Search

International audience; Understanding how carbon and biodiversity vary across tropical forest landscapes is essential to achieving effective conservation of their respective hotspots in a global context of high deforestation. Whether conservation strategies aimed at protecting carbon hotspots can provide co-benefits for biodiversity protection, and vice versa, highly depends on the extent to which carbon and biodiversity co-occur at the landscape level. We used field measurements and easily accessible explanatory variables to model aboveground carbon density, soil carbon density and tree alpha diversity (response variables) over a mostly forested area of northern Borneo. We assessed the spatial relationships between response variables and the spatial congruence of their hotspots. We found a significant positive relationship between aboveground carbon density and tree alpha diversity, and an above-than-expected-by-chance spatial congruence of their hotspots. Consequently, the protection of areas of high aboveground carbon density through financial mechanisms such as REDD+ is expected to benefit tree diversity conservation in the study area. On the other hand, relationships between soil carbon density and both aboveground carbon density and tree alpha diversity were negative and spatial congruences null. Hotspots of soil carbon density, mostly located in peatlands, therefore need specific conservation regulations, which the current moratorium on peat conversion in Indonesia is a first step toward.

International audience; Market based instruments for ecosystem services have become the norm since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment advanced the concept of "ecosystem services" as an international reference in global govemance. In this way, market based instruments for ecosystem services have increasingly been implemented within nation States. In this paper we analyze the role of environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in spreading market based instruments for ecosystem services. We put forward the hypothesis that: when a State cannot adequately defend its political and economic sovereignty to produce its own public policies, then the environmental NGOs are strong policy entrepreneurs, that are able to diffuse standards and policy instruments. When a State is more politically and economically capable, the role of environmental NGOs as policy entrepreneurs is more limited. To test this hypothesis, we analyze the diffusion of market based instruments for ecosystem services in three contrasted countries regarding State and NGOs' respective strength: Costa Rica, Madagascar and France. A comparison and analysis of the dissemination of the market based instruments for ecosystem services in different countries therefore seems highlk relevant for analyzing such transfers of international standards and policy instruments.

The originality of the REDD proposal is its incentives-based mechanism designed to reward the governments of developing countries for their performance in reducing deforestation as measured against a baseline. This mechanism is founded on the hypothesis that developing countries 'pay' an opportunity cost to conserve their forests and would prefer other choices and convert their wooden lands to other uses. The basic idea is, therefore, to pay rents to these countries to compensate for the anticipated foregone revenues. The reference to the theory of incentives (in its principal-agent version) is implicit but clear. In this REDD-related framework, the Government is taken as any economic agent who behaves rationally i.e. taking decisions after comparing the relative prices associated to various alternatives, then deciding to take action and implementing effective measures to tackle deforestation and shift the nation-wide development path. Such an approach ignores the political economy of the state, especially when dealing with "fragile" or even "failing" states facing severe but chronicle institutional crises, which are often ruled by "governments with private agendas" fuelling corruption. Two assumptions underlying the REDD proposal are particularly critical: (i) the idea that the government of such a state is in a position to make a decision to shift its development pathway on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis that anticipates financial rewards, and (ii) the idea that, once such a decision has been made, the "fragile" state is capable, thanks to the financial rewards, to implement and enforce the appropriate policies and measures which could translate into deforestation reduction. The first sections of the article discuss the pertinence of applying such a REDD version of the theory of incentives to Governments, and particularly to Governments in fragile states, with respect to the historical patterns and the practical way those states work. The last sections discuss the possibility of alternative architecture for REDD, focusing on policies and measures targeting the drivers of deforestation, and investments for intensifying agriculture, reforming land tenure and enhancing the functioning of the judicial system. We will show why incentive mechanisms should be used at another scale, for the benefits of local economic agents (companies, rural households, communities, etc.), and how a scaling down is likely to alleviate some of the constraints faced by incentives when dealing at Government level.