Category: Theme 4: Climate change adaptation and mitigation


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From Paris to Marrakech: forests, climate change and REDD+ in Southeast Asia


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Photo: Grace Wong/CIFOR
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Photo: Grace Wong/CIFOR
Photo: Grace Wong/CIFOR

By Rob Finlayson, originally published at ICRAF’s Agroforestry World Blog

The implications of international agreements on the ten countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and their extensive forests was explained at an Experts Dialogue in Indonesia

The Paris Agreement is a global deal aimed at limiting the negative impact of climate change. The implications for Southeast Asia’s forests were explained to senior officials of member states at an Experts Dialogue on Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in ASEAN held in Bali, Indonesia, 30 November 2016 by Grace Wong of the Center for International Forestry Research. The Dialogue was supported by Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.

The 21st Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Paris, France in November 2015, reached a consensual deal—the world’s first comprehensive climate agreement—signed by 193 countries, 115 of which have ratified it. It entered into force on 4 November 2016.

Wong explained that the aim of the Agreement is described in Article 2: a) Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change; b) Increasing the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience and low greenhouse-gas emissions development, in a manner that does not threaten food production; and c) Making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse-gas emissions and climate-resilient development.

Forest area in Southeast Asian countries, 1990–2010. Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Forest area in Southeast Asian countries, 1990–2010. Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

For the first time, forests were explicitly mentioned, in Article 5.1, which encourages action for results-based payments to keep forests standing, such as the mechanism known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation plus Conservation (REDD+). Article 5.2 states that keeping forests and trees standing and sustainably managed will be crucial in global efforts to reach the goal of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5–2 °C. Especially for forest-rich Southeast Asia, avoided deforestation can provide major reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions and is explicit in many nationally determined contributions to the goal.

The Paris Agreement was a complete document that sets out the overarching goals and framework for international climate action. The details of the Agreement are to be ironed out by 2018, with a review of progress in 2017. The recent 22nd Conference of Parties, held in Marrakech, Morocco in November 2016, began the implementation of the Agreement. Some of the key issues discussed were finance, the global stocktake process and guidance for Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and transparency.

Finance: the Parties reiterated their commitment to USD 100 billion per year of public and private finance for developing countries by 2020. The UNFCCC Standing Committee of Finance released its biennial assessment showing an upper, bound estimate of total global climate finance in 2013 and 2014 from all sources added up to USD 714 billion. A greater balance between mitigation and adaptation was also indicated although only USD 80 million was committed to the Adaptation Fund. A new Capacity-building Initiative for Transparency trust fund has begun with an initial USD 50 million funding projects in Costa Rica, Kenya and South Africa. Non-market approaches were considered significant owing to complexities around the implementation of REDD+ policies and measures before results-based payments would be possible. How mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund will deal with both the non-market elements of policy performance and results-based payments will be closely monitored by all REDD+ countries. You can read more about this here and here.

NDCs: each country determines what contribution they should make to reach the global goals. Article 3 requires these contributions to be ‘ambitious’ and ‘represent a progression over time’. After five years, the next ambition should be more ambitious than previous. According to Wong, the challenges in developing guidance for NDCs are in communicating the mechanisms, accounting and developing guidance for different types of NDCs, avoiding double accounting and allowing flexibility for each country depending on their capacity.

Keeping ASEAN’s forests standing is critically important for the future of our planet. Photo: World Agroforestry Centre/Robert Finlayson
Keeping ASEAN’s forests standing is critically important for the future of our planet. Photo: World Agroforestry Centre/Robert Finlayson

Global stocktake: to evaluate whether the world is on track to limit warming. In 2018, a Facilitative Dialogue will assess progress and plan for the next round of NDCs.

Transparency: the foundation of the Paris Agreement’s ‘ambition mechanism’; a unique approach that allows countries to increase their ambition. A lot of discussion took place on how to create a fair ‘rulebook’ so all countries could have confidence when assessing each other’s climate pledges. The technicalities of the rulebook—setting baselines and methodologies—will likely continue into 2018. For example, decisions on the balance between national sovereignty and global uniformity in the rulebook for monitoring greenhouse-gas emissions were put off till the next year.

‘For REDD+, transparency includes assessing biases related to use of historical periods in forest reference greenhouse-gas emission levels and the systematic choices relevant to national circumstances’, said Wong. ‘Independent monitoring can be critical for credibility of any such system, involving a variety of practices that include elements of free and open methods, data and tools, increased participation and complementarity to national reporting’. A report on an event on transparency held during the Marrakech conference can be read here.

In addition, the implications need to be considered of any measuring, reporting and verification  system aimed at REDD+ shaped by diverse interests, information, institutions and ideas that require multilevel coordination and governance. Understanding the politics of different people at different levels of government and society could lead to a more effective system.

The challenge for ASEAN

All nations recognize that achievement of the Paris Agreement goals as well as the Sustainable Development Goals will be impossible without action to protect, restore and sustainably manage all types of forests […] [T]ransformation of the forest sector requires fundamental  changes from both the public and private sectors. Only determined, sustained leadership and inclusive forest governance will deliver this.

How will ASEAN leaders rise to this challenge? According to Wong, ASEAN member states need to increase transparency in the forest sector if they are to improve the effectiveness of REDD+. This should include efforts to incorporate the needs and interests of all the different groups of people involved through dialogue, communications, trust and participation. They also need to ensure transparency in, and free accessibility to, data and data sources, methodologies and tools.

‘Secondly, ASEAN member states need to increase the ambition of their NDCs and the role of forests’, said Wong. ‘This implies being open to independent review and actively participating in the review of others and also increasing investments into forest conservation, restoration and sustainable management, relative to other sectors’.

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  • Reflections on COP22 and gender

Reflections on COP22 and gender


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Photo by Marco Simola for Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).
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By Markus Ihalainen, originally published on CIFOR’s Forests News

Thanks to lobbying efforts by gender equality advocacy groups, the recent climate talks in Marrakesh yielded a significant decision that extended the mandate of the Lima Work Program on Gender (LWPG) over the next three years.

