The Hectares Indicator: Chiapas State, Mexico

The Hectares Indicator (HI) was developed to assess the effectiveness of interventions aimed at avoiding forest loss and promoting climate-smart land use. The toolkit is designed to answer the question: How much deforestation are we avoiding through our project’s interventions? The core of the HI toolkit is the establishment of a reference level from which users can estimate expected forest loss within a specific area. The toolkit recommends creating a risk map by considering factors that increase risk of forest loss in four categories; forest accessibility, potential for cultivation, extractable value and protection status. Once this risk or reference level map has been produced, users upload the map along with actual forest loss data to their Mapping Platform application where they can adjust a pre-written query that automatically calculates and produces summary results for expected forest loss, actual forest loss and avoided deforestation.

The customer in this case study is ECOSUR, a Forests 2020 partner in Mexico. ECOSUR has applied the Hectares Indicator to present results for avoided deforestation in three regions of Chiapas state – Sierra Madre, Marques de Comillas and Reserva El Ocote. To create their risk map, ECOSUR considered risk factors within three categories: Accessibility - proximity to road, rivers and water bodies, and topography (slope); Social/Economic - population density, distance to sites with agricultural land use, marginalization rate and distance to villages; Protection - protected areas (risk reduction factor). These variables were spatially analyzed, then compared with the location of deforestation events to determine the risk classes. The team also utilized data from a local region within Chiapas state to determine the final categorizations of risk.