Ecuador articula los esfuerzos nacionales para la reducción de la deforestación y degradación de los bosques a través del Plan de Acción REDD+. Comprender cómo los flujos de financiación privados impactan positiva o negativamente en los bosques es una oportunidad para incrementar las inversiones alineadas con REDD+.
Ecuador is coordinating national efforts to reduce deforestation and forest degradation through its REDD+ Action Plan. Understanding how different private finance flows positively or negatively impact forests is an opportunity for national and international actors to increase investment aligned with REDD+.
As 2021 draws to a close, I’d like to take this opportunity to share some highlights from this year’s work by the EU REDD Facility.
This year we celebrated the 10th anniversary of our founding, taking the opportunity to reflect on the lessons we learned over the last decade. We’re working to ensure these insights help to shape and accelerate action for protecting and restoring the world’s forests.
The Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forest and Land Use, drafted as part of the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) process, is a significant achievement. The Declaration brings more than 130 countries to work collectively to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030.
We’re collaborating with partner countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to understand the governance challenges driving deforestation, track private finance for tropical forests, and develop pragmatic approaches that monitor and deliver change for forest and land-use sector governance.
Assessing the revised climate plans of several of our partner countries, we’ve seen many opportunities to work in partnership to address forest land-use sector challenges. But we’ve also found a mixed picture in terms of overall pledges to reduce emissions, and forest-related targets.
In launching our Transparency Pathway, we offer a pragmatic method for turning policy aspirations into measures to decouple deforestation and trade. Our first Transparency Pathway insight demonstrated how supply chain data can be used to develop new understandings of commodity trade contexts. This information unlocks potential for partnerships between producers, consumers, and trader groups to shift commodity markets towards sustainability. Building on our partnership with the Trase Initiative and the support we provided to our Indonesian partners tracking jurisdictional sustainability, we found growing interest from our partner countries in supply chain transparency approaches.
This year we gave our flagship Land-use Planner a major overhaul. Partners in Africa, Asia and Latin America used the tool to help develop land-use scenarios, compare social, economic and environmental impacts, and weigh policy decisions. The tool is now available in 6 languages and more than 100 participants have been trained throughout the year, now taking the tool forward in their own programmes and land-use planning activities across the globe.
In 2022, we look forward to:
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As climate change impacts grow ever more apparent, it becomes more urgent to stop carbon flowing into the atmosphere and increase resilience to rising threats. Much will depend on how and where finance flows. Countries are enacting plans for adapting to and mitigating climate change, so they need to know what money is available and — crucially — if any flows of finance are working against their climate objectives.
Monitoring past, present, and future spending and investment patterns is therefore essential. Such information can help countries to measure progress, identify gaps, and align flows and instruments for maximum impact and scale. It can optimize the deployment of public resources in a way that can effectively and efficiently unlock private investment at the transformational scales needed.
To discuss how best to do this, the EU REDD Facility, Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) gathered experts from governments, donor agencies, and organisations that are engaged in tracking domestic climate finance during the COP25 climate change conference.
Different approaches and tools are already used by countries to map and track domestic climate finance. These include: climate budget tagging; land-use finance mapping; climate public expenditure and institutional reviews; private sector climate expenditure and institutional reviews; and investment and financial flows assessments. Countries like Nepal and Kenya have been at the forefront of developing such national systems and are now joined by many countries around the world following similar approaches.
There is also something called the ‘climate finance landscape approach,’ which CPI developed with partners in 2011. It tracks the life cycle of climate finance flows – from provider of finance, through intermediaries, instruments and disbursement channels to end uses. This approach has been key in helping policymakers understand who finances what, and the extent to which finance is aligned with policy objectives.
It also identifies barriers to investment, potential incentive mechanisms, and provides a baseline for monitoring progress in mobilising resources. CPI and the EU REDD Facility have since developed an open source tool that makes this methodology available to countries. Côte d’Ivoire is among the countries to have used it to map investments related to their climate and forests objectives.
During the event, a panel of country representatives, practitioners, and partners shared their experiences of monitoring and planning domestic climate and land-use finance. They gave examples of positive outcomes, but also raised a number of challenges. These ranged from the methodological —such as a lack of data gaps and a lack of clarity about definitions of climate finance in the national context — to the institutional, such as a lack of capacity and poor inter-ministerial coordination.
Given the challenges, it is clear that simply quantifying financial flows is itself a big step. The next level is using those estimates to influence policy, plan investments and measure progress. Critically, mapping finance can also help to mobilize new money and redirect old towards climate objectives. So how do we move from producing nice reports to bringing systemic changes to budgeting and spending patterns at domestic level?
Participants spoke of a need to simplify information and present it visually to facilitate dialogue among stakeholders and garner support for proposals. They also raised the need for more transparency, better sharing of data and a greater understanding of best practices based on what has worked in different countries. To support this, governments would also need to improve coordination among ministries and ensure their staff have adequate capacity through training.
Summing up the event, Dr. Barbara Buchner, Global Managing Director at CPI, highlighted the need for improved coordination among technical partners to develop and share methodologies, tools and potentially data. One suggestion was that continued and regular exchanges among the participants and other interested parties would help start to create an informal community of practice enabling us to share experiences and best practices. With this in mind, CPI and the EU REDD Facility are planning to organise a follow-up and virtual half-day workshop at the end of 2020. If you want to know more about climate finance tracking and mapping, or if you have experiences to share, we hope to see you there.
– Dr. Angela Falconer, Associate Director in Climate Policy Initiative’s climate finance division, is also an author of this blog post.
– The workshop was funded by the EU REDD Facility and International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU).
– This blog post was originally published on 14 February 2020.
The Ministry of Planning and Investment of Vietnam, through its Central Institute for Economic Management, and the EU REDD Facility mapped and analysed planned public investments (2016-2020) in land use in the five provinces of the Central Highlands region. This innovative research looked at the main sources of finance and their role in supporting the objectives of Vietnam’s National REDD+ Action Plan (NRAP).
When you buy a chocolate bar, it’s quite likely that the cocoa in it came from Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s top producer. If so, it is almost certain that the cocoa plants were grown where dense rainforest once stood.
