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The world recognizes the climate emergency and nations have agreed to a legally binding commitment in Paris to limit global temperature rise to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5°C1. Climate change affects the agriculture sectors (crops, livestock, fisheries, aquaculture, and forestry) and their functions and capacity to provide many benefits and services to people, such as the ability of ecosystems to regulate water flows and nutrients cycling2. For example, increased frequency and intensity of extreme climate events such as droughts, floods and heat waves lead to losses of agricultural infrastructure and livelihoods. Sea-level rise and coastal flooding can lead to salinization of land and water impacts on fisheries and aquaculture.  Climate change impacts on agricultural production and livelihoods are also expected to intensify over time and vary across countries and regions, especially in Africa where impacts will be greater. The negative effects of climate change will further exacerbate poverty, jeopardize food security, increase unemployment rate, and ignite conflicts and violence among and within rural communities, causing migration and forced displacement. It is estimated that with climate change, the population living in poverty could increase by between 35 and 122 million by 2030 compared to a future without climate change, largely due to negative effects on household incomes in the agriculture sectors3.  African countries, especially in the Congo Basin, are a crucial part of the forest solutions (mitigation, adaptation and resilience), and of the UN-REDD goal of 1 gigaton of CO2eq emission reductions/enhanced removals, per year, by 2025. Globally, but it is especially true in Africa, countries are not making sufficient progress within their AFOLU sector. Despite recent efforts to curb tropical deforestation – including reducing demand for deforestation-linked commodities and implementing sustainable production practices – deforestation of primary forests increased by 12 percent between 2019 and 20204. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, lost nearly 500,000 hectares of primary forest in 2021, and has exhibited a consistently high rate of deforestation since 2016.  The long-term outcome of this project is to help countries achieve emissions reductions through the REDD+ mechanism to achieve national and global forest emissions reductions targets, including contributing to the UN-REDD Programme’s ambition of 1GtCO2eq per year by 2025. Nature-based solutions, with forest as most mature solution, are crucial to limit global warming and achieve the Paris Agreement goals. Land is both a source and a sink of GHGs, with agriculture, forest, and other land uses (AFOLU) accounting for 23% of anthropogenic emissions of CO2 equivalent from 2007 to 2016.5 To reach the global target of 2oC, or even to keep within 1.5°C, requires an urgent and rapid transition of the AFOLU sector. It is estimated that forests can provide a mitigation potential of between 4.1 – 6.5 GtCO2e by 2030.6 But financing for forest solutions remains insufficient and needs to be scaled up significantly and urgently to increase action in order to stay on the track of the Paris agreement.