Ikalahan Ancestral Domain Forest Carbon Initiative — Kalahan Educational Foundation (Philippines)

The Kalahan Educational Foundation (KEF) was established in 1973 as the legal entity through which five Ikalahan (Kalanguya indigenous) villages in the Caraballo Mountains of Nueva Vizcaya and Nueva Ecija, northern Luzon, secured community ownership over roughly 15,000 hectares of forest within their wider ancestral domain, later recognised at a larger scale under the Philippines' Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act. Within the reserve, the community developed the Forest Improvement Technology (FIT), a selective, small-scale continuous-culling method designed to accelerate carbon accumulation in old-growth forest while maintaining canopy cover, with landholders retaining use rights over specific parcels.

A University of the Philippines Los Baños study measured that the Kalahan Forest Reserve sequestered more than 38,000 tonnes of carbon in 2002 alone, providing an early, academically documented baseline of the reserve's carbon value. Building on this, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and partners worked with KEF from 2003 under the RUPES (Rewarding Upland Poor for Environmental Services) programme, and later prepared a proposal (2009–2012) to develop roughly 900 hectares of afforestation and reforestation within the ancestral domain toward Clean Development Mechanism or REDD+ carbon credits, with a benefit-sharing design that would have allocated 60% of any carbon payments directly to landholders.

Despite this multi-year preparation — including forest inventories, a Rapid Carbon Stock Appraisal, and a 2012 market-facing event in Manila to seek buyers — available sources report no completed registration or issuance of tradeable carbon credits from the project; the initiative appears to have remained at the feasibility and negotiation stage rather than reaching a monetised, verified transaction.

Kalahan is documented here as a mixed case: it demonstrates one of the longest-running, best-governed examples of indigenous community forest stewardship in Southeast Asia, with real, independently measured carbon-stock data, but illustrates how governance strength and biophysical evidence alone did not translate into a completed carbon-finance transaction over nearly a decade of effort.

Read the full analysis: https://ovcre.uplb.edu.ph/journals-uplb/index.php/EDJ/article/view/232