Key Issues in REDD Baselines and Monitoring
Rights and Climate Meeting | 23 October 2008
During the Rights, Forests and Climate Change meeting currently being held in Oslo, Phil Shearman, PhD, from the Remote Sensing Centre at the University of Papua New Guinea, raises three developing issues in regard to the technical aspects of baseline setting and monitoring of REDD.
- Creation of baselines and data management – Many if not most countries selected for the “REDD-Ready” program do not have accurate baselines of their forest cover. Another obstacle is that national forest authorities will need to share their data with other parties, despite their poor track record on transparency. This is vital if the rights of local people are to be respected and benefits from REDD secured.
- Degradation: The other “D” – Despite uncertainty on the definition and measurement of forest degradation, this concept must be maintained within REDD considerations. Confusion arises in part from the definitions of “forest” used by the IPCC – for instance, an area can have 10-30% canopy cover and still constitute a forest. Ecologically, a 90% reduction in canopy cover is disastrous, but under current guidelines this degraded forest would be indistinguishable from old-growth forest. If degradation is not included, it could allow forests to be hollowed out by the logging industry without impacting a country’s forest coverage statistics – on which REDD payments may be calculated.
- Oversight: Whose numbers can you trust? – When it comes to forest statistics, the default has been to faithfully reproduce national reported figures. However, self-monitoring is not a good idea. Without external oversight, there is little reason to expect that these figures will be accurate. This is going be all the more difficult if the same organization (the Designated National Authority) is doing the monitoring and managing the interface between local people, project beneficiaries, and REDD payments from donors. Independent verification of deforestation and degradation mapping may be needed to increase transparency, reduce potential for corruption and increase REDD’s effectiveness.
Download the Key Issues in REDD Baselines and Monitoring viewpoint paper [pdf]…
