Experiences from incentive-based forest management are examined for their effects on the livelihoods of local communities. In the second section, country case studies provide a snapshot of REDD developments to date and identify design features for REDD that would support benefits for forest communities.

Sustainable forest governance is critical to a debate over how multi-faceted impacts of climate change can be addressed at the local community level. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) is a financial incentive-based carbon emission reduction program of the United Nations (UN) which will likely change the ways community forests in many developing countries are accessed and used. In particular, the REDD program may reduce the access and use of forest products to poor communities who are heavily dependent on forests for their livelihoods. This paper aims to investigate whether and how the REDD program affects community forestry program in Nepal, particularly in relation to the livelihoods of forest dependent poor communities. It examines conceptual and policy aspects of REDD program in respect to Nepalese community forestry policy through the literature review, and also draws upon the current research in three community forestry cases. It then focuses on the analysis of impacts of the REDD program, viz.- a) access and use of community forests for poor communities, b) benefit and costs of REDD program to poor communities, and c) benefits (or costs) sharing mechanism (i.e. who gets what, when and how?). The paper identifies issues of REDD program in relation to community forestry and local livelihoods, particularly the livelihoods of the poorer groups. The paper provides a critique of the market driven, financial incentive-based REDD program to be not sympathetic to the decentralized forest governance. Despite community forestry has proven to be more equitable than the top-down centralized approach to forest governance, we argue that REDD seems to encourage the top-down approach, and therefore it seems to be anti-community forestry. Further, it does not really safeguard the interest and need of poor and disadvantaged communities who are directly dependent on forests. The paper concludes by underpinning the need to rethink forest governance in a changing climate with due consideration of persisting poverty in many developing countries.

REDD+ is one of the leading near-term options for global climate change mitigation. More than 300 subnational REDD+ initiatives have been launched across the tropics, responding to both the call for demonstration activities in the Bali Action Plan and the market for voluntary carbon offset credits.

REDD+ must be transformational. REDD+ requires broad institutional and governance reforms, such as tenure, decentralisation, and corruption control. These reforms will enable departures from business as usual, and involve communities and forest users in making and implementing policies that a ect them. Policies must go beyond forestry. REDD+ strategies must include policies outside the forestry sector narrowly de ned, such as agriculture and energy, and better coordinate across sectors to deal with non-forest drivers of deforestation and degradation. Performance-based payments are key, yet limited. Payments based on performance directly incentivise and compensate forest owners and users. But schemes such as payments for environmental services (PES) depend on conditions, such as secure tenure, solid carbon data and transparent governance, that are often lacking and take time to change. This constraint reinforces the need for broad institutional and policy reforms. We must learn from the past. Many approaches to REDD+ now being considered are similar to previous e orts to conserve and better manage forests, often with limited success. Taking on board lessons learned from past experience will improve the prospects of REDD+ e ectiveness. National circumstances and uncertainty must be factored in. Di erent country contexts will create a variety of REDD+ models with di erent institutional and policy mixes. Uncertainties about the shape of the future global REDD+ system, national readiness and political consensus require  exibility and a phased approach to REDD+ implementation.

As new mechanisms for "reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation" (REDD) are being negotiated in international climate change talks, resource tenure must be given greater attention. Tenure over land and trees--the systems of rights, rules, institutions and processes regulating their access and use--will affect the extent to which REDD and related strategies will benefit, or marginalise, forest communities. This report aims to promote debate on the issue. Drawing on experience from seven rainforest countries (Brazil, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guyana, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea), the report develops a typology of tenure regimes across countries, explores tenure issues in each country, and identifies key challenges to be addressed if REDD is to have equitable and sustainable impact.

To date, REDD+ projects in Laos have made relatively conservative choices on driver engagement, focusing on smallholder-related drivers like shifting cultivation and small-scale agricultural expansion, to the exclusion of drivers like agro-industrial concessions, mining concessions and energy and transportation infrastructure. While these choices have been based on calculated decisions made in the context of project areas, they have created a pair of challenges that REDD+ practitioners must currently confront. The first is lost opportunity. By not engaging industrial drivers of forest loss, REDD+ misses an important chance to engage with high level economic decision making. This has implications not only for climate change mitigation, but more importantly for efforts to make Laos’s current trajectory of natural resource-intensive development more socially, environmentally and economically sustainable. The second challenge is more immediate. Due to the political-economic circumstances under which forest loss occurs, there is a significant gap between loss that is planned and loss that can be accounted for under REDD’s “national circumstance” allowances for planned deforestation. This means that REDD’s positive impacts on mitigating forest loss, to the extent that they occur, may be swamped by planned but unaccountable forest loss, and thus difficult or impossible to verify. Thinking bigger on issues from driver engagement to spatial planning and concession regulation to land tenure and rural livelihood possibilities thus presents not only a series of opportunities, but a series of imperatives.