Blog

As 2021 draws to a close, I’d like to take this opportunity to share some highlights from this year’s work by the EU REDD Facility. 

This year we celebrated the 10th anniversary of our founding, taking the opportunity to reflect on the lessons we learned over the last decade. We’re working to ensure these insights help to shape and accelerate action for protecting and restoring the world’s forests.  

Taking stock of progress towards addressing deforestation 

The Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forest and Land Use, drafted as part of the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) process, is a significant achievement. The Declaration brings more than 130 countries to work collectively to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030.  

We’re collaborating with partner countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to understand the governance challenges driving deforestation, track private finance for tropical forests, and develop pragmatic approaches that monitor and deliver change for forest and land-use sector governance. 

Assessing the revised climate plans of several of our partner countries, we’ve seen many opportunities to work in partnership to address forest land-use sector challenges. But we’ve also found a mixed picture in terms of overall pledges to reduce emissions, and forest-related targets.  

A new pathway to decoupling deforestation and trade  

In launching our Transparency Pathway, we offer a pragmatic method for turning policy aspirations into measures to decouple deforestation and trade. Our first Transparency Pathway insight demonstrated how supply chain data can be used to develop new understandings of commodity trade contexts. This information unlocks potential for partnerships between producers, consumers, and trader groups to shift commodity markets towards sustainability. Building on our partnership with the Trase Initiative and the support we provided to our Indonesian partners tracking jurisdictional sustainability, we found growing interest from our partner countries in supply chain transparency approaches. 

Land-use planning processes get easier with an updated website and training