Companies, governments, and individuals voluntarily spent just under $4.5 billion on conservation and clean energy over the past decade by purchasing nearly 1 billion carbon offsets, finds a new report released on the sidelines of this week’s international climate talks in Bonn, Germany.

The Forest Trends Ecosystem Marketplace report, Ahead of the Curve: State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets 2015, demonstrates that voluntary demand for carbon offsets – each representing a one-tonne reduction in greenhouse gases that compensates for emissions elsewhere – is impactful well beyond the markets’ relatively small size.

The issue of REDD+ benefit sharing has captured the attention of policymakers and local communities because the success of REDD+ will depend greatly on the design and implementation of its benefit-sharing mechanism. Despite a large body of literature on potential benefit-sharing mechanisms for REDD+, the field has lacked global comparative analyses of national REDD+ policies and of the political-economic influences that can either enable or impede the mechanisms. Similarly, relatively few studies have investigated the political-economic principles underlying existing benefit-sharing policies and approaches. This working paper builds on a study of REDD+ policies in 13 countries to provide a global overview and up-to-date profile of benefit-sharing mechanisms for REDD+ and of the political-economic factors affecting their design and setting. Five types of benefit-sharing models relevant to REDD+ and natural resource management are used to create an organising framework for identifying what does and does not work and to examine the structure of rights under REDD+. The authors also consider the mechanisms in light of five prominent discourses on the question of who should benefit from REDD+ and, by viewing REDD+ through a 3E (effectiveness, efficiency, equity) lens, map out some of the associated risks for REDD+ outcomes. 

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This paper builds on the legal priorities identified by key stakeholders during national workshops held in November 2011 in Hanoi, Lusaka and Mexico City to discuss the country studies commissioned by FAO in 2011 for the UN-REDD Programme.  The study has been reviewed by government representatives from the three countries, the UN-REDD Programme’s partner agencies and international experts.

The main legal issues that affect REDD+ implementation identified by national stakeholders and analyzed contextually in this study include:

• Definition of rights (land, forest carbon) and REDD+ terminology (trees, environmental services, forests, deforestation, degradation, carbon stocks, etc.);
• Formal recognition of customary and indigenous rights;
• Identification of major drivers of deforestation and forest degradation and harmonization of legal inconsistencies across sectors;
• Legal arrangements needed to strengthen REDD+ institutional coordination;
• Public participation processes and FPIC mechanisms that need to be in place;
• Decentralized mechanisms that need to be regulated to support REDD+ implementation at local level;
• Benefit distribution mechanisms that need to be developed and regulated; and
• Reform of investment laws.

Download the publication here.