Achieving climate change mitigation with forests, trees and agroforestry
The Paris goals require immediate, coordinated efforts from all sectors in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. FTA’s work on mitigation provides analysis and guidance on GHG emission reduction options for tropical landscapes using forests, trees and agroforestry as resources, integrated within economic and social development.
It supports mechanisms such as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), the National Adaptation and Mitigation Actions (NAMAs); sustainable forest management (SFM) and zero-deforestation pledges from the private sector.
FTA seeks to advance knowledge through country-specific, as well as global, comparative analyses of emission reduction options, incentives, policies, governance and partnership mechanisms. FTA provides guidance on policy design and architecture, and a focus on the political economy of enabling policies. FTA plans to undertake more foresight studies on forest, tree and agroforestry-based mitigation and adaptation with respect to the SDGs and Paris targets.
Current key research activities on mitigation are: | |
• | REDD+: The Global Comparative Study on REDD+ policies and their implementation is in its seventh year. It investigates national policies and enabling frameworks; measurement, reporting and verification (MRV); landscape integration; and carbon and social effects (by gender) of the interventions. |
• | NDCs and other mechanisms: FTA undertakes comparative analyses of NDCs, and works on NAMAs and SFM. |
• | Supporting the Bonn Challenge: FTA undertakes research on the policy and practice of forest restoration and on enhancing the forest carbon sink capacity. |
• | Forest fires: FTA studies the complex challenge of forest fire policies, particularly in Indonesia. |
• | Climate finance: FTA assesses the effectiveness and efficiency of results-based climate finance and incentive mechanisms. |
• | Political economy: FTA advises on the enabling policy architecture of climate mitigation policies. |
• | Corporate pledges of deforestation-free production: FTA researches public-private partnership mechanisms, standards and certification that could support corporate zero-deforestation commitments and other mitigation initiatives. |