Participatory Biodiversity Monitoring for REDD+. Considerations for national REDD+ programmes

Summary

Key messages:

1. Monitoring biodiversity impacts of national programmes, including REDD+ can contribute information on how countries are achieving the objectives of multilateral environment agreements, and existing national policies.

2. Safeguard information systems for national REDD+ programmes can benefit from the information provided by participatory biodiversity monitoring (PBM) approaches.

3. PBM can benefit REDD+ programmes as a relatively cost-effective and sustainable component of national forest monitoring systems.

4. PBM can empower and encourage local stakeholder engagement in REDD+ processes and contribute to the full and effective participation of stakeholders, in particular women, indigenous peoples, and local communities. 

5. REDD+ schemes that can demonstrate biodiversity benefits may be more attractive to gain support for the actions. 

6. PBM is likely not to be the best solution in situations where complex equipment or expertise is needed to collect the data or where abstract indices of biodiversity are applied.