By Ellysar Baroudy, originally posted at World Bank
With all eyes on a new climate agreement in Paris later this year, healthy forests and landscapes are seen as critical to cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero before 2100. The key underlying question is how to best achieve a true transformation in how we manage our forest landscapes, which are still degrading at a rapid rate.
At the World Bank Group, we are piloting innovative approaches to achieve just that. Through our forest climate funds, including the BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes and the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, we are working with 15 forest countries to develop large-scale programs that address market and policy failures and transform the way land-use decisions are made.
At an event on forests, climate change and development in London, the Nature Conservancy and the World Bank released a new report, Early Lessons from Jurisdictional REDD+ and Low Emissions Programs. The report analyses eight of the most advanced REDD+ programs – six of which are supported by the Bank – and provides insights into the dynamics on the ground. It tells us that:
- Working at the landscape level is critical for low-carbon development that doesn’t come at the expense of forests. Working at the landscape level also helps overcome the short-comings of project-based approaches and enables work with multiple stakeholders, from global agri-business to local farmers, and across different land-use types and conservation areas.
- However, working at this scale, which often constitutes between 10-25% of a country’s total area, also comes with challenges. Not all political leaders have bought into the concept of low-carbon development or see the immediate value of healthy forests and landscapes. Instead decisions about how land is used are driven by near-term economic considerations, such as industrial growth, jobs, income, and tax revenues. There are also other complex interests that motivate political decisions and that are difficult to understand from afar.
- To depart from business-as-usual development pathways, we need to offer transformational development models that appeal to ministers of finance and other economic actors. We need development propositions that serve countries’ needs for economic growth, for nutrition and for food security while preserving and restoring healthy landscapes.
In the work of the World Bank’s forest climate funds, we are taking these challenges head-on. We are now packaging our forest financing so we can provide a seamless line of support for countries getting ready for and implementing their forest programs as part of an integrated approach to low-carbon landscapes…
Read full blog at World Bank
