To secure and deepen the decline in CO2 emissions achieved in the Brazilian Amazon, REDD+ must be rapidly reframed to focus on low-emission rural development.
Source: Reframing REDD+.
GCF Governor Round Table at Rio+20.
Photo courtesy of Marcia do Carmo.
Variation in above ground carbon storage at 0.1 Ha resolution throughout a 4.3 million Ha area in the Peruvian Amazon region.
Source: Greg Asner
A comparison between the annual rates of deforestation in the Legal Amazon and the State of Pará. More information on Pará is available on the GCF Knowledge Database.
Source: PRODES/INPE, 2011
State efforts to reduce the rate of deforestation have proven to be successful and are now bolstered by the State REDD+ System which was created in early 2013. More information on Mato Grosso is available on the GCF Knowledge Database.
Source: Prodes/INPE
Mary Nichols, Chairman of the California Air Resources Board and Matt Rodriguez, California Secretary for Environmental Protection Introduction at the 2012 GCF Task Force Annual Meeting.
GCF Member states/provinces account for 26% of worldwide tropical forest carbon stocks.
2012 GCF Annual Meeting in Chiapas, Mexico
Recent Developments
GCF Member Spotlight—Pará, Brazil
The second-largest Brazilian State (IBGE, 2011), Pará, is divided into 144 municipalities, totaling 1.2 million km2. Entirely located within the geopolitical region known as the Legal Amazon, Pará is the most populous state in the region, with over 7.5 million people (almost one third of the population in the Amazon region). The service sector leads the economy for Pará, followed by industry with primary agricultural production also contributing to the state’s GDP.
2012 GCF Annual Meeting
The GCF held its 6th plenary meeting in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México on September 25-28, 2012. The GCF member states and provinces of Aceh, Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, California, Campeche, Central Kalimantan, Chiapas, East Kalimantan, Madre de Dios, Mato Grosso, Papua, Pará, and West Papua attended the meeting, along with observer states Tocantins (Brazil) and Catalonia (Spain), public, private and non-profit interest organizations, community members, and other stakeholders.
GCF Member Technical Training
The GCF, the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, the Forum on Readiness for REDD, Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC), and Google Earth Engine co-hosted a six-day Geographic Information Systems (GIS)/Remote Sensing (RS) training workshop for a small group of technical representatives from GCF member states in Brazil, Indonesia, Peru and Mexico. Participants were introduced to and trained in the use of software capable of improving measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) in each of their respective jurisdictional REDD+ programs. The software consisted of CLASlite, biomass mapping, and Google Earth Outreach/Google Earth Engine.
GCF Nigerian Workshop
The workshop in the GCF member state Cross River was organized by the Cross River State Forestry Commission (CRSFC) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) at Cross River National Park and focused on training participants in the use of hand-held GPS units for forest monitoring. Earlier this year, the GCF purchased 23 GPS units for the state to assist the CRSFC in building the capacity of forest communities and foresters to monitor and assess changes in forest cover.
Acre-Sao Paulo Partner to Lower GHG Emissions through Avoided Deforestation
In April, 2012, Brazilian states Sao Paulo and Acre-a GCF member signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to facilitate the purchase of avoided deforestation carbon credits. Under the MOU, Sao Paulo will purchase the credits from Acre to meet its greenhouse gas emissions targets. Sao Paulo is seeking to reduce its GHG emissions to 98 million tons of CO2 equivalent by 2020 (down from 122 million tons in 2005) according to an article by Reuters.
Report Release - Overview of Subnational REDD Programs as part of the GCF
A technical update report created collaboratively by IPAM, the GCF and the Tropical Forest Group under contract to the Electric Power Research Institute. The report reviews the status of REDD+ programs in GCF member-provinces and states, assessing progress made towards the development of nine essential components of REDD+ programs, and evaluating the potential of these programs to provide high-quality offsets that could be issued into emerging cap-and-trade systems in California and elsewhere, or transferred into other systems of performance-based compensation.