Overcoming the barriers to REDD+ implementation | Legal aspects of REDD+ environmental safeguards

Summary

This briefing by UNEP-WCMC is designed to provide publicly available resources outlining key background information regarding the environmental safeguards applicable to REDD+, as part of the project ‘Overcoming the legal barriers to REDD+ implementation’. As such, it aims at: 

• Informing REDD+ countries about the specific legal issues they might need to address in order to promote and support REDD+ environmental safeguards 
• Informing project developers currently designing and implementing REDD+ demonstration projects (such as FFI’s global REDD+ programme operating in Cambodia and Viet Nam) what issues they need to address in their project design in order to be in line with environmental safeguards. This brief is not primarily concerned with the application of privately developed REDD+ standards such as those of the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA), but rather with how REDD+ safeguards and standards at the international and national level might affect private REDD+ projects. 
• Informing REDD+ countries and REDD+ project developers alike about the implications of the development of a ‘National Approach to safeguards’ for the eventual ‘nesting’ of projects within a national REDD+ Programme. The issue of nesting is often approached in the existing literature from the angle of carbon accounting and rarely under that of safeguards implementation. This brief is an attempt to address this deficit, by looking at ways to reconcile the concurrent implementation of various safeguards processes at different scales.