As the above discussion indicates, the selection of villages for the action research involved consultations with various levels of government, the communities and feasibility assessment. The feasibility of CCA was explored with five villages and CCA activities were initiated in four villages.
However, by Year 4 the project was concentrating its resources on two villages – Semoyo and Terong.
The action research team concluded that the community at Muara Merang were not sufficiently organised to be involved in a community-based forest monitoring initiative. In Muara Merang, the village institutions were facing difficulties and
community members were mostly interested in harvesting timber from the forest to earn cash. Since they extract the timber from the state forest, they had
Overview of research villages 4.4
During the Dutch colonial period, Gunung Kidul was rich in teak forests. However, it was over-exploited and became totally deforested during the Japanese occupation. Most of the area in Gunung Kidul became bare land and limestone.
Thereafter, Gunung Kidul became known as one of the poorest areas. In the 1970s, the government launched a reforestation and afforestation programme. Slowly, Gunung Kidul restored its green landscape.
This process of recovery received a strong incentive during the “reformation period”
that began in 1999. The process of decentralisation enabled multi-stakeholder approaches as well as local institutions to recover degraded – and even barren – state enterprise plantations as agroforestry systems (Adi et al., 2004).
In the past, most of the land was owned by the Sultan and was known as Sultan ground. However, the area of Sultan ground has been decreasing and most of the land is now owned by individuals.
Agriculture and forestry is mostly a mixture of traditional food crops, pasture and trees (teak, mahogany, acacia). All land is owned by individuals in the community. Two types of land ownership were observed, namely dryland farming
69 and home gardens. The composition of
private forest can be classified as:
a) Clustered
b) Linear, i.e. trees planted along the border of the land
Agroforestry techniques with multilayer cropping are implemented by communities on their land. Sengon, suren (toona sureni), mahogany, jackfruit (artocarpus), jengkol (Pithecellobium jiringa or Archidendron pauciflorum), kelapa (Cocos nucifera), petai (Parkia speciosa), aren (Arenga pinata), and rambutan (Nephelium lappaceum), comprise the top layer. On the second layer one may find coffee, snakefruit/salacca, kaliandra (Calliandra calothyrsus), cacao, banana, clove, and papaya. On the forest ground layer, yellowroot/kunir and other medicinal plants can be found.
The formal village institutions in Semoyo and Terong are legitimate and effective.
The institutional structure is hierarchical:
village – sub-village – group/compound – household. Strong and effective community groups exist in Semoyo and Terong. Agriculture farmer groups were initiated to promote the production of cash and food crops, and forest farmer groups were established in the process of developing the agriculture farmer groups.
At Semoyo, women and community radio groups are also functioning.
Photo 4.2: Forests and livelihoods, Semoyo
© Agus Setyarso
Currently, both villages are under process to be awarded with timber legality certificates (SVLK) from an independent legality verification body, which makes forest monitoring even more pertinent to their forest management and selling of timber. The locations of Semoyo and Terong are shown in Fig. 4.1.
70 Figure 4.1: Location of Semoyo and Terong Villages, Yogyakarta
Training of trainers 4.5
Training of trainers (ToT) have been conducted at different points in time, both because the original trainings have been followed up with further trainings and because different villagers were brought into the action research at different points in time.
4.5.1 ToT at Semoyo and Burat, 2010
The design and implementation of the ToT incorporated the fact that biomass assessment and monitoring was totally new to everyone at the research sites and that the relationship between CCA and community livelihoods was not so clear.
The objective of the ToT was to enable the training participants to (i) understand the importance of climate change, REDD+ and community-based forest monitoring, (ii) build their capacity to undertake biomass monitoring and (iii) develop methods for effectively introducing information on
biomass monitoring to community members. The participants were selected from key persons in the villages who were
active in the series of
discussion/consultations with the research team. The subject matter of the ToT is outline in Table 4.2.
Table 4.2: ToT programme Subjects Contents Group
dynamics
ice breaking, setting a good training atmosphere, internal rules in participating in the training, agreement on schedule
Concepts and awareness
climate change phenomena, how community forest may contribute to mitigation, rights to carbon, distribution of benefits, need for CCA Forest
sampling
sampling framework, plot shape and dimension,
dynamics in applying sampling on the ground
Measurement team work, setting plot boundaries, introduction to measurement equipment, using measurement equipment, finding best techniques on the ground
71 Data
recording
introduction to tally sheets, adjustment of tally sheets, practice filling tally sheets, data entry and storage on computer
Implementation and observations
Training was carried out in the village and the entire programme was completed. The need for a flexible training schedule was observed. Training could not be conducted daily, but depended on the availability of the participants. With the intermittent schedule, the entire programme required three weeks to complete.