Work has begun to draft a National Strategy for Guyana to implement Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+).
A critical component of Guyana’s REDD+ Readiness Process, the Strategy aims to maintain the country’s low rate of deforestation and forest degradation by continuing related policy, procedures and programmes; and by strengthening monitoring, reporting and verification systems.
The Strategy, expected by November 2019, is being developed under the Ministry of Natural Resources’ Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) Project.
The Ministry contracted a consortium of consultants in April 2018 to prepare the REDD+ Strategy along with a Social Environmental and Strategic Assessment (SESA) and an Environment and Social Management Framework (ESMF). The latter are crucial to the REDD+ Strategy which will also respond to environmental and social priorities for land use taking into account expected local, regional and global benefits and opportunity costs of conserving forests.
The consortium of consultants include Winrock International, Climate Law and Policy, Conservation International (CI) Guyana and Slyvan Acres. CI has been engaging key stakeholders from government, private sector, civil society and indigenous/forest dependent communities, to review the draft assessment of governance, and to contribute to the analysis of indirect drivers of deforestation and forest degradation, both historically and looking forward.
The US$3.8 million FCPF Project, scheduled to the end of December 2019, supports key REDD+ Readiness Activities aimed at building Guyana’s capacity to implement REDD+, specifically by creating the organisational structures and enabling environment that could attract future investment projects for reducing carbon emissions.
