One Tool to Fight the World’s Climate Crisis—With Additional Community Benefits
REDD+ plays a crucial role in conserving high biodiversity landscapes and delivers much-needed funds to support long-term forest protection, wildlife conservation, and local communities.
REDD stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. REDD+ is a proven framework for working with governments, local communities, and other stakeholders to protect, preserve, and revive global forest lands. Restoring and maintaining the earth’s natural carbon sinks is also essential for meeting global climate goals and commitments.
REDD+ finance recognizes the crucial role governments and communities play in the ongoing protection of our forests and wildlife. Government and local communities become active participants in addressing the climate crisis, incentivizing the building of a rural, green, sustainable economy based on the maintenance and restoration of forests and wildlife.
Carbon sales revenue generated from reducing deforestation and degradation are directed through mutually agreed upon benefit sharing agreements towards interventions that are proven to prevent forest conversion. These interventions are led by local governments and the community members themselves, bringing long-term income to local communities battling poverty, hunger, and other livelihood issues.
Protects 166,983 ha of forests in eastern Cambodia by reducing deforestation that results in greenhouse gas emissions
The Keo Seima REDD+ Project aims to halt deforestation and improve conservation efforts and land management practices, while increasing sustainable economic opportunities for communities whose livelihoods depend on the ecological services of the forest.
This approach includes securing land and resource tenure for local communities, improving protected area management, law enforcement, and establishing sustainable alternative livelihoods for communities. To date, this has successfully resulted in:
6 Indigenous Community Titles and 1 Community Protected Area
Development of successful community-led ecotourism model at Jahoo camp
Direct payments to communities under the benefit sharing mechanism
Improved law enforcement procedures and techniques, including community participation
Quantifiable improvements in community well being
Stable numbers of key wildlife species
Colombia
REDD+ is one of the main tools used to preserve forests and biodiversity in Colombia. With more than 100 registered projects, this country is a global leader in REDD+. WCS Colombia works in landscapes which contain some of the most important and threatened forests on the planet. Our long-term presence in these landscapes gives us a much greater understanding of the drivers of deforestation and the holistic, locally-driven, and community-based strategies that we can employ to reduce deforestation where we work.
Tanzania
Tanzania covers 48 million hectares of forest that provide a number of ecosystem services, including mitigation of the global climate through the sequestration of carbon. Despite these benefits, Tanzania is still experiencing high deforestation rates.
WCS is working in collaboration with the Government of Tanzania, specifically the Tanzania Forest Service Agency, to we make sure that we contribute to the conservation and sustainable management of the forests in the country. While this project is still in the early stages, initial assessments indicate that it will be able to deliver a large volume of carbon credits.
Sign Up for Email Updates
Get news from the field and learn about ways you can help Earth’s most threatened species.
