Forest Reference Levels and REDD+ Results Submitted to the UNFCCC;
An Overview
Marieke Sandker (The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO))

Session 1

Forest Reference Levels and REDD+ Results Submitted to the UNFCCC; An Overview
Marieke Sandker (The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO))

Global Overview of FRLs and REDD+ Results

Good afternoon, everybody.

I will give a global overview of forest reference levels (FRLs) andREDD+ results that have been submitted to the UNFCCC so far.
levels.

After that, I will look into the reference

Finally, I want to have a brief discussion on how reference levels and Nationally DeterminedContributions (NDCs) relate.
It was in 2007 when REDD+ came to life in the negotiations, a year after the UN-REDD Programme1
was established.

For several years, the details of REDD+ reporting had to be negotiated.

Those details

were finalized with the Warsaw Framework in 2013, which is our starting point for looking at global
progress on FRLs.

1

https://www.un-redd.org/

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To date, we have 44 reference level submissions by 39 countries.
twice.

Some of these countries submittedThis was either to expand the geographical scope (in Brazil’s case) or to expand the coverage of

REDD+ activities (in Malaysia’s case).
improvements.

Other countries like Madagascar re-submitted to provide technical

We have nine REDD+ result submissions by seven countries.

Together, these countries

have produced emission reductions which are equal to 6.6 billion tons of CO2 equivalent.

This is morethan the fossil fuel emissions of the US, Brazil, and Japan together.
If we look at the countries that submitted FRLs and put them on a map, this is what we see.

All thesecountries that have proposed a benchmark for performance on REDD+ cover a total area of 1.5 billion
hectares.

This is more than 30% of the global forest cover.

are responsible for 70% of the worldwide deforestation.

More importantly, these countries together

This is a significant potential contribution to theclimate change problem.
Objectives of FRL Submissions

What do these countries state as objectives in their reference levels?
objectives.

These countries state multiple

Some countries specifically say for domestic purposes, to track the progress of their policies

and measures they are implementing, but the most frequently mentioned objective of the reference levelsubmission is to get access to results-based payments.

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In this regard, a pilot program by the Carbon Fund,Forest Reference Levels and REDD+ Results Submitted to the UNFCCC;
An Overview
Marieke Sandker (The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO))

Session 1

the FCPF, in 2013 published a methodological framework with specific guidance on what a reference levelneeds to look like to be eligible for finance from the Carbon Fund. In 2017, the Green Climate Fund (GCF),
the official financing mechanism of the UNFCCC, also started a pilot program that includes a score cardwith specific criteria that the reference level needs to live up to for being eligible for finance.
A look at the reference levels submitted to the UNFCCC to date shows that deforestation is the mostfrequently included activity.

This is because it tends to be the most significant source of emissions and weare able to get estimates with reasonable reliability for deforestation.
degradation and enhancement.

Much more challenging are

Also lot of countries do not include the ‘plus’ activities sustainablemanagement of forest and forest conservation because they state that these activities are not additional
activities per se, since the GHG fluxes from the forest may be covered entirely through deforestation,degradation and enhancement.
How are FRELs Created?

If we look at how deforestation has been included in the reference levels, we see a changing picture.
Initially, in 2014 and 2015, countries created maps of change.
the area of deforestation.

From those maps, they directly subtracted

That approach has gradually changed.

The remote-sensing community

published several papers saying that these maps had errors and needed to be corrected.

They suggested

correcting those errors by using samples inside the map areas and then getting final estimates based on
those samples, so your samples are stratified by your map.
countries is systematic sampling.

Finally, an approach which is used in several

The downside of systematic sampling is the need for a large amount ofsamples to capture rare features like deforestation with reasonable accuracy.

However, the advantage ofeither stratified area estimation or systematic sampling is that it allows for calculation of confidence
intervals around the area estimate.
How was the associated emission factor assessed?

Of the 44 countries that submitted a reference

level to the UNFCCC, more than half have a national forest inventory, while another big share is in thephase of establishing a national forest inventory.

Only 10% of countries do not have a national inventory,

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but these countries tend to have forest inventory data for estimating their emission factors.

So in big lines we can say there are three different methods to assess deforestation.

With degradation,

however, a wide scale of solutions are proposed but countries are still struggling to address degradation in
the best way as to get reliable and accurate assessments.
Another important progress that has been made from 2014 to 2019 is the substantial increase insubmissions assessing and reporting uncertainty around activity data, making the data more transparent.
For more than 50 years, countries have been reporting forest area statistics to FAO, but they never estimatedtheir uncertainty around those estimates.