The two-year work program – first adopted at COP20 in Lima – contains a two-fold objective of: 1) Enhancing the gender-balance in the negotiations and 2) Providing guidance to Parties on gender-responsive climate policy.

Actions under the program included trainings for delegates on gender-responsive climate policy, capacity building for women delegates, and developing guidelines for implementing gender considerations in climate change activities.

While the extent to which the LWPG has achieved its objectives is debatable, it has opened up a space for more specific discussions and recommendations with respect to enhancing the gender-responsiveness of various policies and mechanisms under the UNFCCC. The decision to extend the mandate of the work program was thus received with much appreciation by gender equality advocates at COP22.

Here’s a look at some key dimensions of this decision in the context of the broader debates around gender and climate change.

Photo by Marco Simola for Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).
Photo by Marco Simola for Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

ALIGNING CLIMATE POLICY WITH COMMITMENTS

One of the criticisms of the previous iteration of the LWPG is that despite its mandate, it “failed to articulate work on gender-responsive climate policy in relation to broader international obligations to human rights and gender equality”. This, in turn, allowed for a fair amount of confusion with respect to what ‘gender-responsive climate policy’ actually means.

It is thus positive that the preamble to the new decision maintains the ‘importance of coherence between gender-responsive climate policies … and the provisions of international instruments and outcomes’, including the Beijing Declaration, the Convention of Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and now the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

What this text actually means for policy design, implementation and monitoring remains unclear. It is, however, essential that the above provision guide the work under the new iteration of the LWPG, as it opens up a crucial space for conceptualizing the role of gender equality and women’s empowerment in climate policy and action in a much broader sense.

Instead of viewing empowerment or equality as a vehicle for achieving other policy objectives, this framing allows us to flip things around and look at how various policies can impact equality or empowerment across a much wider set of political, economic, social and cultural indicators.

As such, this ‘rights-based’ framing departs from popular ‘business case’ arguments, which assert that women’s empowerment will lead to better economic, environmental or social outcomes. A rights-based argument does not ignore women’s contributions to promoting development and conservation; however, it does not make the granting of rights contingent on how effectively women contribute to the latter.

A strong rights-based framework is especially important now that policies and programs are increasingly aligning themselves to the SDG framework. Anchoring ‘women’s empowerment’ in broader international conventions could help mitigate the unfortunate tendency to water down empowerment to tokenistic participation in meetings simply to allow policies and programs to ‘hit as many SDGs as possible’.

Instead of simply assuming win-wins between social, economic and environmental objectives, a rights-based approach also allows us to have a much clearer and more honest conversation about leveraging synergies – as well as reconciling potential tensions – between the different SDGs.

Photo by Tomas Munita for Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).
Photo by Tomas Munita for Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

FROM GLOBAL PLEDGES TO NATIONAL ACTION

In addition to a continued mandate, the new decision also requests the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) to ‘develop a gender action plan in order to support the implementation of gender-related decisions and mandates under the UNFCCC process’.

While the development of a gender action plan under the UNFCCC was not a given, it follows the trajectory of the other Rio conventions, which already have such plans in place. The priority areas for the action plan still needs to be defined, but this decision invites Parties, observers and other stakeholders to provide inputs to the formulation of the action plan.

A collaboratively developed, comprehensive Gender Action Plan (GAP) could prove useful for coordinating the efforts of various bodies and stakeholders, channeling funding towards specific actions outlined under the GAP, and for developing salient indicators for evaluating the gender-responsiveness of various climate policies.

However, it is important to note that the content of the GAP is to be defined over the coming year. So given the urgency of beginning the implementation of the Paris Agreement, the immediate priority in terms of gender equality in climate policy is still to ensure that all Parties to the Agreement take substantial actions on the national level towards safeguarding women’s rights and enhancing the gender-responsiveness of the climate policies and actions as outlined in the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs).

This is particularly important given the fact that out of 188 INDCs submitted to the UNFCCC Secretariat prior to COP21, only 63 submissions included specific references to women or gender. A closer look shows that these references are often very general and superficial, mostly just outlining women as ‘vulnerable populations’.

The Paris Agreement – unfortunately – has also largely failed to move beyond this view, managing only to include references to gender under ‘adaptation’ and ‘capacity building’. It is therefore encouraging to see that the new decision taken at COP22 this year invite Parties to consider gender in relation to mitigation and technology development, even if one would have preferred stronger wording.

It is also noteworthy that all of the 63 INDCs mentioning ‘women’ or ‘gender’ came from developing countries. Despite high-flying rhetoric, there seems to be a tendency among donor countries to view gender-responsive climate policy mostly as a priority for developing countries.

Concerns are being raised over whether donor commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment actually translate into concrete funding. A recent OECD DAC report estimated that investments in women’s economic empowerment remained unchanged in the period from 2007-2012, and represented only two percent of total bilateral aid. This is a significant concern, especially as many commitments in developing countries’ INDCs remain conditional on the availability of funding.

During a discussion forum on gender held at the 2016 Global Landscapes Forum, panelist Lorena Aguilar, Senior Advisor of the Gender Programme at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), stated that 21 countries have developed specific climate change and gender action plans (ccGAP). Yet, she warned, a lack of funds is hindering many governments from implementing these plans.

To enhance the implementation of gender-responsive climate policies, it is thus crucial that the operating entities of the Financial Mechanism – including the Green Climate Fund and the Global Environment Facility – are held accountable vis-à-vis the gender policies that both entities now have in place.

It is reassuring that the COP22 decision requests financial entities to provide information on the ‘integration of gender consideration in all aspects of their work’. However, it contains no references to the allocation for financial resources towards the implementation of gender-responsive climate action. Issues around financial responsibilities, targets and accountabilities thus remain largely unresolved.

