Page 33 - Governing Congo Basin Forests in a Changing Climate • Olufunso Somorin

General Introduction and Research Setting
In the Congo Basin, adaptation and mitigation policy developments in the
forest sector are at large in their infancy, and varied in the dynamics of the 1 policy debates. While official policies on adaptation and mitigation are yet to be
developed either regionally or nationally, policy debates among a broad range
of stakeholders on designing institutional arrangements, policy instruments
and defining implementation strategies are growing and finding their roots in
the much larger sustainable development thinking of the countries. Since 2005,
when most of the countries started producing their National Communications
to the UNFCCC, deliberations in each country (and regionally) among the governments (including various ministries and agencies), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), development partners, local communities and the private
sector have created a ‘policy space’ to negotiate adaptation and mitigation
strategies for the Congo Basin forests. The deliberations have explored
different types of rules and norms along with scenarios for institutional and management structures on how existing issues of local livelihoods, sustainable
forest management (SFM) and biodiversity conservation can be managed in
tandem with using the forests for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Despite the progress in deliberating the future of the Congo Basin forests under a changing climate, the policy actors still face the daunting challenge of policy design. Beyond climate change, the Congo Basin forest is already under pressure of balancing multiple imperatives: livelihoods, timber production and biodiversity conservation (Nkem et al., 2010). Designing policies to structure the management of the forests to respond to climate change adds an additional layer of complexity to the existing challenges confronting the sustainable management of the forests. Implicitly linked to the policy design challenge is also the question of how the existing forest governance initiatives and instruments such as forest decentralization, legality/sustainability standards and certification schemes, and conservation approaches, currently targeted at managing competing demands for forest goods and services, are capable of dealing with the additional climate burden.
More importantly, the Congo Basin region faces a policy challenge of how to contextualize many of the internationally defined decisions, agreement and strategies of adaptation and mitigation in the forest sector. Similar to other developing regions, the countries in the Basin are on the one hand fully aware
13