Strengthening community forest rights can help mitigate climate change in many heavily forested countries.
Globally, communities have legal rights to at least 513 million hectares of forest, making up one-eighth of the world’s forests. These community forests hold about 37.7 billion tonnes of carbon, or 29 times more than the annual carbon footprint of all passenger vehicles in the world.
Jamaicans will have greater access to information about infrastructure developments and their environmental impact in the form of Development Alert!, a new interactive website created by the Jamaica
Brazil is a big investor in environmental stewardship, including several government-managed funds meant to protect the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. However, new analysis shows that in many cases, these funds aren’t being properly managed.
Los bosques comunitarios alrededor del mundo resguardan 37,7 mil millones de toneladas de carbono
Nota del editor: El informe completo, el folleto con el resumen ejecutivo y las infografías de alta resolución están disponibles para su descarga aquí.
Learn more about securing community forest rights to combat climate change.
Note: The Executive Summary is also available for download in Bahasa Indonesia, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish.
Read this press release in Spanish
Community forests around the world hold 37.7 billion tonnes of carbon
Indonesia and Singapore have been bracing themselves in recent weeks as warnings that this year's dry season would likely herald a severe spike in forest fires in Sumatra, with toxic haze across the region.
As governments and citizens look for ways to reduce the risks they face from climate change, one option at their disposal is the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) process developed under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Heather McGray draws on her experience at the Experts Meeting on the NAP Technical Guidelines in Tanzania to explain key features of the NAP process.
In India, Tamil Nadu Electricity Governance Initiative (TEGI)—a network of consumer and civil society groups—has been using the Electricity Governance Initiative’s new tool, 10 Questions to Ask About Integrated Resources Planning, to evaluate the state’s current planning approach and understand how it can be improved.
This tool was designed to help make decision-making processes more transparent and enable greater engagement in the electricity sector. To date, TEGI’s work provides a good example of how this tool can be used to start putting Integrated Resources Planning (IRP) principles into practice.
Ensuring an affordable and reliable supply of energy is a concern of national governments around the world.
The Green Climate Fund is holding its 7th Board meeting in Songdo, Korea this week. One of the most difficult questions that the GCF Board will grapple with is how entities will become “accredited” to receive GCF funds to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change.
How is the price of electricity set and what exactly are consumers paying for? Are today’s electricity tariffs too high or too low?
WRI's Electricity Governance Initiative program explains the details behind electric tariffs in a new working paper, 10 Questions to Ask about Electricity Tariffs, which offers a tool that stakeholders involved in tariff-setting processes can use to increase their knowledge and capacity in decision-making processes.
Tariff determination—the process of determining the price of electricity to consumers—has far-reaching impacts throughout the electricity sector.
Investors face growing pressure to reduce the negative environmental and social impacts of their investments. In trying to do so they are confronted with the question of how to interact with governments in the countries where they invest.
In an article originally published in Project Syndicate, the authors discuss the changing landscape of forest management and how corporations are making stronger sustainable business commitments.
Recently, WRI hosted a roundtable on Adaptation Finance in Washington, D.C., bringing together experts in development and climate finance to discuss this challenge: Countries and donors are mobilizing hundreds of millions of dollars to help people adapt to a changing climate. How do they get it to the local communities that need it most?
Although the World Bank has successfully addressed a number of important economic and social risks in its projects, it is falling short in recognizing climate risks. As the World Bank refreshes its long-term strategies, this is a key moment to bring climate change—and more broadly, sustainability—to the forefront of its investment agenda.
The World Bank has sought to reinvent itself in the face of a growing number of global development challenges, including economic uncertainty, political unrest, and the increasingly severe impacts of a changing climate.
The global effort to save forests in developing countries, known as “REDD+,” would benefit from a set of tools that hold governments to account for their commitments. These accountability tools need to be integrated into national REDD+ programs.