Monitoring Deforestation And Forest Degradation In The Context Of Redd

In this Infobrief, we outline the rules and choices to be addressed by participatory countries in REDD+ activities, and show some technical problems they can face, and some options they can adopt.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been providing support to member countries on national forest monitoring for decades. Best practices and lessons learned from this support are summarized in FAO´s Voluntary guidelines on national forest monitoring (VGNFM). The guidelines provide principles, elements and best practices for the establishment and implementation of a multipurpose National Forest Monitoring System (NFMS). The aim of this paper is to strengthen the elements and guidelines provided in the VGNFM in the context of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). It also includes a deeper analysis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change decisions and the most recent methodological recommendations provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, focusing on the three pillars of an NFMS for REDD+: a Satellite Land Monitoring System, a National Forest Inventory, and REDD+ reporting, including the combination of remote-sensing and ground-based forest inventory to estimate anthropogenic forest related Greenhouse Gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks.

REDD+ is one of the leading near-term options for global climate change mitigation. More than 300 subnational REDD+ initiatives have been launched across the tropics, responding to both the call for demonstration activities in the Bali Action Plan and the market for voluntary carbon offset credits.

This report provides an overview of Nepal’s initiatives on readiness for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+). It presents the status of forest cover change; identifies the drivers of deforestation, institutional and distributional factors in the country; analyses the political economy of land use change; revisits the REDD+ process; and assesses prospects for effective, efficient and equitable outcomes of the same. Nepal has a high rate of deforestation and forest degradation, though there exists no robust, comprehensive orupdated information to show the precise rate. Multiple drivers—such as high dependency on forests, over harvesting, weak governance, landlessness and high opportunity costs for agricultural expansion—contribute to deforestation. The government’s capacity to monitor and address these drivers and underlying causes appears inadequate. Forest officials, civil society organisations and donors exhibit strong enthusiasm for and active involvement in REDD+. Over half a dozen diverse REDD+ readiness initiatives are being implemented by the government and non-state actors. REDD+ implementation has adopted a participatory and multi-stakeholder process usually involving government agencies, civil society organisations and development partners. However, this process is largely detached from the complex dynamics of deforestation and appears to be limited to technical, administrative and peripheral issues. The core issues of forest tenure security and governance reform have not received adequate attention. A robust policy, legal and institutional foundation for community forestry and well-functioning community institutions provide a strong foundation for REDD implementation in Nepal. However, there are enormous challenges from the larger political and socio-economic context, the paucity and diversity of institutional arrangements and the unique nature and distribution of forest types.

The development of a system for forest monitoring and measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) is an on-going priority – and challenge – for REDD+ countries. Although many countries already have some form of national forest monitoring in place, the existing capacity often falls short of the level required to participate fully in REDD+. In this context, a group of experts from around the world met in September 2012 to share their experiences and to discuss some of the central – and at times controversial – issues for national forest monitoring readiness and REDD+.

Recent developments in international policy on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation in Developing countries (REDD) open the way for crediting of carbon saved by rural communities through management of the forests in their vicinity. Since the annual changes in forest carbon stock under this kind of management are relatively small and often under the canopy, they cannot easily be assessed using remote sensing, so ground-level data collection is likely to be essential over large areas of forests. The potential role of communities in measuring, monitoring and reporting carbon stock changes in their forests has been explicitly mentioned in UNFCCC documentation on methodology for REDD+, the extended form of REDD that includes forest enhancement, sustainable forest management and forest conservation. This book presents practical methods by which communities can do it. These methods were developed and tested with communities in villages in Africa and Asia under a six-year research programme. The reliability of the data gathered by the community is shown to be equivalent to that of professional forest inventories while the costs are much lower. Involvement of local communities in collection of this data may be the most cost-effective solution for national REDD+ programmes. Moreover, it could provide the basis for a transparent system for distribution of the financial rewards from REDD+ and the carbon market. The book first presents the policy context, concepts, methods and general results, which include estimates of typical carbon savings resulting from community management in different types of tropical forests. It also looks at the governance issues that may be involved and a variety of ways in which incentive schemes might be designed to encourage communities to participate. The second half of the book is devoted to case studies from the countries involved in the research. These provide both ideas and practical experience to enable agencies to engage with local communities to monitor carbon stock changes.