Posted on February, 10 2016

In Guyana, WWF has worked with partner NGOs, the government, and the indigenous Wai Wai people to develop a community measurement, reporting and verification (CMRV) system. This will feed into the country’s national monitoring, which enable it to receive REDD+ payments from Norway. Community members have learned to measure trees in forest plots, calculate carbon stocks, as well as record and monitor other indicators such as water quality, health and well-being –skills that enable them to better monitor and manage their resources and to take action when those resources are threatened.
 
We caught up with WWF-Guyana CMRV consultants Roxroy Bollers and Shurland Davis to find out more.
 
Why is it important for the Wai Wai to monitor their territory?
 
RB: Because they are so isolated they don’t face as many threats to their community, most importantly in terms of mining [the leading driver of deforestation in Guyana]. One aspect of importance would be for them to keep monitoring their well-being. This can provide them as a community with information that would help determine sickness trends or possible causes of reoccurring sicknesses along with helping the council to make other decisions in relation to development etc. of the community.
 
SD: Yes, because well-being brought up a lot of indicators in health, leadership, and in nutrition. So with the information we have now, we can to say that such and such is happening, and this is the reason for that. Diarrhea was one of the health problems there, since some people treated the water while others didn’t, so we can use this to educate people about treating water or ways to dispose of garbage. Another point I would like to highlight is that people would know where their land boundaries are, so if others are undertaking illegal activities in their title area, they would know what resources are available to stop them.
 
What lessons have you learnt?
 
RB: Consultation with the community should be clear – explaining the framework of the project and seeing how this can fit in with what they have. Also that having the community council and members informed of every step of the project would make working along with the community easier and less problematic. This will help both the project implementers and the community achieve their goals.
 
SD: One of the things that we can also take from the Wai Wai project is that in the Wai Wai community the people work together. Everything they did in this project they did together, and working together they are able to achieve multiple things. I think that’s something we can also encourage in the other projects, so that they can also meet their objective and goals. Working together – without having internet – we built a community-based platform where all data was kept and analyzed at a community level.  That was a big plus for us to be able to quickly give information to the village.
 
What are the next steps?
 
RB: Currently, we are looking at setting up a pilot project in another community to develop a methodology where other communities in Guyana can opt in to the LCDS, the Low Carbon Development Strategy that the government has laid out.
 
I’m hoping that as we go on into the other communities we can develop a tool that is flexible enough and able to adapt to all the communities within Guyana, and by extension, around Guyana. Hopefully we can have multiple working CMRV projects in these communities, and the information collected can be used to influence the management plan and better enable the community members to develop themselves and work together.
 
SD: I would like to see more projects being replicated in other regions, with people on the ground within their communities doing the verification for the government. For example, communities collect information regarding the drivers of deforestation, which could influence the government in their decisions to update the satellite imagery platform. That would help the community, the government as a whole, to understand CMRV. And maybe we can influence other communities in other countries to have similar projects there. Also, members that worked on the CMRV project are better equipped than before, and now they have the capacity to work on similar projects.