Livelihoods

PRINCIPLES

  1. Social Additionality 

    1. The Project must strive to achieve Social Additionality. 
    2. The Livelihood Matrix, the Social Additionality Plan and its corresponding activities must reflect the Project Stakeholder’s definitions, needs, and values.

  2. Stakeholder Engagement 

    1. The Project must be designed based on the Stakeholders’ needs and aspirations across social, economic, cultural, and spiritual domains, as expressed during the Community Consultation.
    2. FPIC. The Free, Prior and Informed Consent must be applied before initiating any Project that may impact directly or indirectly lands, territories and resources of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), and consistently during the Project's implementation. Refer to the ERS Programme for more details on the FPIC requirements.
    3. Stakeholder Mapping
      1. Developers must map and classify Communities and moral persons participating in or impacted by the Project according to their influence.
      2. Developers must strive to identify past and existing social conflicts or unresolved grievances during the mapping phase. If conflicts or grievances are identified, the Developers should have a local mediator assisting in the resolution process. 
      3. Marginalised, vulnerable, and/or disadvantaged communities and individuals (hereinafter referred to as Vulnerable Communities) must be identified and reported in the Livelihood Matrix. 

  3. Employment & Fair Wages

    1. Developers must ensure the health and safety of all of the Project’s workers throughout the entire Project duration. Specifically, Developers must:
      1. Ensure access to personal safety equipment.
      2. Ensure adequate and equitable working conditions.
      3. Ensure all of the Project’s employees work of their own free will.
      4. Comply with ILO’s Convention on Forced Labour (No. 29) and ILO standards on occupational safety and health.
      5. Ensure discrimination, of any kind, is not tolerated in the workplace. The Developer must have sanctions to respond to and protect employees from aggressions and violence, whether physical, verbal or mental. Special attention must be paid to Vulnerable Communities. 
    2. Planting and monitoring teams should be trained and hired from IPLCs within or surrounding the Project Area. 
    3. When possible, the Project should foster long-term employment with fixed contracts. 
      1. When employing temporary workers, the Project should foster official affiliations through contracts or any applicable formal agreement. 
    4. All Project workers must be paid fair wages and, when available, follow the country’s living wage.
      1. If the country does not have an official living wage, ERS will use the values indicated by the Global Living Wage Coalition as a reference.
      2. Workers occupying the same position and with the same level of experience must receive equal wages. Special attention must be paid to the context of gender equity. Any wage difference for workers occupying the same position must be justified.
    5. The Project must guarantee equal opportunities for professional development regardless of gender, social and racial backgrounds.
    6. Where IPLCs are identified as Stakeholders, respect must be paid to local customs and traditional practices, which may assign specific roles based on gender.

  4. Communication

    1. Developers must have an open-door policy so Stakeholders can learn more, ask questions, air grievances, and convey relevant information.
    2. Developers must ensure that all Stakeholders are aware of, know how to use, and have access to the ERS Grievance Mechanism.

    3. 💡 When no IPLCs are present in the Project Area, requirements for points 5, 6 and 7 are not applicable.

  5. Empowerment, Well-Being and Equity

    1. The Project should reduce the Communities’ vulnerability and promote socio-economic resilience to future extreme weather conditions, natural hazards, social conflicts, and economic fluctuations.
    2. Where relevant, the Project must: 
      1. Improve health and well-being conditions, including but not limited to improving food security, securing access to clean water, and improving sanitation systems. Particular attention should be given to women’s health.
      2. Enhance access to quality education and capacity building.
      3. Pay particular attention to increasing opportunities for women's empowerment (i.e. financial independence, training, capacity building, women's self-help groups, and organisational capacity, among others).
    3. Where relevant, the Project should enable the development of alternative livelihoods and/or enhance existing ones, including Non-Timber Forest Products.

  6. Cultural Heritage & Traditional Knowledge

    1. Where relevant, the Project must: 
      1. Preserve cultural heritage and Traditional Knowledge.
      2. Respect Traditional Knowledge, and not try to adapt it to scientific-based knowledge. 
      3. Acknowledge and compensate Traditional Knowledge transfers. 

