Climate Change and Mountain Forests

The project builds upon the outcomes of a side event organized in 2012 in Brazil by the Mountain Partnership (MP) at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in collaboration with the Global Island Partnership and with the support of the Directorate General for Development Cooperation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy, a core founder and active partner of both alliances. 

With the financial support of the Italian government, the project tackles the issues regarding the nexus between poverty and unsustainable use of natural resources, faced by vulnerable mountain communities of both continental and island nations, in the framework of the pursuits of the Rio+20 outcome document and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

It aims to promote sustainable management of mountain ecosystems in key tropical mountain regions by supporting the implementation of the Mountain Products Programme (MPP) of the Mountain Partnership Secretariat, as well as FAO’s activities aimed at Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+).

The project recognizes the special role that mountain ecosystems and their forests have in the international development agenda, as they provide resources and services that are critical not only to upstream Indigenous Peoples' communities but also to downstream villages and economies, such as: food, timber, fibre, medicinal plants, water, maintenance of soil quality, regulation of water regimes, protection against landslides and other natural disasters, 

The project has two main components:
The first aims to promote and protect high value mountain products as a strategy for sustainable development in mountain regions at global level. In collaboration with the members of the Mountain Partnership, the project will establish a light certification scheme to brand mountain products so to benefit local mountain producers and help them to better tackle market challenges.

The second component focuses on Papua New Guinea as a case study, and on the integration of PNG’s Multipurpose National Forest Inventory (NFI) with a methodology to assess and monitor forest biodiversity at national scale (in the framework of REDD+ preparedness activities). The new NFI, appropriately integrated with a protocol for biodiversity assessment, aims to enable objective analyses of the trade-offs between protecting biodiversity and reducing emissions, with the aim to maximize both objectives and to reduce the risk of an unsustainable use of forest resources, which undermines the resilience of forests and, in turn, their capacity to provide the goods and services that humans require.

The outcomes of the two components and the lessons learned from the pilot projects will be shared at an international level among all members of the two alliances (MP and GLISPA), in view of their possible adaptation and replication in other countries.

• Mountain Products Initiative

• Biodiversity and REDD+