Our Biodiversity, Ecosystem Services and Climate Change program follows a traditional multidisciplinary research leading to practical policy advice. We believe that the sustainable management of natural resource is vita we are to ensure our ongoing social, economic and environmental well being. We help build local people’s capacity to manage their natural resource base in a manner that maintains and safeguards its value for future generations. Our success in this area is that ANSAB has promoted and helped communities apply international standards that have put Nepal at the forefront of the Community Forestry (CF) practices and approaches.
ANSAB’s diverse work in the field of natural resources cuts across the following areas:
Forest Certification
ANSAB introduced and successfully piloted Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification in the community forests of Nepal from 2002. As a result, Federation of Community Forestry Users, Nepal (FECOFUN), which represents over 14, 000 Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) managing about 20% Nepal’s forest, has received FSC forest management group certification. Currently 21 CFUGs covering 14,086 hectares of forests in Dolakha and Bajhang are in the certification pool. This led to Nepal becoming the first county in Asia and the fifth in the world to obtain FSC certification for Non Timber Forest Products (NTFP). Besides, we facilitated 8 forest based enterprises to get FSC Chain of Custody Certification.
ANSAB not only facilitated the auditing, but also helped to train Nepalese FSC certification auditors to make the certification process more financially viable for the highly forest dependent developing nations.
Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES)
We assist communities to gain increased economic incentives by assessing ecosystem services such as biodiversity conservation, watershed management, recreation and tourism. Our goal is to create incentives for local communities to conserve forest resources and maintain ecosystem services. We support innovation and propose to pilot a payment system to market carbon through clean development mechanisms and distribute resulting funds to user groups of the Community Forests.
Agroforestry
ANSAB promotes promising agroforestry practices with a special focus on poor and landless individuals who may benefit from these systems. The promising agroforestry practices help to conserve biodiversity, maintain ecosystem services and help attain poverty reduction goals.
Community Forestry
ANSAB promotes local initiatives for sustainable forest management and biodiversity conservation by forming and strengthening local forest user groups (FUGs), developing of forest management plans and enhancing local capacities in implementing forest management efforts. Building on the past enterprise-oriented initiatives for community forest management, we focused, in 2005, on strengthening the capacity of forest user groups and their federations. We also worked to improve the forest management practices, maintaining sustainable forest management framework and biodiversity conservation.
In 2005, ANSAB work directly with 112 forest users groups and 11 district FECOFUN chapters. This effort helped to conserve and manage 80,525 ha of forest and meadows and provided 13,167 households with forest products (for subsistence and commercial purposes) and ecosystem services. Other planned activities with the long term sustainability implications include improving the capacity of local stakeholders, such as district forest officers; ensuring improvements in pro-poor decision making and benefit distribution; guaranteeing transparency in account keeping and fund mobilization; and enhancing knowledge, skills and attitude for sustainable harvesting and conservation.