At the same GLF forum, Eleanor Blomstrom, Co-Director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), stressed the need to improve gender-responsive tracking and monitoring of finance for enhancing – and enforcing – the implementation of gender-responsive climate policies at the national level.

Ugwono Pauline plants Gnetum (okok) in the village of Minwoho, Lekié, Center Region, Cameroon.   Photo by Ollivier Girard for Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).
Photo by Ollivier Girard/CIFOR

CONNECTING POLICY FRAMEWORKS TO LOCAL REALITIES

While it is important to monitor what policies are in place and to track their implementation, it is arguably even more important to understand the impact of these policies on the lives of local women and men. Policy processes removed from local realities are less likely to yield transformative results on the ground.

CIFOR’s research shows that climate change vulnerability tends to be highly contextual and depends on various socioeconomic, cultural and environmental variables. Despite this, gender is still primarily tackled as a men-versus-women dichotomy in climate change studies, according to a recent CIFOR paper.

One of the key hopes of CIFOR gender experts at COP22 was thus to contribute to a more nuanced picture of gender and climate change. Understanding that the vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities of women and men are structured by various societal power relations – and not just by virtue of their sex – can help enhance the responsiveness of climate policies. In order to ensure everyone’s voice is heard, it is vital that such ‘intersectional’ thinking is translated into implementation processes and impact assessment tools and instruments.

This requires that the voices of local people be accounted for in policy processes, particularly when it comes to adaptation, says Houria Djoudi, a scientist at CIFOR who was a panelist at the GLF event. Women in impacted communities are not sitting around waiting for international agreements to come in place – they use various strategies to adapt to climate change every day. However, rural women often lack a voice in national policy processes. As a result, many locally grounded, potentially up-scalable adaptation and mitigation initiatives risk going unnoticed, or replaced by top-down, inflexible programmatic responses with little local ownership.

It is therefore good to see the new decision taken in Morocco encourage Parties to recognize the value of grassroots women’s participation in gender-responsive climate action at all levels.

However, much remains to be done to move beyond lip-service towards meaningfully integrating local-level action in national climate policy and action, and to ensure that adequate capacities and resources are in place at the national and sub-national levels to support and scale up successful initiatives.

For more information on this topic, please contact Markus Ihalainen at m.ihalainen@cgiar.org.
This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry.

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  • FTA event coverage: Gaining traction on climate goals

FTA event coverage: Gaining traction on climate goals


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Deforestation in Jambi, Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo: Asep Ayat for 2014 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition
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Deforestation in Jambi, Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo: Asep Ayat for 2014 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition
Deforestation in Jambi, Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo: Asep Ayat for 2014 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition

By Catriona Croft-Cusworth, originally posted at CIFOR’s Forests News

An increasing number of states are embracing commitments made under the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global temperature rise. But how do these grand ambitions play out in reality?

In practice, climate action gains traction at the ground level — ‘where the rubber hits the road’, so to speak — and that requires collaboration among a whole range of different stakeholders.

Besides national governments, subnational governments are increasingly involved in action on climate change in the land use and forestry sectors. Non-state actors, including indigenous groups (which sometimes own and manage important territories), non-governmental organizations and the private sector, are also playing a growing role.

So how can the efforts of these various groups be best coordinated to meet national and international pledges, bringing real action on climate change?

A political world

Anne Larson, a Principal Scientist with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), has led research on this issue in five countries as part of the Global Comparative Study on REDD+ under the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, including two national studies on systems of monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV).

Planting Mangroves. Photo: Putu Budhiadnya for 2016 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition
Planting Mangroves. Photo: Putu Budhiadnya for 2016 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition

She says that even with apparently technical issues like MRV, political tensions tend to emerge both horizontally and vertically among stakeholder groups when trying to turn ideas into reality. This shouldn’t discourage efforts to take action but suggests that we need to take a different approach.

“We can’t ignore political realities,” she says. “We have many great ideas, but no matter how great they might sound technically, we always bump into reality when we hit the ground and try to start implementing.”

Also read: FTA project update: Understanding REDD+ across the globe

“Politics is not necessarily good or bad, it just is. We need to embrace this and learn to work in this reality.”

Pham Thu Thuy, another CIFOR scientist involved in the study, says her research in Vietnam found that politics not only influenced coordination, but also shaped perceptions of goals and challenges among different levels of governance.

“Different levels perceive different problems. But also how they actually define the problem is based on their own perception and their political interest,” Thuy says.

The answer to coordinating those differences, she says, is to take a landscape approach.

Click to read: Exploring the agency of Africa in climate change negotiations: the case of REDD+
Click to read: Exploring the agency of Africa in climate change negotiations: the case of REDD+

You have to be aware of these politics and think about how you can bring together every piece of information and every active group to make a policy work,” she says.

“And I think that for the land-use system, if you want something to work, basically it has to be at the landscape level.”

A landscape view

At the Global Landscapes Forum in Marrakesh, subnational and non-state actors were invited to share their perspectives on the matter of catalyzing action on the ground.

The term ‘non-state actors’ includes researchers, civil society and other community-level groups, but via global climate negotiations in recent years has become shorthand for the private sector.

Also read: COP22 Special: REDD+ monitoring is a technical and political balancing act

Bruce Cabarle, Team Leader of Partnerships for Forests, an initiative for investment in sustainable use of land and forests, said in discussion at GLF that public-private-people partnerships were key to applying lessons learned into the future.

“The more interesting question is: How do we get synergies and complementarity between voluntary certification schemes and government regulations so that they are mutually reinforcing?” he asked.

Christoph Thies, a forest campaigner for Greenpeace, welcomed cooperative efforts among sectors, but maintained that states should take the lead.

“The private sector should never replace the roles and responsibilities of governments,” he said.

For Thies, the answer lies in understanding political factors as both challenges and opportunities for change.

