Recording can be accessed here
Despite the tremendous mitigation potential offered by tropical forests, this solution to the climate crisis remains underfunded. In the context of increasing public-private efforts to mobilize transformative finance to protect forests, this COP 26 side event brings together high-level decision makers from forest countries to discuss catalytic opportunities to scale up finance for forest action necessary to keep global warming below 1.5C.
Some of the most cost-effective climate solutions can be activated by investing in tropical forests through national and jurisdictional programs to reduce tropical deforestation, working across entire countries. The Green Gigaton Challenge (GGC) proposes a public-private bid to mobilize funds to pay for at least one gigaton of emission reductions and removals from forests per year by 2025. This would send an unmistakable signal of ambitions and be a powerful force to help change the economics and politics of deforestation and restoration in many parts of the world. Funds mobilized through the GGC can contribute substantially to finance COVID-19 recovery efforts in rural areas of forest countries.
However, mobilizing funding at the level required to achieve significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 appears unlikely in the absence of consensus on issues related to conditionalities and mechanisms of that funding. The different positions on these issues, however, are not intractable and could be reconciled through the thought leadership and convening efforts of the UN.
Organized by the UN-REDD Programme, a collaborative programme on forests among United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the side event will contribute to a process of dialogue and consensus building, which if successful, would close more than half of the annual funding gap in the Paris Agreement pledge.
Speakers
· Her Excellency Eve Bazaiba, Deputy Prime Minister and Environment Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo;
· Her Excellency Andrea Meza, Environment and Energy Minister of Costa Rica;
· His Excellency Malik Amin Aslam, Minister for Climate Change, Pakistan and High-level Champion for Forest Finance;
· Dr. André Weidenhaupt, Director General, Ministry of the Environment, Climate and Sustainable Development of Luxembourg;
· Ms. Inger Andersen, Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme
· Professor Partha Dasgupta, Author of Dasgupta Review and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom;
· Dr Eunsik Park, XV World Forestry Congress Secretary-General
For more information, contact Florian Eisele, Head of UN-REDD Communications and Knowledge Management (florian.eisele@un.org)
