A Guide to Learning about Livelihood Impacts in REDD+

Summary

This guide is about understanding the livelihood impacts of first-generation REDD+ projects. These projects are being planned and funded by a range of actors, with the aim of implementing a range of interventions to reduce deforestation and forest degradation, to promote conservation and sustainable management of forests and to enhance forest carbon stocks. The international community is looking to these projects for insight and guidance on the design of REDD+. Clearly, there are limitations to how REDD+ can be implemented and what it can achieve at the subnational level, and thus we should not expect the experience of projects to answer all of our questions about REDD+. However, by applying rigorous research designs and mapping the causal chains of projects, we can gather valuable evidence about how REDD+ interventions affect social welfare in forest regions. This guide provides an overview of such methods.