Safeguards for Results-Based Payments (REDD+)

After formulating national REDD+ strategies and action plans, Vietnam, Ghana and Peru were ready to proceed towards REDD+ implementation. To mitigate the potential negative impacts of REDD+ projects and ensure that REDD+ was implemented in a transparent and inclusive manner, with respect for the rights of local communities and indigenous people and with consideration for the protection of biodiversity, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) stipulated social and environmental guidelines, called safeguards. To monitor and ensure the transparency, consistency and effectiveness of the implementation of safeguards, the UNFCCC required all REDD+ countries to establish a safeguards information system (SIS).

Reporting of summary information from the SIS on how the UNFCCC REDD+ safeguards had been addressed and respected took place periodically in national communications to the UNFCCC in order to be eligible for results-based payments, which came from a wide variety of sources, including public, private, bilateral and multilateral sources. As most target countries were only beginning to consider how they would put in place such a SIS, whilst meeting multiple safeguard requirements, the ‘ensuring operationalisation of safeguard requirements to obtain RBF from sustainable national REDD+ policies’ project aimed to assist Vietnam, Ghana and Peru in REDD+ readiness, to put in place a SIS and meet multiple safeguard requirements to be eligible for results-based payments.

Project implementation and context

The project, funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB), was implemented between December 2015 and November 2018 in Vietnam, Ghana and Peru, three key regional hub countries that were relatively advanced in terms of proceeding towards REDD+ implementation.

This project built on the work carried out under the delivering multiple environmental and social benefits from REDD+ in SE Asia (MB-REDD) project also funded by BMUB (2013-2016). SNV, through the MB-REDD project, provided a crucial leadership role on the important issue of safeguards in REDD+ in Vietnam, including the development of a country safeguards approach (CSA) and REDD+ safeguards roadmap for Vietnam.

Country-led safeguards approach (CSA)

The project promoted a country-led safeguards approach (CSA) that responded to national and international safeguards commitments by building upon a country’s existing governance system: its legal, institutional, and compliance frameworks. Rather than building an entirely new system, the CSA provided a framework for specifying international safeguards according to the country context and anchoring them to the governance system (through the identification of relevant laws, the institutions responsible for their implementation, as well as for monitoring and compliance) so as to ensure that they were implemented and legally enforceable. The CSA aimed to be comprehensive enough to allow a country to effectively ensure systematic implementation of and compliance with the UNFCCC REDD+ safeguards, and demonstrated such compliance through a SIS.

Primary project outcomes

The project had two key overall outcomes:

• Immediate intended outcome: three regional hub country governments – Vietnam, Ghana, and Peru – were eligible for results-based payments through the establishment of country-led safeguard systems and improved institutional capacity for REDD+ safeguards implementation, monitoring, and reporting at national and sub-national levels.

• Wider learning outcome: an important further outcome was improved technical knowledge among REDD+ countries in the three regions on how to implement a country-led safeguards approach (CSA) to meet and operationalise multiple REDD+ safeguard requirements.

Core work packages

The project worked through four work packages, designed to contribute to sustainable development at national policy, subnational planning, and site-based activity levels, and to use target countries as regional hubs to promote and enable context-specific replication in other countries/landscapes.

1. Developing and disseminating global knowledge products and country best practices.

2. Developing and operationalising comprehensive country-led safeguard approaches, including national SIS.

3. Introducing subnational low-emissions development plans (LEDPs), which were sub-national plans for REDD+ or reducing emissions from forest and land-use change, representing strategies for addressing local drivers of deforestation in coordination with the country safeguard approach.

4. Incorporating participatory forest monitoring (PFM) into national forest monitoring systems (NFMS) and examined its potential contribution to national SIS.