1. Recognizing community tenure rights over forest lands is a low-cost way to promote better forest management and reduce deforestation, with costs ranging from $0.05 to $9 per hectare on average. 2. Securing these tenure rights is important for REDD+ programs to work effectively by giving local communities incentives to conserve forests, yet the full costs of REDD+ programs are still unknown. 3. Recognizing tenure rights is a complex political process but methodologies exist, and it is feasible and important to scale up recognition of community rights over the 350 million hectares of forest lands they already own or manage.

1. Securing rights as a mitigation measure: The costs of recognizing tenure rights & carbon benefits Jeffrey Hatcher, Rights and Resources Prepared for the conference “Rights, Forests and Climate Change” Convened by The Rainforest Foundation Norway and the Rights and Resources Initiative Oslo, Norway | October 15-17, 2008

3. Secure community rights make better forest management possible Insecure tenure a known, but difficult to quantify, driver of deforestation (Eliasch Review 2008) Communities invest at least US$1.3 - 2.6 billion a year in forest conservation in developing countries (Molnar 2004) Indigenous Peoples have proven that they promote permanence of carbon in forest (Nepstad et al. 2007) Increased size of and greater authority in community forests leads to better outcomes for carbon, livelihoods and biodiversity (Agrawal 2008) Insecure, unclear and unrecognized community tenure rights can lead to conflict (De Koning 2008) Many mitigation options available with secure rights

8. Securing community forest tenure rights is a fundamental step to mitigating climate change and it is a relatively cost-effective one

10. o What do the costs of recognizing historic community tenure look like? These cases represent more than 8 million hectares of community territories World Bank costs for individual titling (per parcel): Philippines $51 (as at Mar 2008) Laos $18 (as at Dec 2007) Indonesia $32 (as at Oct 2007) Cambodia $8.50 (as at June 2007)

12. Different costs estimates for REDD

15. Thank you