Project Team Leader.

Due to increase in population, coupled with limited farming areas, communities have engaged in destructive ways of farming and depleting the biodiversity through excessive and illegal harvesting of timber and non-timber forest resources in the forest reserves and sacred areas. Other environmentally unfriendly farming practices contribute to this challenge. This project will contribute to slowing this trend as much as possible through enhanced community awareness, reforestation through enrichment planting, passing on valuable technical expertise in the process. The biodiversity corridor that will be created in fallow lands and off reserve areas and this will serve to decrease the pressure on the sacred groves and the forest reserve.

The project will assess the biological diversity of the Mafia C forest landscape, use that data to foster genuine community based resource management areas around their sacred groves including through enrichment planting and use this to significantly improve biodiversity, socio- economic and institutional co-benefits.

The project will offer a comprehensive approach of maximising the value of forest resources through conservation and sustainable use by demonstrating that high quality forest carbon assets will generate important socio- economic and biodiversity co- benefits when paired with community based sustainable forest management. The project activities will promote models that can be adapted in the districts landscapes to enhance the capacity of forest stakeholders to participate in REDD and finally analysing and disseminating results to improve REDD+ strategies in Ghana.

The project seek to develop tools for the comprehensive biological survey (flora and fauna inventory assessment) for the 10 sacred forest in the Mafia C landscape and designated fallow lands, off reserve areas, train community members in the use of the tools to enable sustainability, buy-in and transfer valuable technical skills and know-how and develop Community Resource Management Area (CREMA) structures in the communities building on the CBNRM committees created in the previous project.

Build market linkages and long term commercial relationship between project communities and investors for carbon offsets both private and government funds by developing a database of potential sources of funding or reward schemes for community landscape conservation approaches.