Community Participation Mechanism: A Study of Youth Voices in Conservation’s GreenLeaf Marketplace

This chapter focuses on international mechanisms for addressing climate change, focusing on linkages and multistakeholder communications, adaptations, and adoptions for greater sustainability. Since the Kyoto Protocol was organized, the idea of creating a carbon credit marketplace has been widely discussed. The United Nations has created a carbon credit certification process, and, at this point, there are a number of recognized evaluators for these credits. Unfortunately, the credit marketplace has substantially changed, and the availability of using this type of financial transaction for encouragement of developing countries to utilize their present initiatives to receive funds for their transition towards sustainability for which the developed countries and corporations would purchase these credits has failed. Failure in the sense that when funds are received by these developing countries, these funds are often diverted and actions towards a lower-carbon lifestyle have not been achieved. Conversely, a number of agencies have funded more localized projects that engage in developing sustainable actions in communities through improved mechanisms, such as sustainable forestry and agriculture and sustainable lifestyles including improved cooking stoves, water recycling, and waste recycling through biogas generation. Many of these projects at the point of achievement for their sustainability lack continued funding necessary to allow for sustainable development.

The Youth Voices in Conservation Program has researched youth action towards conservation and sustainability from the classroom, the field site, and within nongovernmental and governmental organizational situations for the past few years. This research found that by developing a residual funding based upon carbon credit offsets created by these localized actions, there is a possibility of conditional cash transfer based upon these “good actions.” During the latter half of July 2011, intensive fieldwork in conjunction with UNDP-GEF Small Grants Projects and Center for Environment Education (CEE) occurred in India. Ten projects were evaluated for the establishment of an intranet/Internet evaluation mechanism that would allow for the development of the GreenLeaf Marketplace. Projects were also evaluated for their approach to reducing the carbon impact which correlated to the community financially, educationally, and environmentally. Detailed description of how this methodology works for developing financial environmental and financial communities will be discussed. It is hoped through a global mechanism that other localities throughout the world will be able to sign up through this computer-based system. The results of this research indicate that the Youth Voices in Conservation’s GreenLeaf Program may be able to address localized sustainability issues as well as methodology for decreasing carbon footprints and increasing financial sustainabilities within each community, and consequently, the environmental effects from the wide-scale adoption of these plans may be expected. It is anticipated that these credit mechanisms may be used with local bank issuance for green purposes with conditional cash transfer as part of the residual credit program.