This presentation was given by Astrid Bos Valerio Avitabile, Martin Herold, Amy Duchelle, Shijo Joseph, Claudio de Sassi, William Sunderlin, Erin Sills, Arild Angelsen, Sven Wunder at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Monpellier 2016.

Given the key role of forests in mitigating climate change, it becomes increasingly important to monitor the carbon effectiveness of policies and programmes for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). Performance assessment is essential to check progress, verify accountability, and learn from REDD+ implementation in general, with important bearings on funding for REDD+ in the long term. This study presents a new framework to assess the effectiveness of subnational REDD+ initiatives from 2000 to 2014 using tree cover change trajectories with and without REDD+ since its implementation.