In the Media
Deciphering UNFCCC decisions on national forest monitoring and REDD+
July 17, 2012
UN-REDD Programme
As a comprehensive agreement on REDD+ gets closer with each Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It is essential that stakeholders around the world – especially in developing countries – fully understand the content, context and implications of adopted decisions. This is not always easy, with the finalisation of decision texts being notoriously rushed affairs. Also, subsequent in-country knowledge transfer is often limited by the demands on country negotiators’ time and expertise. Among these areas of complexity lies the guidance on technical systems required for REDD+ implementation.
Over the past three years, the COP has agreed upon a series of decisions to guide the development of national forest monitoring systems for REDD+. Because this guidance is published cumulatively, there is no single source of comprehensive information on what these systems might look like and what they should do. It therefore becomes a case of piecing together the available evidence to decipher meanings and functions. The two documents that provide guidance on national forest monitoring systems are Decision 4/CP.15 (from the 2009 Copenhagen Accords) and Decision 1/CP.16 (the 2010 Cancun Agreements).
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Keywords: COP, monitoring, national forest monitoring, REDD, UNFCCC