UN Chief Executives Board Organizes Panel on Key Issues for REDD Implementation
9 June 2009: The UN Chief Executives Board (CEB) organized a panel, on the sidelines of the climate change talks being held in Bonn, Germany, to present UN-REDD, a collaborative initiative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) that assists forested developing countries and the international community gain experience with REDD.
Charles McNeill, UNDP, explained that the programme aims to maximize the carbon mitigation and broader sustainable development benefits that reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD) could deliver in a post-2012 climate regime.
During the panel, Peter Holmgren, FAO, discussed techniques to measure forest carbon stocks, highlighting that data are often inadequate. Barney Dickson, UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), addressed the social, economic and institutional impacts of REDD. Laura Furones, Global Witness, UK, described international forest monitoring, a method used to monitor logging and law enforcement based on ground-truthing through field investigations. Rosalind Reeve, Global Witness, UK, stressed that illegal logging demonstrates governance failures.[ENB On The Side]