Plan Vivo Holds First Regional Knowledge Sharing Event
Plan Vivo’s strategy includes providing additional support to our pipeline and certified projects alongside the expansion of our regional presence. With this mind, we have begun piloting online ‘Regional Knowledge Exchange’ sessions.
The first pilot event was held in July and saw several of our Latin America carbon projects come together to explore the opportunities and challenges they are currently facing in the region.
Plan Vivo’s carbon (PV Climate) projects face different challenges and opportunities during their lifecycle. There is a need to identify these challenges and opportunities whilst looking at how projects are impacted in different national and regional contexts. At the same time, we believe it is important to utilise the current knowledge and experience of our various projects – to the benefit of others.
Our ‘Regional Knowledge Exchange’ sessions have been proposed as a space for regional projects to share experiences, learnings, best practices, opportunities, and to identify possible challenges and their solutions. We are currently piloting this initiative with our Latin America projects.
The Forum plans to have four stages in which projects can share experiences and use the sessions as a learning and capacity-building opportunity. It is also a room to create a network of experts that can support the different needs identified in this working group.
For the first session, the projects Scolel´te (Mexico), Communitree (Nicaragua), Bolitrees (Bolivia), Paskaia (Honduras), zeroCARBON (Guatemala) and Kasaw Ñampi (Ecuador) participated in the online pilot session. Scolel’te presented its experiences (as the first Plan Vivo Project) and how the project is addressing some common issues. The project highlighted that when Plan Vivos (Land Management Plans) are properly designed, they can be a powerful tool to comply with social and environmental safeguards and to implement activities that respond to smallholders’ interests.
More generally, projects highlighted the need for more guidance on long-term business plans, and that these plans need to consider diversified sources of income that can incentivize long-term participation of smallholders (after carbon payments have ended). Another challenge that was discussed included how local-level decision-making is impacted by public policy changes.
Newer projects recognised that the certification and validation process can be time consuming, and it becomes a challenge to address everything needed to complete certification in shorter time frames.
The common ground for all projects was the identification of how current market models don’t cover all operational cost for the development of the projects. The main outcome from the meeting was to establish a coalition of projects from the region. The coalition can give proposals to Plan Vivo to identify contextual problems and to find the best routes for specific regional challenges.
We look forward to conducting our next Knowledge Exchange session, and would like to thank the Latin America projects who made the first pilot session a success.