The Untapped Potential of Great Green Wall Voluntary Carbon Market Projects 2024

2.3 Disputed land tenure Unclear or disputed land ownership often creates barriers to the success of carbon projects, with the risk of projects becoming entangled in legal disputes that hinder development, reduce investor confidence and ultimately compromise long- term sustainability. Risk mitigation: Governments in GGW countries are making progress in recognizing and strengthening community land rights. Recent legal reforms across the region are increasingly recognizing customary user rights, traditionally held under customary law, in relation to land no longer held under state ownership.40 Legal reforms are essential in reducing land-tenure conflicts and promoting long-term environmental initiatives such as the GGW and VCM projects, which rely on clear and secure land rights to succeed. Customary tenure and user rights, when managed effectively, can also increase the participation and inclusion of women and young people. Community-based land-tenure agreements help restore 12,000 hectares BOX 3 For more than 20 years, Tree Aid has been working with communities across Burkina Faso. One of the key pillars of its work has been in forest governance – establishing long- term, community-based tenure systems for the protection, restoration and sustainable use of community-held forest resources. This work has laid a strong foundation for the development of fair and equitable livelihoods from non-timber forest products. Established long-term land-tenure agreements and community buy-in have allowed for advanced planning of planting areas, planting density, tree selection and protection. Representative community groups were established and trained in advance of the programme to ensure fully informed and organized village communities could take active decisions in the programme’s design. The programme identified 12,000 hectares of severely degraded forest land as requiring restoration and allocated surrounding farmland for agroforestry interventions by participating farmers. Two years into programme implementation, approximately 4 million trees have been grown in degraded forest sites.The programme was designed with a restoration budget, including initial community benefit payments, financed by a private wealth management company aiming to make a commitment to advanced, large-scale carbon credit purchasing. This “pre-sale” was sufficient to cover the full programme of restoration – with 70% of the funds going to local communities implementing the programme. Furthermore, the community retains an equity share of the credits produced in each carbon credit issuance. This ensures the long-term commitment of the community, which directly benefits from the success of forest restoration. Instead of simply benefitting from the initial pre-sale of carbon credits, the advantage to the community of holding a long- term equity share (worth an estimated 1 million credits) is that the community can benefit from the potential upside of appreciating market prices for high-quality carbon credits sold in future on the open market. Image credit: Tree Aid The Untapped Potential of Great Green Wall Voluntary Carbon Market Projects 15