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Add to Preferred SourcesThroughout history, times of crisis have yielded extraordinary innovation and social cooperation. Not only has this been essential for conquering many seemingly insurmountable challenges, but it has also shown one of the greatest strengths of human nature: we can best face and overcome crises through joint, creative action.
Anthropogenic climate change constitutes one such historical crisis. The UN-REDD Programme, a joint undertaking of FAO, UNDP and UN Environment to fight deforestation and forest degradation, was developed to advance the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and to foster innovative and collaborative approaches to address the existential challenge of climate change.
Founded ten years ago with the sustained and substantial support of Denmark, Japan, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the European Union, UN-REDD was the first joint global UN programme on climate change; it has been a pioneer of innovative policy and financing approaches to valuing and protecting forests and their social and ecosystem services.
The Programme now encompasses 64 partner countries, and it has become a flagship UN partnership for the Paris Agreement and for delivering on the Sustainable Development Agenda. Today, it is a global knowledge hub for solutions to deforestation and forest degradation and a major world partner in the implementation of nature-based solutions to climate change.
The Programme has accompanied its partner countries in improving governance and advancing national policy and institutional systems to safeguard forests and mitigate climate change. Ecuador, for example, with support from the Programme, became the second country after Brazil to meet all the requirements for the REDD+ mechanism (known as the Warsaw Framework for REDD+). Since 2012, Ecuador has reported reductions of over 28 million tonnes of CO2 emissions; in 2017 it became the first country to receive Green Climate Fund investment to co-finance its national REDD+ Action Plan.
The UN-REDD Programme has also helped countries take giant steps forward in modernizing their forest monitoring using new technologies, satellite data and open-source software. Measuring forest change is now easier, more cost-effective, faster and more transparent than ever before.
A dedicated support for governance and policy reforms, multi-stakeholder cooperation, technological innovation and institutional capacity building can unleash the potential of forests as the pre-eminent nature-based solution to climate change. This is crucial for the implementation of the Paris Agreement and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Forests are a major, requisite front of action in the global fight against catastrophic climate change – thanks to their unparalleled capacity to absorb and store carbon. Stopping deforestation and restoring damaged forests, therefore, could provide up to 30 percent of the climate solution.
Nevertheless, deforestation remains shockingly high and intractable without major policy and institutional reforms and corresponding governance and financing support in most countries.
2020 will mark a pivotal moment in humanity’s quest for a sustainable future when greenhouse gas emissions need to start declining if we are to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change. Increased ambitions for the role of forests in climate change mitigation and adaptation and the UN’s innovative and collaborative power must be at the core of this future.
The UN-REDD Programme is a proven model for the joint creative action we need in order to overcome the climate crisis. Now it is time to scale it up.
Original source: UN Environment
Published on 3 October 2018