  7. Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs)

    1. Planning. Before initiating exploitation, Developers must: 
      1. Assess and ensure compliance with the applicable regulatory framework.
      2. Consult Stakeholders during the Community Consultation to understand their traditional practices, the cultural and/or spiritual value attributed to NTFPs, and their subsistence reliance on them. Feedback must be integrated into the NTFPs' planning. 
    2. Harvesting Protocols. Developers must design a species-specific harvesting protocol that ensures the sustainable collection of NTFPs. The protocol must include: 
      1. The delimitation of collection sites in the Project area where harvesting can occur. 
      2. Safeguards to ensure that the regeneration rate of the NTFPs used surpasses its extraction rate. It must include the parts of the plant that can be harvested, the frequency, and quantity.
    3. Capacity Building and Training.
      1. Developers should organise regular training sessions for local communities on the sustainable harvesting protocols and the ecological role of NTFPs.
      2. Developers should promote local ownership by involving communities in monitoring the use of NTFPs and participating in data collection processes.
      3. Developers should encourage community members to report any unethical or illegal harvesting activities.
    4. Adaptive Management
      1. Developers must review the NTFPs protocol every four (4) years to account for changes in the ecosystem, the community’s needs, and global best practices.
    5. Equity and Fair Benefit Sharing. Developers must ensure that access to NTFPs and its derived benefits are fair and equitable. Particular attention should be paid to vulnerable communities and communities who depend on these resources for their livelihoods.

  8. Benefit Sharing

    1. All Projects with IPLCs among their Stakeholders must establish a Benefit-Sharing plan. Refer to the General Project Requirements section in the Programme for more details.

💡 Benefits can take multiple forms: direct payments, communal infrastructure or benefits-in-kind.


METHODS

  1. Stakeholder Engagement

    1. When IPLCs are part of the Stakeholders, Developers must report on FPIC compliance in the Feasibility Study, Ecological Recovery Tool, Benefit Sharing Plan, and PDD.  
    2. Developers must record the communities’ attendance at meetings and document Stakeholder’s suggestions for amending the Project’s implementation plan. Such meetings should continue regularly throughout the Project’s lifetime to ensure ongoing Stakeholder engagement. 
    3. The PDD and Annual Reports must publicly disclose how Stakeholders’ inputs are included in the Project.
    4. Projects that undertook Pre-submission Activities must fill out the ‘Livelihoods’ section of the Pre-submission Activities Report during the Project Feasibility phase.

  2. Baseline Assessment 

    1. The livelihood baseline must be performed using the Livelihood Matrix during the Community Consultation on Livelihoods at the Project Design phase. 
    2. Pre-submission Activities will not be included in the baseline quantification. 

  3. Social Additionality Plan 

    1. The Social Additionality Plan must result from the Community Consultation on Livelihoods and the Livelihood Matrix baseline assessment. 
      1. Developers must ensure that all involved parties are heard and can freely express their desires. 
      2. Developers must ensure the co-creation of the plan is done in a form, manner, and language understandable to IPLCs, following FPIC processes.
    2. The Social Additionality Plan must include:
      1. Objectives and interventions selected by Developers and Stakeholders. When relevant, interventions must be linked with SDGs indicators. 
      2. Alternative income streams, when applicable.
      3. NTFPs harvesting and monitoring protocols, when applicable.
      4. The detailed benefit-sharing arrangements, including format, amount, and disbursement schedule. If access to benefits is dependent on any condition, such as achieving Project objectives, the objectives and targets must be made explicit in the Benefit Sharing Plan.

  4. Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs)

    1. Developers must document the NTFPs inputs resulting from the Community Consultations in the ‘Key Findings’ field of the ‘Interventions’ tab in the Livelihood Matrix.
    2. Developers must disclose any applicable legal framework, the Sustainable Harvesting Protocol, and detailed NTFPs activities in the Social Additionality Plan.

  5. Measurement and Reporting

Refer to the MRV Procedures section for more details.

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