“Technical barriers can be overcome,” he said. “To really address the landscape requires political will.”

On the ground

Fernando Sampaio, Executive Director of the PCI (Produce, Conserve and Include) Strategy State Committee in Mato Grosso, Brazil, acknowledged the importance of both private-sector and civil society involvement in ground-level efforts, from a subnational government perspective.

“The private sector is an important part of the process, but we also need to include other stakeholders who are excluded from the process,” he said.

Excluded groups often include indigenous peoples, whose land rights are not always recognized. Norvin Goff, President of MASTA, an indigenous federation that represents the Miskitus of the Honduran Mosquitia, said that blueprint approaches to land and forest use rarely work at the ground level for indigenous communities.

“We don’t need a set formula that has been used in the past, we need to create an approach together,” Goff said.

He urged closer partnerships between government and indigenous groups.

“Instead of an enemy, they should consider us as part of the solution,” he said.

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  • Beyond dichotomies: Gender and intersecting inequalities in climate change studies

Beyond dichotomies: Gender and intersecting inequalities in climate change studies

09 December, 2016

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Authors: Djoudi, H.; Locatelli, B.; Vaast, C.; Asher, K.; Brockhaus, M.; Sijapati Basnett, B.

Climate change and related adaptation strategies have gender-differentiated impacts. This paper reviews how gender is framed in 41 papers on climate change adaptation through an intersectionality lens. The main findings show that while intersectional analysis has demonstrated many advantages for a comprehensive study of gender, it has not yet entered the field of climate change and gender. In climate change studies, gender is mostly handled in a men-versus-women dichotomy and little or no attention has been paid to power and social and political relations. These gaps which are echoed in other domains of development and gender research depict a ‘feminization of vulnerability’ and reinforce a ‘victimization’ discourse within climate change studies. We argue that a critical intersectional assessment would contribute to unveil agency and emancipatory pathways in the adaptation process by providing a better understanding of how the differential impacts of climate change shape, and are shaped by, the complex power dynamics of existing social and political relations.

Publication Year: 2016

ISSN: 0044-7447

Source: Ambio 45(Supplement 3): 248-262

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-016-0825-2

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  • Peter Holmgren: ‘Climate solutions will have to happen in the landscape’

Peter Holmgren: ‘Climate solutions will have to happen in the landscape’

30 November, 2016

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Peter Holmgren: ‘Climate solutions will have to happen in the landscape’. Click to watch
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By Leona Liu, originally published at CIFOR’s Forests News

Peter Holmgren is the Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). He spoke on the sidelines of the Global Landscapes Forum about the landscapes approach, what it means for the global climate agenda, and what’s coming up next for the GLF, the key event under the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry.

How does the Global Landscapes Forum relate to climate change?

Well, very much so. Because the climate solutions that we’re looking for, many of them will have to happen in  the landscape. Dealing, for example, with the food systems or reducing deforestation; restoring degraded lands. So, many of these benefits will have to happen in landscapes. And by doing this right, and by meeting all those other values in the landscapes, we can come to a situation where the climate benefits are actually co-benefits of sustainable landscapes.

What’s the connection to COP22?

I think the COP negotiations are going well, under the circumstances. It is a big job to get the Paris Agreement into implementation and into action. I think that the Global Landscapes Forum provides one avenue where we can reach some of the ambitions that are expressed in the Paris Agreement.

What’s next for GLF?

We want to launch the new phase of the Global Landscapes Forum, where we will scale up and reach out, and in the next five years we hope to reach a billion people to be engaged and learn from the landscape approaches, to figure out solutions that are good for them in their landscapes.

VIDEO Q&A
Wanjira Mathai: ‘Landscape restoration is about gender equality’

How can we reach a billion?

The main part is to be serious about having the stakeholders in landscapes engaged on their own terms, with their own priorities. And try to avoid having an expert, top-down approach, as we are trying to scale up the landscape approach.

*This is part of a series of interviews from the 2016 Global Landscapes Forum: Climate Action for Sustainable Development in Marrakesh, Morocco

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  • FTA project update: Understanding REDD+ across the globe

FTA project update: Understanding REDD+ across the globe


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Indonesia is one of the research countries. Maybe these children will benefit from REDD+ in the future. Photo: Anne Crawford for 2016 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition
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Photo: Bernard II Recirdo for 2016 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition
Trees help mitigate climate change. Photo: Bernard II Recirdo for 2016 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition

The global framework to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation known as REDD+ is ambitious and groundbreaking.

After years of national, sub-national and project-level experimentation, focused, innovative research is required to understand REDD+ successes and failures amid diverse local conditions.

Looking at REDD+ across the globe, a continuing Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) project – now in its third phase – is striving to ensure those impacted by and working to prevent deforestation have the best information and tools available to them. The Global Comparative Study on REDD+ (GCS REDD+) project is supported by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). It counts on further funding from the International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB), USAID and the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (CRP-FTA), with financial support from the donors contributing to the CGIAR Fund.

Scientists and researchers at CIFOR and its many partner institutions have been working since 2009 to understand how enabling governance and on-the-ground conditions affect the efficiency and effectiveness of REDD+ policies, how REDD+ policies should be best designed and to find ways to monitor deforestation and forest degradation across different landscapes. This includes the equitable performance of REDD+ with regard to the so-called “non-carbon” benefits —  which include equity and poverty reduction, protection of ecosystem services and local livelihoods, rights and tenure.

Mangroves are known as natural carbon sinks. Photo: I Putu Agung Wiaskara Ita Negara for 2016 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition
Mangroves are known as natural carbon sinks. Photo: I Putu Agung Wiaskara Ita Negara for 2016 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition

The CIFOR partnership with Norad has been a successful one, generating over 350 publications on REDD+ and sizeable impact. Key achievements of the project, as determined in ODI’s assessment, include the incorporation of CIFOR’s recommendations on REDD+ policy at the national and international levels. For example, the recommendation of a stepwise approach to setting forest reference levels and reference emission levels, when building their capacity to monitor REDD+ effects (the so-called MRV), has been taken up in the Warsaw Framework and has informed national policies in Guyana and Ethiopia.

