ITS EDUCATION ASIA ARTICLE

Bottom-up initiatives not a panacea

By Danny Harrington, MD ITS Education Asia

A report by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has found that there has been no aggregate deforestation reductions from rollout of community land titles in Indonesia yet. You can see the details in full in the report but it goes to show that we cannot assume that community-led projects will and must always be successful at achieving sustainability aims. To my mind it helps illustrate the importance of what the UN calls FUR – follow-up and reporting - so that impacts can be measured and assessed and then programmes can be changed if they are not working as intended.