsets in general – is it right for the gringos who
have so long benefitted from industrialization and the cheap
exploitation of resources from these developing countries to ask
these communities to not have the right to benefit in the same
ways? The idea that money for alternative development is equivalent
to what they might do with these trees or this land is one of the
great falsehoods behind REDD, and is frankly offensive to those who
desire sovereignty over their lands. 
 
There is much more I might say – about fundamental problems with
additionality, perverse incentives in the certification process,
and the near-impossibility of effectively assessing leakage - but I
believe this gives you a sense for some of the ground-level
realities that come to bear in REDD. Even in the most well-run of
jurisdictional REDD programs, I believe ARB is likely to encounter
some of these challenges. I fear that to really do this well, as is
suggested in the White Paper, ARB is going to have to be far more
engaged than it has the resources to be, and that such engagement
raises important sovereignty issues. The challenges in
international REDD cannot be equated to work with Quebec or work on
domestic offsets. The forests that REDD is most focused on are in
extremely different legal, cultural, and historic contexts – not
only from Quebec and the US, but from one another. The idea of
creating tradable credits out of these extremely complex, unique,
and often highly volatile political and economic contexts is one
that is highly problematic, and one which I fear will cost ARB, the
world, the people of the communities involved, and the people of
California far more than is presently recognized in the White
Paper. 
 
I am happy to talk more about any of these points, or any other
aspects of REDD I have not had the opportunity to cover in this
brief summary of what I am finding. I am also happy to provide more
good resources about early REDD pilots and what we might learn for
REDD from past conservation and development experiences. Thanks for
considering these thoughts. As a Californian, I want us to continue
to be a leader in the climate change fight, and I hope that these
experiences will help us to do so.

Best regards,

Lauren S. Withey
University of California, Berkeley 
Environmental Science, Policy and Management