Indigenous People Could Be Key to Storing Carbon in Tropical Forests, New Report Concludes (Science Magazine)

From article: 

“There really is something special about indigenous people’s management of forests,” agrees Jonah Busch, an economist at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the analysis. In a 2014 meta-analysis of more than 100 peer-reviewed studies, he and a colleague found that indigenous-managed forests are significantly less likely than the average tropical forest to be deforested. Busch notes, however, that few studies have directly investigated the effect of land title and tenure policies on carbon storage.

Such knowledge gaps have led some to question whether data support indigenous communities’ claims to be better forest carbon stewards than outsiders, and whether paying indigenous groups to preserve forests would in fact help curb emissions.

Read full article here.