5 years of REDD

Lessons for effectiveness and

financing

Jane Boles, IIED, “Moving Ahead with REDD”, April 9th 2014

Era vs ERA (vs ERA Congo)

• ERA Ecosystem Restoration

Associates Inc Vancouver British

Colombia, since 2005

• Forest Carbon project development in

North America (AB32, FCOP) and

REDD development in Congo Basin,

Latin America

• Name change in 2013

Great Bear Forest Carbon

Initiative

• Largest intact temperate rainforest

in the world

• Carbon credits purchased by

voluntary market as well as BC

public sector (Pacific Carbon

Trust)

Mai Ndombe REDD+ project

• >265,00 ha, 30,000

people in 26 villages,

mostly lakeside

subsistence fisheries.

• Baseline land use:

industrial timber

harvesting for

international markets

• Began development in

2009

Mai Ndombe REDD+ -

• Good Pilot for DRC,

good for conservation

• BUT! Not easy model to

replicate.

– Previous concession

holder not a stakeholder

– Low-opportunity cost

– Built on specific

relationships and

opportunities

Project Development 2.0

Positive changes in Project Activities

Addressing Underlying drivers

Focus on governance (transparency, accountability)

Challenge: how to scale up finance?

Becoming financially sustainable

Bundling of environmental assets beyond carbon

Challenge: can be more difficult to address drivers

Focus on Bundling

assets beyond

carbon

Economic benefits to

communities

Sustainable agriculture

High-value processing

CHALLENGE

underlying drivers of

deforestation often not

linked to communities

Focus on

underlying drivers

Needed approach:

Transparency with

local environmental

authorities

Inter-ministerial

cooperation at national

level

CHALLENGE

Particularly difficult to

finance

Voluntary Carbon Market

• Will not get us to 30 billion! So why talk about it?

Provides evidence to inform policy

– Performs reasonably well with regards to S/E safeguards.

– Suppliers predict market value could reach $2.3 billion in

2020 (up from $523 million in 2013) **if we get the

communication right**

The Differentiator Problem

The ‘own the story’ problem

• Result: many CSR-

driven buyers would

prefer to finance

transaction costs rather

than purchase credits.

The marketability problem

Some Concluding Remarks

• Voluntary market as enabled some useful early action,

but will not be able to keep up as REDD scales up.

• REDD+ initiatives have become ‘smarter’, but in doing

so have added funding challenges.

• Just because Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is

limited as a REDD catalyst, it still has a huge role to

play in addressing the cause of avoided deforestation

by other means: consumer demand for green

commodity supply chains.

Thank you!