Durban finished with the now commonplace but contradictory sense of achievement and disappointment. Achievement that something has been agreed, disappointment that because expectations are so low, any agreement seems like an achievement. REDD+, however, has finished COP17 with a less pessimistic sentiment [...]

Recalling last week’s benchmarks for the success of REDD+ negotiations at COP17, we can take each in turn and assess state of the negotiations on each topic. As expected, much of the discussion has been focussed on the MRV text (and addendum) from the SBSTA, which has now been presented to the COP for adoption this week. [...]

REDD+ is one of the building blocks for a new international agreement, and like other blocks, such as finance and technology transfer, it is one that many observers are hoping will become operational relatively soon, perhaps even in absence of a post-Kyoto agreement and the merging of the AWG-LCA with the AWG-KP [...]

Last month, the second edition of State of the Forest Carbon Markets,was released. All in all, the report painted a positive picture for the forest carbon markets: the volumes, transaction value and average prices in 2010 were all up on the previous year at, respectively, 30.1MtCO2e, $178 million and $5.50/tCO2e. Notably, REDD based transactions dominated the total [...]

Indonesia’s flagship Rimba Raya REDD project was registered this year under one of the Voluntary Carbon Standard’s REDD methodologies, aiming to preserve “91,215 hectares of tropical peat swamp forest,” equivalent to an emissions reduction of 104,886,254 tonnes of CO2e over the crediting period of 30 years, according to the registration documents. The project has long been an [...]

As already discussed on Climatico, using REDD+ as a private sector offsetting mechanism runs the risk of creating perverse incentives, exposing land to market price volatility and causing supply-induced price suppression. However, for the purposes of a deeper exploration into the market-related issues of REDD+, let’s assume these problems are solved and that forest carbon [...]

As the number of public sector financial mechanisms targeting REDD+ has increased, and consequently the volume of money flowing in to REDD+, observers are increasingly pointing out that the public sector alone cannot supply the huge sums of money needed to combat deforestation. The private sector is thus needed to share the cost and supply [...]

In recent years the transfer of climate finance has emerged as a policy response to equitably addressing climate change mitigation and adaption in developing countries. Much attention has been given to setting up the multilateral or bilateral mechanisms needed to classify, transfer and disburse the funds pledged by donor countries. Of those that have sprung [...]

Article by Guest Contributor: Natalie Antonowicz During the second week of negotiations at Cancun, expectations for progress on the United Nations’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) program declined. Delegates remained divided about rules on safeguards and finance, as well as the scope of REDD. Overall, however, the second week of the Cancun [...]

Article by: Ruth Brandt The first week of the COP16 has come and gone, with barely a mention of REDD+ in the official negotiations. Some delegates attribute this to the fact that the REDD+ negotiating text is one of the more advanced ones, and that negotiators either want to bring other texts to a comparable [...]