UN-REDD made tenure part of its strategy framework based on information that CIFOR generated. CIFOR research contributed to the Cameroon Readiness Preparation Proposal and Peru’s national REDD+ Strategy. In Indonesia, CIFOR supported the Research and Development Agency, Ministry of Environment and Forestry (FORDA) and national REDD+ strategy development.

Also read: Exploring the agency of Africa in climate change negotiations: the case of REDD+

The REDD+ framework has now been finalized in the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties in Warsaw 2013, and REDD+ has been endorsed by the Paris climate agreement. Thus, the road is paved for REDD+ implementation.

CIFOR scientist and project coordinator Christopher Martius said, “In their efforts to move ahead, REDD+ policymakers and practitioner communities can greatly benefit from information, analysis and tools based on scientific evidence, such as what we produce at CIFOR. By engaging with our partners, we are working hard to make this evidence as useful as possible for them.”

GCS REDD+ phase three will extend from 2016 to 2020 with funding from Norad, continuing crucial work to understand the complexity of local situations to inform policy that supports REDD+ and its goals.

Indonesia is one of the research countries. Maybe these children will benefit from REDD+ in the future. Photo: Anne Crawford for 2016 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition
Indonesia is one of the research countries. Maybe these children will benefit from REDD+ in the future. Photo: Anne Crawford for 2016 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition

The project is now focusing more closely – but not exclusively – on eight countries deemed key by Norad’s Norway International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI) program – Brazil, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Guyana, Indonesia, Myanmar, Peru and Vietnam. It will also continue to provide policy advice in the global arena, expanding the its reach to include stronger work on private sector initiatives and their zero-deforestation pledges.

“We will assess REDD+ policies and activities in the seven NICFI countries where we have worked before, and expand the study to include a new country, Myanmar, which is very receptive to REDD+ and where deforestation rates are particularly high. In-depth studies of REDD+ demonstration projects will be undertaken in Brazil, Indonesia and Peru,” Martius said.

In emerging economies, the combination of development and sustainability concerns can complicate the implementation of REDD+. The CIFOR project recognizes that balance must be struck, having looked at livelihood outcomes in detail at 23 sites in six countries.

Martius said, “In villages in or near forests the development objectives are much more important than saving carbon or saving trees. If you go to a village in Kalimantan where one of the only income sources is cutting trees, then it quickly becomes very clear that you cannot ignore these concerns.”

Thanks to this collaboration with Norad, we will be able to continue supporting effective emissions reduction and actually step up support to countries in the post-Paris context of climate change mitigation in the land sector of developing countries.”

The work is a component of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA), which integrates the comparative REDD+ study in the broader context of using forests for the development needed to provide a decent living to forest-dependent people.

Now, with the start of phase three, GCS-REDD+ looks to deepen its impact even further to support both people and forests across the globe.

For more information about this initiative, please contact Christopher Martius, Coordinator of the climate change theme of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (c.martius@cgiar.org)

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  • With satellites we look at landscapes, not pixels

With satellites we look at landscapes, not pixels

29 November, 2016

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By Leona Liu, originally published at CIFOR’s Forests News

Matt Hansen is a professor in the Geographical Sciences Department at the University of Maryland. He spoke on the sidelines of the Global Landscapes Forum about what technology means for the global climate agenda.

How is technology helping with the climate change agenda?

Remote sensing by definition is the idea that you can say something about an object, which you can’t touch. So it’s the same thing as our eyes. We can integrate all this information across our field of view and fill in the gaps.

Traditionally, with forestry, they have plots every kilometers or so, and those plots are labor-intensive. They cost a lot of money and it’s not easy to redo them repeatedly.

But when you have this image that just goes across the entire landscape and you can repeatedly image it, you get this information on how this land is changing and we are able to track deforestation rates and what kind of land use has replaced the forest. We can track almost anything on the land’s surface- urbanization, inundation, agriculture, and forest. So it’s this fantastic tool that feeds into a big part of climate change, which is the land use component.

You’ve talked about some of the opportunities of this technology. What are some of its limitations today?

I think one of the big things is to not overstate capabilities. To not say that it can do everything that a user might want or expect. We have to meet somewhere in the middle.

With remote sensing, we can’t see biomass directly, it’s a highly modeled variable, and we don’t see forest-associated species very easily. So there’s a lot of things we can’t do.

That doesn’t mean it’s not useful, it just means that either we can use what we can do to solve the same problem, understand what it means and use it appropriately, or we can integrate it with data.

How has this technology entered into policymaking? Is it being used to its full potential?

I think the biggest trick from a policy standpoint is that when this whole thing started, in regards to REDD+, policy was a bit ahead of the science when it came to the methods.

What I mean by that is Northern countries like the U.S. don’t do annual forest change mapping. No country does that. And at the same time, the entire North is trying to report capacity to the South. But what capacity are you reporting? We’ve never done it.

So there’s a mismatch in the aspiration in policy. We’re playing catch-up now. I think we do have the methods that can be operationalized to support policy. We have to get them into the hands of the people who are responsible for each of the national reports [related to NDCs] and I think we’re ready.

Why were you motivated to participate in the Global Landscapes Forum?

I like it because it has a very diverse user base. You’re talking about the technical practitioners, the governments, and the civil society. Landscape is an integrating concept.

Even with satellites, you don’t look at a single pixel- that would make no sense. You wouldn’t even look at a forest patch. You need to back up. It only makes sense when you look at it on a landscape scale. At the landscape scale, all these parties are interested, so you have a nice multi-stakeholder framework. It makes a lot of sense.

