Does independent forest monitoring reduce forest infringement? Insights from Ghana’s collaborative mobile-based IFM system
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Independent Forest Monitoring (IFM) has been a feature of international effort to improve forest governance since its beginning in Cambodia in 1999. Today, IFM has gained traction and is an integral element of emerging forest governance schemes such as voluntary partnership agreement (VPA) which seeks to promote trade in legal timber between EU member countries and timber-producing countries in the global south. Within the VPA, IFM aims to complement the national due diligence mechanisms by flagging illegalities and providing opportunities for redress. Ghana is one such country where IFM is emerging within the country's VPA to address perennial forest governance challenges including corruption. This is often done through projects that develop and train communities on forest laws and provide them with mobile phones and appropriate software applications to monitor and flagged illegalities within their localities. Although this has been done over the years little insights are available on how this IFM architecture has performed. Such analysis is required to understand if IFM presents any hope for sanitizing the forest sector. On the back of this, this paper review community IFM monitoring reports identify key trends on forest illegalities and how they were addressed or otherwise. We found that the real-time monitoring platform has generated 747 alerts as of December 2019. Nearly 72% of them have been verified with most Social Responsibility Agreement (SRA) related infractions resulting in some 32 communities receiving SRA for the first time or on a continuous basis.
The study concludes that communities are now protecting their forest as a result of compliance from timber companies which has generated revenue in the form of social responsibility agreements for community projects. Managers of the forest reserves are now responsive to queries as a result of the digital nature of the alerts.
Keywords: Monitoring and data collection, Deforestation and forest degradation, Sustainable forest management, Governance
ID: 3470164