TFD Review: Giving REDD+ Life: Integrating REDD+ with Broader Development Goals

This report draws on The Forests Dialogue’s REDD+ readiness dialogue series, which took place in six countries — Brazil, Ghana, Guatemala, Ecuador, Cambodia and Switzerland — between October 2009 and March 2011. The series involved 240 key stakeholders from more than 30 countries representing governments, businesses, communities, non-governmental organizations, reso urce owners and managers and academia. REDD+ is a comprehensive strategy for addressing deforestation and forest degradation and supporting forest conservation, the sustainable management of forests and the enhancement of forest carbon stocks. The first phase of the strategy is ‘readiness’. The TFD REDD+ readiness dialogue series shows a growing consensus around the need to bring REDD+ out of isolation and, in the readiness phase, to fully integrate it into development plans. Not only would this help ensure that the indirect drivers of deforestation are tackled, it would also guarantee that social safeguards become a key component of implementation practice. There is general acknowledgement that transformational governance reform which not only achieves reductions in greenhouse gas emissions but also facilitates broader sustainable development is possible and needed. The question is whether there is sufficient political will for it to happen.