*This is part of a series of interviews from the 2016 Global Landscapes Forum: Climate Action for Sustainable Development in Marrakesh, Morocco, a key event under the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry.

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  • Exploring the agency of Africa in climate change negotiations: the case of REDD+

Exploring the agency of Africa in climate change negotiations: the case of REDD+


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Click to read: Exploring the agency of Africa in climate change negotiations: the case of REDD+
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Authors: Arhin A A, Duguma L, Mbeva K L, Quinn C H, Atela J O
Abstract 
Emerging climate change regimes, such as the mechanism for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), are increasingly aiming to engage developing countries such as those in Africa, in sustainable development through carbon markets. The contribution of African countries to global climate negotiations determines how compatible the negotiated rules could be with the existing socioeconomic and policy circumstances of African countries. The aim of this paper is to explore the agency of Africa (African States) in the global climate change negotiations and discuss possible implications for implementing these rules using REDD+ as a case study. Drawing on document analysis and semi-structured expert interviews, our findings suggest that although African countries are extensively involved in the implementation of REDD+ interventions, the continent has a weak agency on the design of the global REDD+ architecture. This weak agency results from a number of factors including the inability of African countries to send large and diverse delegations to the negotiations as well lack of capacity to generate and transmit research evidence to the global platform. African countries also perceive themselves as victims of climate change who should be eligible for support rather than sources of technological solutions. Again, Africa’s position is fragmented across negotiation coalitions which weakens the continent’s collective influence on the REDD+ agenda. This paper discusses a number of implementation deficits which could result from this weak agency. These include concerns about implementation capacity and a potential lack of coherence between REDD+ rules and existing policies in African countries. These findings call for a rethink of pathways to enhancing Africa’s strategies in engaging in multilateral climate change negotiations, especially if climate change regimes specifically targeted at developing countries are to be effective.
Published at International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics
Publication year: 2016
Open access

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  • Minimizing the footprint of our food by reducing emissions from all land uses

Minimizing the footprint of our food by reducing emissions from all land uses


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Autors: van Noordwijk M , Dewi S , Minang P A

Abstract:

Twenty-four years after the formulation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Paris Agreement will come into force by November 2016 and finally provide an umbrella for addressing fossil fuel as well as land-use aspects of the human impacton the global climate. Its preamble (as well as article 2) emphasizes the primary concern over continued food production. The Policy Brief addresses whether or not accounting systems and accountability further shift towards “footprints” per unit product, aligned with emission accounting from all land uses, not “just” forests. Nationally Determined Contributions emphasize he supply side of accounting (land use, fossil energy use). The “drivers” are the demand-side relations with human wellbeing and Individually Determined Contributions, to which the private sector responds with various claims on deforestation-free or carbon-neutral value chains.

Published at World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF)

Publication year: 2016

Full text

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  • Climate policy integration in the land use sector: Mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development linkages

Climate policy integration in the land use sector: Mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development linkages

24 November, 2016

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Authors: Di Gregorio, M.; Nurrochmat, D.R.; Paavola, J.; Sari, I.M.; Fatorelli, L.; Pramova, E.;Locatelli, B.; Brockhaus, M.; Kusumadewi, S.D.

This article re-conceptualizes Climate Policy Integration (CPI) in the land use sector to highlight the need to assess the level of integration of mitigation and adaptation objectives and policies to minimize trade-offs and to exploit synergies. It suggests that effective CPI in the land use sector requires i) internal climate policy coherence between mitigation and adaptation objectives and policies; ii) external climate policy coherence between climate change and development objectives; iii) vertical policy integration to mainstream climate change into sectoral policies and; iv) horizontal policy integration by overarching governance structures for cross-sectoral coordination. This framework is used to examine CPI in the land use sector of Indonesia. The findings indicate that adaptation actors and policies are the main advocates of internal policy coherence. External policy coherence between mitigation and development planning is called for, but remains to be operationalized. Bureaucratic politics has in turn undermined vertical and horizontal policy integration. Under these circumstances it is unlikely that the Indonesian bureaucracy can deliver strong coordinated action addressing climate change in the land use sector, unless sectoral ministries internalize a strong mandate on internal and external climate policy coherence and find ways to coordinate policy action effectively.

Pages: 9p.

Publication Year: 2016

ISSN: 1462-9011

Source: Environmental Science and Policy

DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2016.11.004

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  • FTA event coverage: 5 ways forestry research contributed to global climate discussions in Marrakesh

FTA event coverage: 5 ways forestry research contributed to global climate discussions in Marrakesh


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Photo: CIFOR

Originally published at CIFOR’s Forests News

Global climate negotiations concluded last week with renewed commitment to action on limiting global temperature rise and preparing for the impacts of climate change.

From 7-19 November, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Marrakesh, Morocco, hosted the 22nd Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP22), as well as the twelfth session of the of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP12) and the first session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA1).

The Paris Agreement entered into force just days before the event, on 4 November, with 112 of the 197 Parties to the Convention now having ratified the accord.

As anticipated, land use and forestry had a key role to play in negotiations on the new climate and development agenda. Research in these areas will continue to be vital to support sound decision-making and action toward a sustainable, low-carbon future.

Here are five ways research on forests and landscapes contributed to last week’s climate discussions in Marrakesh:

1. Enhancing transparency

Success for the Paris Agreement in practice depends on transparent measuring, reporting and verification (MRV) of progress on meeting its goals. Article 13 of the agreement establishes an ‘enhanced transparency framework’ for states to report progress relevant to their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

However, this raises questions about the capacity of state and non-state actors in accurate carbon accounting, and about how to monitor, measure, report and verify non-carbon aspects, including human rights and other social and environmental dimensions.

In an official COP22 side event, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) together with Wageningen University & Research and partners, asked the question, ‘What is essential for transparency under the Paris Agreement?’

