Reviewing ten years of the world’s most ambitious forest conservation scheme
Since its inception in 2007 and subsequent Global Forest Expert Panel assessment in 2012, REDD+ has been adopted and implemented across the world with the aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, as well as conserving forest carbon stocks. A new report published on 04 May 2022 provides an overview of the impacts, challenges and lessons from the last ten years of REDD+, as well as an assessment of its evolving governance and the major outcomes and influences observed in the last decade.
The report is separated into several sections, each of which goes into detail about a different facet of the implementation and future of REDD+. A number of key challenges were highlighted in the report, including the difficulties involved in optimising synergies across sectors and with other global forest-related conventions and trends, ensuring the legitimacy of REDD+ interventions, securing adequate financing and incentivising REDD+, addressing drivers of forest loss and degradation and improving human and institutional capacity for monitoring and implementation.
Key lessons learned are also identified, including the fact that addressing drivers of deforestation and forest degradation at multiple levels of governance remains a fundamental component of REDD+ that is not yet effectively tackled, that REDD+ implementation requires a better understanding of power relations among different actors and that coordination and collaboration across scales and actors (public and private) holds the key to making a real change in REDD+ implementation.
The report aims to “support a more coherent policy dialogue about the role of forests in addressing the broader environmental, social and economic challenges reflected in the global Sustainable Development Agenda”, and provides an optimistic look forward to the future of REDD+.
The full report can be read here.