What does “strong community engagement” look like? An example from Ponterra’s Azuero Restaura Project
By Dr. Nan Pond and Kim (Cesafsky) DuBose , and Dr. Brian Clough
What does it mean for a carbon project to have “strong community engagement”?
In Voluntary Carbon Market 2.0, carbon projects have to be about more than just reducing emissions.?
It is critical to understand their impact on local communities—the people living in and around the place where the project occurs.
If you look through the documentation of a carbon project, most will make claims about their “strong community engagement.” But it’s one thing to say you’re engaging local communities, and it’s another to achieve it.?
Projects that effectively engage local communities will do things like:
A commitment to fair, transparent community engagement is necessary to ensure that carbon projects don’t adversely impact local communities.?
Members of our Rubicon Carbon Science Team recently visited Ponterra's Azuero Restaura Project, which we think is genuinely delivering on this vision. This post will show how we use science-backed due diligence, guided by our Rubicon Carbon Integrity Framework, to be confident that the Azuero Restuara Project will achieve success through partnerships with local communities.?
The Azuero Peninsula: A Microcosm of the Challenges with Tropical Forest Carbon Projects
Carbon projects are inextricably linked to the people, places, and ecosystems where they are developed. Entering the Azuero Peninsula, you can see all of the hallmarks of a tropical ecosystem that has been degraded by years of intensive grazing: irregularly shaped patches of brown and yellow rangeland, hillsides shaped like stairs, and the occasional remnant stand of the tropical dry forest that once dominated the landscape.?
This patchwork appearance, which covers many tropical landscapes, shows why community engagement is so vital to the success of carbon projects. It results from decades of negotiating and renegotiating boundaries among hundreds of smallholder farmers and ranchers—a process that often lacks a clear record. In the case of the Azuero Peninsula, it is also driven by policy, as the mortgage terms many landowners are under require that they keep land clear for cattle grazing. With many stakeholders and such a complex land use history, it’s clear that community engagement is necessary to ensure that Ponterra’s project will be successful.?
Image: Dr. Nan Pond, Vice President of Nature-Based Research and Monitoring, and Kim Dubose, Director of Science and Sustainability Operations, on their first day in the Azuero Peninsula, en route to a project planting site. Note the grazing lands, interspersed with small patches of native vegetation, in the background.
Local communities are deeply embedded in the day-to-day operations of the Azuero Restaura Project.
When assessing how a project engages local communities, one of the main things we look for is whether and how local stakeholders are involved in the project’s operations. If the project developer is staffed by non-locals, especially by people who might be spending little time on the ground, that’s a big red flag. Fortunately, in the case of the Azuero Restaura project, it’s quite the opposite, as members of local communities are directly guiding the design and development of the project.?
Before discussing how, let’s take a step back and discuss the project. Ponterra works with hundreds of local landowners and smallholder farmers to restore 10,000 hectares of degraded land into native tropical dry forests. They do this by planting over six million trees of 75 species native to the region. Executing such an ambitious restoration project is a full-scale operation, with teams of foresters, tree growers, nursery managers, and community leaders who can help network with landowners and hundreds of other stakeholders dependent on the project landscape.?
Local leadership is essential to the project’s success. The Azuero Restaura project is built on strong staff with deep experience in the area. Two key leaders of the Ponterra Project are Nursery Manager José Deago and Community Liason Officer Sarah Spalding.?
José is a scientist with over a decade of experience leading similar restoration projects in Panama. His expertise in tropical ecology has been honed through years of research with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and other international partners. Jose has also led other successful large-scale planting operations, giving him a unique experience that contributes to the success of the Azuero Restaura project. That the project is managed by leaders who understand the region's ecology while having the finger on the pulse of the local landowner community raises our confidence that it is creating the right conditions for long-term success.?
Images (above & below): Sarah is attending a community engagement session, and José is discussing the logic behind Ponterra’s selected tree species. The right mix of species is critical to ensuring that a restoration project is well adapted to local environmental conditions.?
A seasoned translator and interpreter with over 20 years of experience internationally and in Panama, Sarah specializes in bridging linguistic and cultural gaps to facilitate effective communication, having worked with prominent clients such as the UN, FBI, and international NGOs, focusing on humanitarian aid, refugee support, and promoting personal and collective development. Sarah’s expertise in effective, collaborative engagement with rural communities is critical to ensuring that concerns are addressed and provides a bridge between local stakeholders and project operations.?
Creating new economic opportunities?
Direct engagement of community members in the project’s day-to-day operations is crucial but insufficient to demonstrate strong community engagement. After all, even a large and ambitious project like Azuero Restaura employs a limited number of people. When evaluating projects under the Rubicon Carbon Integrity Framework, another thing we look for is whether the project is creating economic opportunities within the community, and this is another place where Ponterra’s project shines.?
The most important part of community engagement is ensuring long-term financial benefit for everyone involved. Ponterra’s revenue-sharing model with participating landowners is the centerpiece of this approach. Landowners enter lease agreements with Ponterra, under which they agree to transition away from slash-and-burn cattle ranching and restore their land with native forests instead. With this model, they receive direct payments for participating in the program while maintaining land ownership. This approach creates stable revenue streams for rural landowners while ensuring that land tenure rights remain with community members rather than being turned over to an international corporation. Given the importance of community members maintaining land ownership, both as a basic human rights issue and for the success of ecosystem restoration projects, we think this is an excellent model.?
Beyond the benefits of revenue sharing, Ponterra’s community-focused approach to growing trees creates more job opportunities across the Azuero Peninsula. Our team had a chance to visit one of the community nurseries that supply tree seedlings for the restoration project. Ponterra is deploying a distributed nursery model, where saplings are started at their main production site and then transferred to community nurseries, where they are grown and cared for until they are ready for planting. These rural nurseries are strategically located near restoration sites, which allows for smooth and efficient planting operations.
Just as importantly, the community nurseries offer significant economic benefits for the rural communities in which they are located. The community nurseries handle a high volume of saplings, creating many more jobs in places where they are badly needed than if they ran just a single production nursery. Community members working at the nurseries receive fixed, regular payments. This creates a more stable stream of income than if they were paid in a lump sum, which is often what ends up happening when community members are engaged to grow trees for restoration projects. Beyond the economic benefits, the presence of the nurseries in rural communities helps engage more people in the project, even if they aren’t landowners themselves.?
Thousands of tree seedlings are grown at Ponterra’s main production site.?
Ponterra employees loading saplings that will be transported to a community nursery. A network of local nurseries creates more efficient operations and brings jobs to more remote communities in the Azuero Peninsula.?
What else we look for when assessing community engagement
We highlighted two examples of how Azuero Restaura is excelling at engaging local communities, both of which we had a chance to observe firsthand during our site visit. Of course, other questions must be answered before we can be confident that projects are setting themselves up for long-term success. Some of these that are also included in the Rubicon Carbon Integrity Framework are:
Our site visit was the culmination of months of extensive research and due diligence on the Azuero Restaura project, where we worked with Ponterra and other partners to answer these questions.?
Nan inspects recently planted seedlings at one of Ponterra’s restoration sites. One of the best ways to assess a project is to pay it a visit!
Conclusion
The data we’ve gathered through our due diligence process, along with our notes from the field, show why we have rated the Azuero Restuara project as one of the best in terms of community engagement of the projects we’ve evaluated. The project is just beginning, and it will have to continue to put the lofty standards it has set into practice. This is why we annually monitor community engagement activities under the RCIF.?
We’re confident that Ponterra will continue to deliver, which is why we’re so proud that Rubicon Carbon is a major investor helping to make this project a reality.