Research conducted under the Global Comparative Study on REDD+ (GCS REDD+) was presented to support the development of more transparent approaches to MRV, including a role for civil society and other actors in independent monitoring, and ways to track and verify non-state actor and corporate pledges.

2. Reviewing REDD+ performance

In another side event, CIFOR, the University of Helsinki and the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) hosted a discussion on the issues of REDD+ performance.

Presenting further GCS REDD+ research, CIFOR scientists and colleagues shared findings on ‘Measuring and monitoring performance, and managing risks in REDD+’.

In discussion, subjectivities were revealed in the science of designing effective REDD+ policies and measuring their performance. CIFOR scientist Amy Duchelle highlighted the inherent tensions between carbon and non-carbon goals under REDD+, while senior scientist Grace Wong questioned risks to equity under REDD+ as a results-based payment approach.

3. Informing corporate pledges

Non-state actors, including international corporations, continued to make voluntary commitments to reduce their climate impact as part of the Non-state Actor Zone for Climate Action (NAZCA).

Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), one of only two corporations under NAZCA to directly own or manage land, is taking a community engagement approach to its commitment to an Integrated Farming and Forestry System (IFFS) program, launched at COP21.

At COP22, APP hosted a session on ‘Putting people at the center of development: Climate-friendly, forest-based livelihoods’. Scientist Amy Duchelle brought to the discussion her analysis of REDD+ social safeguards and subnational initiatives.

4. Highlighting blue carbon

Also at the Indonesia Pavilion, Principal Scientist Daniel Murdiyarso brought his research findings to the Indonesian Blue Carbon Dialogue, hosted by CIFOR together with the Indonesian Ministries for Environment and Forestry, and Marine Affairs and Fisheries.

The dialogue highlighted the often-overlooked role of blue carbon ecosystems, such as mangroves and seagrass meadows, in measures for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Wetland ecosystems have enormous potential for carbon storage – up to 20 times greater than terrestrial forest ecosystems – and maritime countries like Indonesia are starting to pay attention. Several calls were made at COP22 for blue carbon to be integrated into more NDCs under the Paris Agreement.

As the discussion showed, there is already plenty of information available on blue carbon stocks – the challenge now is to put the research into action as policy.

5. Responding to gender

Research on the intersections of gender equality and climate change was brought forward by CIFOR scientists in a couple of sessions arranged together with the Global Gender and Climate Alliance, including UN Women, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO).

Discussions in these sessions centered on how climate policy can be more gender-sensitive, gender-responsive – or even become gender-transformative.

A ‘Skill-sharing session on monitoring of gender-responsive climate policy’ brought forth research on possible synergies or tradeoffs between gender equality and other objectives for climate policy, while a panel discussion with the same partners looked at ‘Gender equality in climate policy: Translating global commitments to national policy’.

CIFOR scientists Anne Larson and Markus Ihalainen shared findings on what gender-responsive climate policy looks like in practice and in action, while Houria Djoudi highlighted adaptation taking place at a local level, and the co-benefits and tradeoffs that occur.

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  • Long-term relationships and mutual trust—partnerships and research on climate change

Long-term relationships and mutual trust—partnerships and research on climate change


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Not only in Ethiopia, climate change research partnerships worked well. Photo: Ollivier Girard/CIFOR
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Photo: CIFOR
Photo: CIFOR

By Christopher Martius, Coordinator of the Flagship on Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA).

For our research on climate change, we have proof that our partnerships do work – there is strong evidence from last year’s assessment of the Global Comparative Study on REDD+, which was about our partners in different countries who did research with us.

Very often, national partners – from universities, NGOs and other organizations – work using the same methodology, each one in their country. Those that are new to the approach will get some training. We are thus able to apply the same methodology across countries and to compare the results.

Often in this process, partners improve their capacity and you can see that they raise their national profile. This model of cooperation is successful, and we call this the co-production of science model.

Good examples of this model are our links with: the Wondo Genet College of Forestry in Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Environment and Forestry Research Institute. In Vietnam, we collaborated closely with the Centre of Research and Development in Upland Areas (CERDA), an NGO; and in Peru, we with worked a private consultancy, Libélula Comunicación Ambiente y Desarrollo, and analyzed media coverage of REDD+ in the country. And we have many more best practices like this.

Not only in Ethiopia, climate change research partnerships worked well. Photo: Ollivier Girard/CIFOR
Not only in Ethiopia, climate change research partnerships worked well. Photo: Ollivier Girard/CIFOR

Of course, we also have many partnerships with universities in Europe, the US and in Australia. As Flagship 4, we maintain a long-standing relationship with the University of Wageningen, where we regularly send students from developing countries to study for PhDs.

We have similar arrangements with the Agricultural University of Ås in Norway, currently there is one student from Zambia and one from Ethiopia studying there. We work with several universities in the US such as Oregon State and North Carolina State. I am linked to the Center for Development Research (ZEF) at the University of Bonn, Germany. And these partnerships are expanding.

Under FTA, researchers created Terra-I, a tool that provides Global Forest Watch with local data. This was led by  the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). A good example for a partnership in the political sphere can be found in the LUWES/LUMENS collaboration with governance institutions in the Indonesian provinces.

We have developed strong ties with GIZ (Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) in Kenya, Indonesia and Tajikistan. In Kenya, we collaborate on the so-called water tower project, in Indonesia on agroforestry and in Tajikistan the link is forestry and migration. These partners appreciate this collaboration as it brings input from our research efforts into their work.

I look forward to new partnerships, with the International Institute for Applied Systems Sciences (IIASA)’s GLOBIOM for example – a global model to assess competition for land use between agriculture, bioenergy and forestry. This will be about developing scenarios for specific forest sites. We also plan to develop a new collaboration with Lancaster University in the UK, again on the water towers project in Kenya.

The partnerships that work well are the ones who continue over a long time. There is mutual trust and this helps us to work together even in rougher times. FTA Phase II has a duration of six years – I think we can achieve a lot in this time!

