By now, dozens of countries have some version of a forestry incentive program, with the government paying local property owners to keep their trees in the ground. But a lot of the programs have come under scrutiny because they’re easy to manipulate and hard to monitor. The one in Ecuador, Socio Bosque, one of the first in Latin America, is no exception. Since its creation in 2008, it’s been criticized for failing to pay participants and for mismanaging who’s applying for which plots of land. A conflict over thousands of hectares of Chocó forest in the Imbabura and Pichincha provinces — now enmeshed in a decade-long legal battle — shows that the program is also susceptible to potential negligence, corruption and political dealmaking, activists in the area claim. Over 9,000 hectares (22,239 acres) were stolen from local communities through an illegal land sale, they say. Then the new owners took in thousands of dollars from the Socio Bosque program that could have gone to local conservation efforts. Now, that land is owned by a conservation group trying to sell carbon credits. “These are people who really need that support to be able to conserve and reforest and to ideally improve their agriculture and land management practices,” said a member of the Land Restoration Lab for the Latin American Association for Alternative Development (ALDEA), who wished to remain anonymous due to legal concerns. The Andean Chocó bioregion of northwestern Ecuador. Photo by Lidia Dávila Eight communities in the parishes of Selva…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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