1.
5 years of REDD
Lessons for effectiveness and
financing
Jane Boles, IIED, “Moving Ahead with REDD”, April 9th 2014

2.
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

3.
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)

4.
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

5.
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

6.
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

7.
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

8.
Focus on
underlying drivers
Needed approach:
Transparency with
local environmental
authorities
Inter-ministerial
cooperation at national
level
CHALLENGE
Particularly difficult to
finance

9.
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**

10.
The Differentiator Problem

11.
The ‘own the story’ problem
• Result: many CSR-
driven buyers would
prefer to finance
transaction costs rather
than purchase credits.

12.
The marketability problem

13.
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.

14.
Thank you!