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  • FTA event coverage: ICRAF calls for upscaling of agroforestry to tackle climate change

FTA event coverage: ICRAF calls for upscaling of agroforestry to tackle climate change


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A perfect example of eco-efficient agriculture, provided by a CIPAV silvo-pastoral system at Reserva Natural El Hatico, familia Molina Durán, near Palmira, Colombia. Photo: Neil Palmer/CIAT
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A perfect example of eco-efficient agriculture, provided by a CIPAV silvo-pastoral system at Reserva Natural El Hatico, familia Molina Durán, near Palmira, Colombia. Photo: Neil Palmer/CIAT
A perfect example of eco-efficient agriculture, provided by a CIPAV silvo-pastoral system at Reserva Natural El Hatico, familia Molina Durán, near Palmira, Colombia. Photo: Neil Palmer/CIAT

Originally posted at ICRAF’s Agroforestry World Blog

The Paris climate change agreement came into force on 4 November 2016—an unprecedented event. And the COP22 climate talks here in Marrakech have been all about turning that agreement into action on the ground. The big question for all, is: how do we reach the triple win of development, adaptation and mitigation without degrading our natural resource base?

Trees in forests and on agricultural landscapes are central to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and to delivering on the Paris Agreement. And they are central to delivering vital livelihood benefits and income, both for the rural population and, via the provision of a diversity of products and services, for urban consumers.

Agroforestry—agriculture with trees—is also instrumental to reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that aim to eradicate hunger, reduce poverty, provide affordable and clean energy, protect life on land, reverse land degradation and combat climate change. Because of the carbon sequestration capacity of trees in biomass and soils, agroforestry can contribute greatly to assist countries to reach their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) is supporting national governments in Africa, Asia and Latin America in developing the tools, knowledge, options and capacity needed to successfully implement sustainable agricultural solutions. We call for:

  • Scaling up agroforestry as a solution for climate change adaptation and mitigation via Nationally Determined Contributions;
  • Raising the investment in providing scientific evidence of agriculture’s contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation;
  • Reducing land degradation and deforestation through agriculture with trees;
  • Including sustainably produced bioenergy to the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) initiative’s portfolio of options to end energy poverty.

We also have great optimism as private financing emerges to enable such investments to contribute to public goods around climate change, sustainable environmental stewardship and farmers’ livelihoods. In particular, the Livelihoods Fund and Tropical Landscape Finance Facility are showing tremendous leadership in making it happen at large scale.

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  • FTA event coverage: 2016 Global Landscapes Forum will go big

FTA event coverage: 2016 Global Landscapes Forum will go big


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Capturing the spirit of the 2016 Global Landscapes Forum. Photo: Pilar Valbuena/CIFOR
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Capturing the spirit of the 2016 Global Landscapes Forum. Photo: Pilar Valbuena/CIFOR
Capturing the spirit of the 2016 Global Landscapes Forum. Photo: Pilar Valbuena/CIFOR

Under the motto “Climate Action for Sustainable Development”, this year’s Global Landscapes Forum again positioned itself as the key event of the land use and development community. The GLF is also the biggest event that is co-funded by the the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry.

Coordinating partners are the Center for International Forestry Research, CIAT, UNEP, the World Bank, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) and Credit Suisse, more than 40 partners contributed in other ways.

The big news this year came from the German government that announced their commitment to the Global Landscapes Forum by hosting the event in the UN city of Bonn. The German Ministry for the Environment and the Ministry for Economic Cooperation have joined forces to support the GLF for the next four years. The platform for global action will meet in Bonn for the first time in 2017.

“GLF is doubtlessly THE global platform leading the debate on sustainable land use & forestry.” Jochen Flasbarth, State Secretary

The vision of the GLF is to reach one billion people with the vision of sustainable landscapes and the message that everything is connected. The event unites business, government, civil society and indigenous leaders engaged in sustainable development solutions.

Some 600 people participated in this year’s Forum in Marrakesh, on the sidelines of the UNFCCC COP22. More than 5000 followed the event online. Participants and viewers came from 95 countries.

The sessions most closely related to the CGIAR FTA were (more videos to follow)

How to walk the talk: Promoting gender equality in national climate policy and action (co-hosted by FTA partner CIFOR)

From commitment to action – developing strategies to operationalize integrated landscape approaches (co-hosted by FTA partners CIFOR, World Agroforestry Centre together with SIWI)

Unexplored big wins for climate change through landscape restoration (co-hosted by FTA partner CIAT together with WLE)

Climate, business and landscapes: Mobilizing large-scale investment for smallholder farmers (co-hosted by FTA partner CIFOR, IFAD and SNV)

Policy learning from REDD+ for zero deforestation and restoration initiatives (co-hosted by FTA partner CIFOR together with UN-REDD)

Where the rubber hits the road for achieving climate goals: Non-state actors and subnational governments in sustainable landscapes (hosted by FTA partner CIFOR)

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Click to watch the video from the session

The Discussion Forum addressed, based on research under the CGIAR FTA, in interaction with partners, the challenges and opportunities that come up when non-state actors such as the private sector and subnational government actors such as provinces engage in efforts to tackle climate change on the ground.

The presentations were based on

  • comparative research from 54 sites of land-use change in 11 subnational landscapes in Peru, Indonesia, Mexico, Vietnam and Tanzania;
  • in-depth studies of the design of monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems in Peru and Mexico; and
  • research on private sector commitments e.g. through the NAZCA platform.

Anne Larson: What we know about global climate goals and local realities – GLF 2016 Marrakesh

Click to watch Anne Larson's introduction
Click to watch Anne Larson’s introduction

Watch all the available videos from GLF 2016 here

Take a look at the presentations here

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Trees on farms: Unexplored big wins for climate change through landscape restoration

18 November, 2016

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