Mobilizing climate finance for intact forests
Better financing is an essential part of action to save intact forests. Whilst many sources of finance are relevant, climate finance is one of the key opportunities (as described recently in the journal Climate Policy and a key research report).
We are building a package of innovative policy solutions that could bring more international climate finance to intact forests. Several complementary ideas are being explored, suitable for a variety of climate finance sources.
Performance-based finance
Whilst many approaches to climate finance are 'results-based' (ie they reward tonnes of CO2 emissions avoided or reversed) there also continues to be an essential role for 'performance-based' finance that directly rewards the completion of actions known to benefit the climate. We are investigating how performance-based finance can deliver the best outcomes possible for intact forests.
Fuller valuation of removals (sinks) and avoided degradation
Some of the carbon flows into and out of intact forests are incompletely valued by current approaches to carbon accounting. This lowers the potential incentives for conservation action. We have identified three ways that the shortfall could potentially be addressed.
Two potential solutions (quantifying avoided committed degradation and avoided foregone removals) are aligned with, and would enhance, common REDD+ accounting frameworks, because they focus on fuller accounting of carbon flows in relation to a short-term counterfactual scenario.
Crediting removals from protected intact forests
The third potential solution takes a broader, longer term view of threat, outside a narrow REDD+ framing, by quantifying the value of removals within forests placed under protection, for example in government protected areas and Indigenous territories.
Supplemental crediting for High Forest-Low Deforestation (HFLD) areas
Typical REDD+ approaches enable areas with high deforestation and degradation rates to gain credits if they lower those rates. However, this offers no incentive to keep deforestation and degradation low in areas dominated by extensive intact forests - the so-called HFLD countries and jurisdictions.
One response is to offer supplemental credits to these areas, in recognition of their ongoing successful forest protection efforts, the risk of future increases and the possibility of threats being displaced from other geographies. The Architecture for REDD+ Transactions recently created a pathway for HFLD crediting in v2.0 of TREES (The REDD+ Environmental Excellency Standard), and other systems may take similar steps.
The FFL partners recently made a statement on the role of HFLD credits in carbon markets.
