Realising REDD+ national strategy and policy options

More than 40 countries are developing national REDD+ strategies and policies, and hundreds of REDD+ projects have been initiated across the tropics. This book wants to inform these national and local processes, by asking some basic questions:

• How are participating countries going to reduce emissions and increase carbon stocks that they hope to be paid for through global mechanisms?
  
• What new institutions, processes, policies, and projects are needed?
  
• What are the options in these areas, and how do they compare?

This book seeks to answer these questions by examining what REDD+ at the national level might look like in four areas: institutions and processes to build the REDD+ framework, broad policy reforms to enable REDD+ implementation, sectoral policies to change incentives, and demonstration activities to test and learn from different approaches.

The book underscores that there are a number of promising approaches for achieving REDD+ objectives. Consequently, policy makers in each country will need to put together a mix of policies and approaches that tackle the drivers of deforestation and degradation in their particular national circumstances.

The main findings of the book are that:

• forests managed by communities may store more carbon, and Community Forest Management can be a cost effective way to manage forests
• control of wildfires, incentives for restoring degraded land, and taxes and market instruments to improve forest management could reduce forest emissions
• the combination of performance-based payments and significant anticipated funding could change positively and substantially the political economy of deforestation
• large REDD+ revenues will create new opportunities for rent-seeking behaviour; policies to ensure transparency, accountability and efficient spending of REDD+ revenues should be put in place
• new ways of collaborating across sectors, stakeholder groups and levels of government will be needed to design programmes and projects and to make sure policies are coherent
• national REDD+ institutions must make upward and downward linkages: transferring funds from the national to the local leveland channelling information from the local to the national and international levels
• the experiences of pilot projects can provide lessons for national policies by pointing to the most critical reforms that will be needed to implement REDD+ at the local level
• it will be important to document and disseminate the early results from the first generation of REDD+ projects so that midcourse corrections can be made as quickly as possible.