Community Forest Management for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Ethiopia: Determinants of Community Participation

Abstract

Forests, when sustainably managed with the participation of local communities, can have a central role in climate change mitigation and adaptation. One of the most important forest ecosystem services is carbon sink from atmosphere during its early growing stage as compared to the late stage. And this has been used as a climate change adaptation strategy locally and mitigation mechanism globally to curb the multi-sectorial problems of climate change. But this depends on effective participation of the households on forest ecosystem service provision (FESP) activities. Therefore, this paper presents the socio-economic determinants of the local household participation on FESP using 157 sampled households with econometric and descriptive analysis. The result shows that FESP negatively determined by gender difference, state of agro-ecology/agro-ecosystem, level of annual net benefit, distance to forest site and other source of income while attending on community meeting and literacy level increased level of participation thereby increasing annual return of individual local households. Furthermore, the highest returns from FESP goes to the rich households and the poor earn less for their fair share of labor though highest costs covered by the rich. Therefore, all users and services providers ought to facilitate inspiring environments to gear the way forward for climate change adaptation and mitigation mechanisms in the future.