NTFP and REDD at the Fourth World Conservation Congress: What is In and What is Not

Abstract

While the Fourth World Conservation Congress (WCC) was effective in bringing together different participants to discuss climate change, the discussion of potential mitigation mechanisms was dominated by the Reducing Emissions for Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) initiative, to the exclusion of other possibilities, including Non-timber Forest Products (NTFP)-there was a notable lack of venues for discussing the relevance of NTFP projects for biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and poverty alleviation. This paper contrasts the treatment of NTFP and REDD at the WCC and discusses how the exclusion of NTFP from these discussions will probably affect its inclusion in the conservation agenda and the future design and funding of conservation projects. The paper also shares some ideas on unexplored complementarities between NTFP and REDD for climate change mitigation, showing that an opportunity was lost at the Fourth WCC for promoting NTFP as an additional market-based approach to conservation.