EU REDD Facility releases highlights and insights from 2020

The EU REDD Facility has published its annual report for 2020, with highlights and insights into work achieved over the year.

In 2020, COVID-19 brought unprecedented challenges for the world’s forests and the people depending on them. While some forest and agricultural sector operators and producers prioritised economic survival over environmental standards, the Facility’s partners remained committed to improving land-use governance as part of efforts to slow, halt and reverse deforestation.

The EU REDD Facility annual report highlights growing interest in supply chain transparency approaches in response to evolving market requirements. Building on progress made in tracking jurisdictional sustainability of Indonesian palm oil, the Facility worked with public and private sector stakeholders to assess feasibility of transparency approaches for cocoa sectors in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Colombia and Ecuador.

The Facility’s Land-use Planner was increasingly used in 2020 by partner countries to support decision-making. An updated version of the tool brought together a wider set of information to the community of users, including land-use data, methods and case studies.

In Colombia and Indonesia, the Facility worked on community forestry as path to improving livelihoods and achieving climate commitments.

As a means of deforestation-proofing investments to leverage finance to meet climate and forest goals, the Facility continued roll out of its Land-use Finance Tool. In 2020 Cambodia used the tool to help to build the case for more international support and improve spending coherence. The Democratic Republic of the Congo also started to use the tool to track all public land-use spending since 2009.

In assessments of payment for environmental services models for progress towards sustainably produced cocoa, the Facility confirmed the importance of incentive mechanisms for covering initial investment costs of shifting to sustainable production.