Rios Tropicales Forests, Costa Rica

Following current trends, most remaining tropical forests are likely to be heavily degraded, fragmented or destroyed within this century. This would have devastating effects on the planet’s climate, biodiversity, water resources, health and livelihoods. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, around 350 million people depend substantially for their subsistence on local forests. Forest ecosystems, their functioning and resilience are often key to adapting to climate change. Action to reduce deforestation and to restore native forests will therefore yield multiple benefits. Multi-sectoral decision-making is crucial to ensuring that this potential is realised.

Deforestation

Despite the fact that 18–25 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions result from tropical deforestation and subsequent land use, neither the UNFCCC nor its Kyoto Protocol have had any provisions for limiting tropical deforestation until now. At the 13th Conference of Parties (COP-13) in December 2007, Parties agreed to strengthen efforts towards reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD or 'avoided deforestation') in developing countries.

Afforestation and reforestation

The Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC allows afforestation and reforestation projects within developing countries, geared to offset emissions in developed (Annex I) countries. The Joint Implementation mechanism allows similar agreements between Annex I countries. There is little uptake as yet for forest projects within either process. There is also a growing voluntary market in tree planting to offset carbon dioxide emissions. There is some debate over its effectiveness, and standards have been called for to better document the long-term carbon storage benefits.

Following current trends, most remaining tropical forests are likely to be heavily degraded, fragmented or destroyed within this century. This would have devastating effects on the planet’s climate, biodiversity, water resources, health and livelihoods. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, around 350 million people depend substantially for their subsistence on local forests. Forest ecosystems, their functioning and resilience are often key to adapting to climate change. Action to reduce deforestation and to restore native forests will therefore yield multiple benefits. Multi-sectoral decision-making is crucial to ensuring that this potential is realised. 

Solutions

UNEP has identified a number of immediate priorities on REDD:

An Improved Technical and Scientific Base

Enable integrated and equitable approaches to REDD, through developing methodologies, safeguards, standards and tools. Areas for development include:

• Rapid and integrated assessment of forests and their services, including carbon and co-benefits, and of deforestation pressures. Investment in REDD will need to be targeted, based on costs, benefits and risks.
• Spatial planning tools, to identify priority areas for action, based on information on carbon, deforestation risk and co-benefits.
• Methodologies and tools for the establishment of baselines and for whole-system carbon accounting and measurement.
• Models and scenarios to identify the consequences of different approaches and alternative pathways to REDD implementation, to help identify areas where REDD could be most effective.
• Common monitoring and reporting guidance for carbon emissions and co-benefits, including the assessment of impacts of changes in forest management and of any displacement (leakage) of land use change into non-target ecosystems. Assessment of success in the demonstration phase is crucial to inform any post-2012 agreement.
• A global monitoring system for REDD projects and forest cover changes.

A Scientific Advisory Panel:

An international, time-limited body to secure the best possible technical and science base for implementing REDD, including the areas outlined above.

Support to a Funding Mechanism:Prepare criteria and guidance on effective use of REDD funds based on experience in forest management. Trial alternative funding approaches, such as Payments for Ecosystem

Services

Build Capacity: Support to government departments, non-governmental organizations, local communities and marginalized groups. Topics range from forest monitoring and enhanced law enforcement to improved access to and benefit sharing of financial resources and ecosystem services.

Enhance Policy:Enabling effective policy formulation at national level through mainstreaming REDD into national development planning and undertaking analysis of conflicting interests and trade-offs, such as for biofuel markets.

Identify and Initiate Demonstration Projects: Develop pilots to test REDD approaches at the national level, focusing on maximising co-benefits as well as emissions reduction.

Examples

Activities coordinated by UNEP on forest and climate:
The Carbon Finance for Agriculture, Silviculture, Conservation and Action against Deforestation (CASCADe) programme enhances expertise to generate African carbon credits by promoting forestry and bioenergy projects such as reforestation, agroforestry, and forest and soil conservation efforts. The project promotes Agriculture, Forestry and other Land Uses activities under the CDM in seven Francophone African countries (Mali, Senegal, Benin, Madagascar, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon and Cameroon). CASCADe explicitly addresses REDD through the development of new methodologies for the 2nd commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol).

The Great Apes, Human Livelihoods and Global Change Initiative will develop innovative revenue streams and positive incentives (in particular REDD) and help to minimise the carbon and ecosystem impacts of bioenergy production, land-use change and poor development planning. As a first step, two great ape habitat countries are developing best-practice REDD initiatives. The overall Great Apes Survival Partnership has been working to reduce tropical forest degradation in the 23 great ape range states in Southeast Asia and Africa.

The Forest Restoration Information Service provides an open-access service to support forest restoration projects worldwide. Increasingly, forest restoration objectives include carbon sequestration. The website includes a number of case studies, a projects database, and resources ranging from restoration guidelines to maps and a bibliography.

 

Kilograms of CO₂ equivalent

Carbon Sinks and Sequestration

The opposite of a GHG source is a GHG sink. A sink is any process, activity or mechanism that removes a greenhouse gas, an aerosol or a precursor of a greenhouse gas or aerosol from the atmosphere.Natural sinks for CO2 are for example forests, soils and oceans. It is also possible to enhance naturally occurring processes or use modern technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in reservoirs. The uptake of CO2 in a reservoir, whether natural or artificial is also called carbon sequestration.

Trees planted under UNEP's Billion Tree Campaign as at July 2010