New black gold : how can carbon markets work for forest communities?

Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) could enable some of the poorest forest communities to be paid to conserve and protect their forest resources by companies seeking to offset carbon emissions. This project examines the REDD mechanism from a pro-poor perspective, particularly from the standpoint of local communities, and assesses knowledge gaps among community residents and leaders about carbon trading to avoid deforestation – do they understand and appreciate the rules as they have been developed through a distant global discourse? All the communities had experienced a natural disaster within the last 10 years.