This is important for gaining trust, which is needed if you want

to work with multiple parties towards a common goal.

Uncertainty is most commonly reported aroundemission factors because it is usually from inventory data and you can quite easily calculate the samplingerror.

However, uncertainty around activity data is more challenging.

Few countries combine the two

uncertainties of activity data and emission factors and report overall uncertainties of the emissions in thereference levels.

FAO has supported about 70% of all these reference levels submission.

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It provides several openForest Reference Levels and REDD+ Results Submitted to the UNFCCC;
An Overview
Marieke Sandker (The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO))

Session 1

source tools such as Collect Earth2 to help countries collect and analyze their data.
Additionally, by using platforms like SEPAL3, countries can create their own maps and create their ownchange detections much easier than before.

SEPAL is a cloud-based platform for improving data

accessing and processing of satellite data.
Looking into the REDD+ Results

I want to have a quick look at the REDD+ results.

Here the example of Brazil, where the line with

open dots represents the historical emissions and the line with closed dots is the reference level.
area is reduction of emissions below the reference level, i.e. REDD+ results.

GreenOut of the total 6.6 billion

tons of CO2 equivalent emission reductions reported to the UNFCCC to date, Brazil accounts for 93%,
Indonesia accounts for 4%, and all other countries account for either 1% or less.

From this 6.6 billion, the part of emission reductions which falls in the period 2014-2018 is 1.58 billion
tons of CO2 equivalents.

This period is the period of the GCF RBP pilot programme, therefore REDD+results that fall in this time frame could be eligible for funding (unless they would have a fail on the23

http://www.openforis.org/tools/collect-earth.html
https://sepal.io/89

Session 1scorecard).

The GCF currently contains funds only up to 100,000 tons of CO2 equivalent in emission

reductions, meaning the results submitted are exceeding almost 16 times the available amount in GCF.
There is, however, a cap per country.

Each country can only get up to 30% of the total portfolio.

If wewould apply this cap to Brazil, Colombia, and Indonesia, which are exceeding the cap, this would still leave
128 million tons of CO2 equivalent. After the scorecard filling the emissions reductions eligible for payment
would be to some extent reduced but it is also likely more countries will submit additional REDD+ resultscorresponding to one or several years between 2014-2018 since countries have up to the last board meetingin 2022 to submit concept notes to the GCF RBP pilot programme.

This shows that inadequate financemay become an issue.

Where do these results come from?

By and large, this comes from deforestation.

If we take away

Brazil, half is then from deforestation and a big chunk is from degradation and sustainable management offorests.
How do the FRLs and NDC relate?

Next, I wanted to look at reference levels and NDCs as relate to climate change mitigation targets.
The difference is that reference levels tend to use historical average as this is a requirement from the RBP
pilot programmes.

NDCs to the contrary tend to use business-as-usual projections or base year, or they90

Forest Reference Levels and REDD+ Results Submitted to the UNFCCC;
An Overview
Marieke Sandker (The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO))
can express the target in absolute terms.

Session 1

Also the results period for REDD+ is short term, often, five

years, whereas for NDC, it is much longer term, often, by 2030.

Finally, there is no full clarity on theimplications of selling REDD+ results for the future NDC reporting. This may depend on the conditions
under which the emission reductions were sold and whether there was a title transfer. For example, if
REDD+ results are being sold to the GCF, there is no title transfer, and countries can, on their own
discretion, use emission reductions for NDC reporting.
Key Challenges

The country data and quality of the submissions still needs to improve overtime to meet donor
expectations, and further investment in REDD+MRV4 readiness is necessary.
payments, more funding may be needed to live up to country expectations.

Also for results-based

Finally, it would help if thelink between the results reported and what the country does on the ground becomes clearer for donors togain more trust.

I just want to leave you with these two links (‘From reference levels to results reporting: reference levels
under the UNFCCC 2018 update’ http://www.fao.org/3/CA0176EN/ca0176en.pdf / ‘Challenges with4

https://redd.unfccc.int/fact-sheets/redd-mrv-and-results-based-payments.html

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measurement and accounting of the Plus in REDD+’
http://www.climateandlandusealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Challenges-with-measuring-andaccount) for further reading on this topic.

Thank you.

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