Avoided Deforestation (REDD) and Indigenous ... - Amazon Fund

has decimated much of their forest. Continued population growth (estimated at 4% per annum)
and increasing need for income as younger Surui become more deeply enmeshed in dominant
Western culture could represent a bleak future. With most of the surrounding forest already
converted to agriculture or grazing lands, the Surui are under increasing pressure to open up
their lands to similar activities – often through partnership or sharecropping arrangements that
provide capital for forest conversion.
Forest carbon finance that recognizes the value of standing forest could tip the balance
to maintaining this and other large tracts of indigenous forests in ways that favor biodiversity
and cultural survival. However, as with any new mechanism or any engagement with markets by
indigenous peoples, these sorts of REDD mechanisms are not without risk. Strong tenure rights,
improved governance, informed decision-making, as well as the indigenous people leading the
process, are essential, if these mechanisms are to strengthen, rather than further undermine,
indigenous rights and their future as peoples.
The risk of other alternatives, however, is surely at least as great in the case of the Surui
– loss of forests and territorial control driven by markets in products like beef, timber, and soy.
Throughout the Brazilian Amazon’s arc of deforestation, indigenous peoples are facing critical
and probably irreversible decisions. The Surui have chosen to work with a group of institutional
partners to explore the potential for REDD finance to contribute to protecting their forests, with
important lessons for other groups across the Amazon.
Partnership for REDD
With the support of Associação de Defesa Etnoambiental Kanindé, Aquaverde and
United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Surui initiated a reforestation
project in the Sete de Setembro indigenous territory, with the objective of recuperating 7% of
the deforested area that was identified by Metareilá and Kanindé. In late 2007, Almir Surui, the
internationally-recognized leader of the Surui, approached Forest Trends’ Communities and
Markets Program to seek support to increase the area of the reforestation. Forest Trends offered
to assist the Surui in exploring the possibility of funding their reforestation efforts through carbon
finance and began a feasibility assessment working with the Associação Metareilá do Povo Paiter-
Surui (Metareilá Association), an organization representing the Paiter-Surui. While the initial
focus was on generating credits through carbon sequestration from reforestation of the Surui
territory using native-species reforestation, the feasibility assessment concluded that a REDD
project was likely to prove a much more powerful tool for protecting the territory and its forests.
Av o i d e d d e f o re s t A t i o n (redd) A n d i n d i g e n o u s p e o p l e s: experiences, chAllenges A n d o p p o r t u n i t i e s in t h e A m A zo n c o n t e x t 111