Key messages: Non-wood forest products (NWFPs) offer considerable opportunities for economic development and environmental sustainability, highlighting their potential as key resources in climate action initiatives. By establishing and enhancing value chains for new NWFPs, there's a dual benefit: it not only increases the economic value of forests, thereby incentivizing their conservation, but also provides alternative livelihoods for communities, potentially reducing reliance on economic activities, like charcoal and agricultural production, which might put pressure on forests. The process involved in selecting NWFPs for development is critical, emphasizing the importance of fieldwork. Engaging directly with communities and leveraging their knowledge and experience ensures that the...

In 2023, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Basque Center for Climate Change (BC3), as part of the NDC Aspects H2020 project, and in collaboration with the UN-REDD programme organized a series of dialogues aiming at better understanding the barriers, challenges, and enabling factors in the Forest and Other Land Use (FOLU) sector to achieve net zero emissions by mid-century. The lessons learned from these dialogues recognize that FOLU investments fall far short of what is needed and underscore the need to scale up climate finance for forests, particularly for the implementation of on-the-ground mitigation...

La degradación forestal genera grandes emisiones de carbono (34% de las emisiones del sector forestal, FAO 2020). Prevenir la degradación forestal reduce las emisiones al tiempo que salvaguarda la salud del ecosistema forestal y maximiza la productividad forestal para los medios de vida de las comunidades y la economía en general. Por lo tanto, estimar las emisiones y remociones de carbono derivadas de la degradación forestal es un requisito para participar en nuevas oportunidades de financiamiento climático. El Programa ONU-REDD, con el apoyo técnico de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación y la Agricultura (FAO) y el programa...

The UN-REDD Programme – FAO Halting Deforestation, Degradation, and Emissions Team invites proposals for the provision of a study on “Analytical framework on Policy Coherence to halt deforestation: Aligning public expenditure and cross-sectoral strategies to meet climate change commitments in the AFOLU Sector.”  FAO, through joint efforts of the UN-REDD Programme, and the FAO Agrifood Economics and Policy Division’s Monitoring and Analyzing Food and Agricultural Policies team, are developing an analytical framework of public expenditures analysis on forest conservation, restoration, and sustainable use, encompassing budgets allocated to forestry, agriculture, and other land use sectors.    The forthcoming study will extend the scope...

As countries increasingly qualify for payments under the REDD+ process and schemes in return for reducing their emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, a new report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and UN-REDD highlights the need for legal clarity on who owns emission reductions and who is entitled to benefit from those payments.    The publication, entitled Comparative study of carbon rights in the context of jurisdictional REDD+: Case studies from Africa, Asia and the Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean explains that since the Warsaw framework for REDD+ was established in 2013, verified emission reductions derived from forests have effectively become...