Indigenous Plant Species from the Drylands of Iran, Distribution and Potential for Habitat Maintenance and Repair - Combating Desertification in Asia, Africa and the Middle East - page 357

Fig. 17.11 Millions of plants are produced each year. Nurseries like this one are the backbone of
this effort to reproduce locally adapted plants for transplanting (Photo Behrouz Malekpour)
Box 17.1: Carbon Sequestration in the Desertified Dryland
The Carbon Sequestration in the Desertified Dryland of Hosseinabad Project
(CSP) was brought to life in 2003 through the joint efforts of the United
Nations Development Program (UNDP), Global Environment Fund (GEF)
and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). The CSP is a unique
project. It takes a holistic approach to achieving its goal, sequestering carbon
by protecting the environmental integrity of the rangelands of Hosseinabad
and the livelihoods of its inhabitants.
The dryland where the CSP focuses its efforts is suffering from increased
desertification. More and more of the once vegetated land is becoming barren
and bare. This loss of vegetation not only leads to desertification, but also
contributes to global climate change because of the decreased capacity of the
environment to absorb carbon in the atmosphere. When the architects of the
CSP realized the problem, they aimed to address it through an innovative
approach: social mobilization. Instead of taking the traditional top-down
approach and imposing environmental mechanisms on the local people, they
worked to “harness the dormant potential and the willingness of people to
help themselves”. In this way, the project kicked off in the belief that the fight
against desertification is fundamentally a fight against poverty.
The CSP quickly set out to identify key causes of not only desertification
but also poverty in order to achieve the Project's objective. One simple
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