CHALLENGE
Deforestation and forest degradation account for nearly 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transportation sector and second only to the energy sector. While considered a problem, preventing deforestation can serve as 20% of the solution to climate change.

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and the enhancement of carbon stocks (REDD+) is an effort to create a financial value for the carbon stored in forests, thereby offering incentives for developing countries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development. REDD+ goes beyond deforestation and forest degradation and includes the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.
For REDD+ to be effective, a benefit-distribution system is needed to persuade stakeholders, in particular the forest-dependent poor, to participate. However, a range of critical questions remain about the nature of such a system.

APPROACH
The Forest Dialogue (TFD) REDD+ Initiative seeks to build a community of practice among locally rooted, well-connected REDD practitioners to share experiences and develop practical tools that support effective, efficient, and equitable benefit-sharing mechanisms for REDD+. Through the initiative, TFD aims to promote appropriate economic, policy, and institutional arrangements at the local, national, and international levels and to facilitate equitable and efficient delivery of REDD+ benefits.

TFD and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) conducted a series of dialogues among leaders in 2013—in Ghana, Vietnam, and at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C.—to investigate how to create benefit-sharing mechanisms for REDD+. The first dialogue, in Washington, was a scoping exercise that aimed to understand the state of REDD+ benefit sharing in several key countries and to identify the challenges of designing and implementing those mechanisms more broadly. The dialogues will continue in 2014, with the first scheduled to take place in Peru.

PROFOR will support this initiative in several ways. It will host the scoping dialogue associated with this dialogue stream. PROFOR also will use the work it has done on benefit sharing to inform the broader dialogue stream, and will link the stakeholders that it has engaged with to the dialogue stream. PROFOR’s other objective is to actively engage from the technical side in the dialogue stream, given the relevance of this topic for REDD+ and more generally. PROFOR also will assist with dissemination and generation of materials and products from this dialogue stream, on a needs-justified basis.

FINDINGS
This activity is ongoing. Findings will be shared on this page when they become available.